Only 30% of Minneapolis parks are considered fully accessible. Advocates want that to improve.

It’s beach season in Minneapolis, when scores of sunbathers in bright swimsuits dot the sands of the ultra-popular Chain of Lakes. Bryce Maples, 25, loves to swim, but he has to consider impediments most never have to think about.

He uses a wheelchair, which can get stuck in the slightest drift of sand.

Hidden Beach on the east side of Cedar Lake is Maples’ favorite place to take a plunge. Not just because it’s where the young people flock, but because he can park his wheelchair in the grass just before it transitions to beach, then negotiate his way to the water. He anticipates this getting harder, though, because his muscular dystrophy is a degenerative condition.

Myriad other features of Minneapolis’ award-winning park system are beyond the reach of disabled park users. Thirty-five years after the Americans with Disabilities Act enumerated their right to the same public spaces that able-bodied people enjoy, only about 30% of Minneapolis park properties meet basic federal standards of access, officials said, though new efforts are underway.

“Minneapolis parks are pretty good as far as accessibility,” Maples said. “There are some issues, but I think that beach accessibility can be really low-hanging fruit.”

There are signs that Minneapolis parks are turning a keener eye on ADA.

In November, the Park Board hired its first dedicated ADA administrator, Jill Moe, whose job is to advocate for accessibility in all aspects of park planning and programming, including training staff to see hindrances.

This summer, she’s planning a pilot project to place mats at popular beaches, which could help disabled people roll up to the lake’s edge — a relatively affordable, temporary measure.

And next year, the Park Board is scheduled to launch an ambitious, public database listing ADA amenities at every park, so users can plan their trips before they go. The goal is to meet the new “digital accessibility” rule of the ADA, which looks at how effectively government agencies communicate their services.

“Everything should be accessible, but that’s not reality,” Moe said. “The hurdle is, there’s competing priorities. I mean, everybody has a stake in this game called the parks.”

Year after year, Minneapolis ranks among the top park systems in the country, thanks in part to its founders’ foresight to design a green city 140 years ago. But that also means the built environment of the park system is old.

Many neighborhood recreation centers, with their missing ceiling tiles and stuffy, windowless rooms, date back to the 1970s. Crumbling sports courts, playgrounds and paved trails are in constant need of repair, even while the Park Board aggressively develops new park spaces in former industrial zones and neighborhoods of color in the name of equity.

With money tight, the Park Board can’t in good conscience replace an asset that’s still useable, like a wading pool that hasn’t met its full life expectancy, even if it isn’t ADA compliant, Moe said.

But when funding becomes available for major new projects, ADA is included in designs. The new riverfront park Water Works opened at St. Anthony Falls with spacious bathrooms and a restaurant, Owamni, which has a rare adult changing table. The area now has a reputation as one of the best local destinations outfitted for accessibility.

There’s less money to maintain small neighborhood parks. Even when repairs are made, such as when Loring Park trails were repaved last year, accessibility problems weren’t resolved.

Laura Mattson has lived a half-mile from Loring Park for 30 years. Reliant on a large power wheelchair to get around, she finds the old park difficult to navigate at times.

For example, she stays home during the annual Pride Festival, when 100,000 people pack the park.

“I’d just run over everybody’s toes,” Mattson said.

She avoids the park after it rains as well. Even though the Park Board in 2024 repaved park paths to make them easier to traverse, several low spots are prone to flooding, making paths impassable.

Last spring, Mattson’s wheelchair got stuck in mud left behind after standing water receded.

“All I could do is scream for help because I couldn’t back out of it,” she said.

Michael Sack, who uses a wheelchair and serves on the Minneapolis Advisory Committee on People with Disabilities, said in an email that the Park Board should prioritize making paths and bridges even more accessible.

“There are several bridges that are within the Park Board boundaries that can or need to be repaired,” he wrote. “It is absolutely necessary to create pathways that are flat and accessible in order for everyone, whether they use a mobility device or not, to safely and efficiently navigate trails.”

He added: “In order for the Minneapolis Park Board to truly be inclusive for all, they need to include everyone in the planning development stage for new projects.”

In the biggest development clash involving ADA in recent memory, the Soo Line Community Garden fought against a Hennepin County proposal to pave a bikeway through their organic plots. It would have doubled as a new ADA-compliant ramp to the Midtown Greenway, where accessible entrances are few and poorly mapped.

But the gardeners criticized the design as being too destructive, with the potential of bringing fast-moving bikes into a crowded area where small children roam. Last year, the Park Board rejected the bikeway.

“They pitted us against each other,” said Danielle Hendricks, a Soo Line gardener with mobility issues brought on by long COVID. “The garden has never been against making things accessible, and that was actually something that we had wanted to do, but with limited resources, that wasn’t anything that we had planned yet.”

David Fenley, ADA director for the Minnesota Council on Disability, found the impasse frustrating.

“We realize change is difficult and scary, but to tell a group of folks, who have been excluded from society by the mere existence of structural barriers, that they need to wait for a civil right they have legally had for 34 years is discrimination,” Fenley wrote in a 2024 email to the Soo Line Garden board.

The Park Board is now working with the gardeners and the city’s disabilities advisory committee to upgrade the Soo Line for wheelchair access. But without the county’s money, and after polluted soils were found at the garden, it’s unclear when it will happen.

“We definitely want gardening to be able to continue with this site,” said park project manager Colleen O’Dell. “I don’t see us putting in a paved bike ramp, which of course has been the big debate.”

On Mondays, adaptive sailors from across the metro meet at the northwest corner of Lake Harriet, where the waters are calm and free of large motorboats.

Paul Van Winkel flew back and forth across the surface of the lake one windy afternoon while friends watched from shore. Van Winkel, a multiple gold medal winner in the Summer Paralympics’ wheelchair races, had polio as a child. Now sailing is his primary sport.

Nate Johnson, another sailor, said he’s still learning the ropes.

“This is my happiness, to be on the water. It’s a very calming, meditational feeling,” he said. “I was a very shy person to begin with. So, for me, it was just a way to kind of make myself more open to meeting people.”

External groups like the Lake Harriet Yacht Club’s Adaptive Sailing Program and Courage Kenny Rehabilitation Institute bring adaptive sports into Minneapolis parks.

Ryan Trench, Courage Kenny’s sports and rec supervisor, said his organization hosts most of its programs in the suburbs, where sprawling new facilities are more conducive to adaptive sports. But he said Courage Kenny’s long-running adaptive Nordic skiing program is based at Theodore Wirth Regional Park and he credits park staff for making it a draw on busy winter weeknights.

Yet, even when a feature is accessible, it’s not always obvious. Or easy to use.

This spring, Maples asked Minneapolis Park Board Commissioner Tom Olsen how accessible the city’s beaches really were. Olsen learned that Lake Nokomis has a beach wheelchair, the only one in both Minneapolis’ and St. Paul’s park systems.

But there’s no information about it on the Park Board’s website. And nothing is posted at the beach. If someone knows it exists, they can ask for it at the first-aid building, where it’s folded in the back of a closet.

Its pillowy yellow wheels can roll over the sand with a good heave. But the manual chair needs someone to push it. Maples wonders if it’s ever used.

“I only know about it because Tom told me, right?” he said. “And I’m clearly a disabled person who is pretty engaged with the politics and ongoings of the Park Board.”