On a Tuesday evening in late August, if you walk over to the patch of green at Quail Street and Briarwood Avenue, you might find a handful of people in work gloves pulling small buckthorn twigs out of the ground while Katie Macke, the project's invasive-plant expert, tells them where to dig. Nobody is getting paid. Nobody from the city called them there. They showed up because Cindy Rasmussen posted about it, and because that's how Streetcar Park gets built.
That sentence matters more than it sounds like it should. Streetcar Park is a modest stretch of land along the Lake Links Trail, and by the numbers it has more finished, and more scheduled to finish this year, than any other park in Mahtomedi. It got there almost entirely without waiting on the city's own capital budget. Wildwood Park, a larger, city-maintained property in south central Mahtomedi, is working through similar upgrades right now, a dog park, a floating boardwalk, on the same 2026 calendar. But Wildwood's additions are moving through the city's formal Capital Improvement Plan, which means they arrive one line item per fiscal year, years apart. Streetcar Park skipped that line entirely and built its own funding path instead.
The Bridge That Came Before the Budget
The clearest evidence of that gap is the covered bridge over Depot Creek. It went up in 2019, entirely privately funded, built by local contractor Sharkey Design Build with help from more than 18 volunteers, many of them assembled a few hundred yards away in the Camp White Bear neighborhood before being moved into place. Principal donors Dan and Karen Runze underwrote the project, and companies including Larson Engineering, Goliath Tech MN, Trussbilt Inc., and White Bear Lift and Dock pitched in labor and materials. The bridge was designed to nod at the site's own history, the same ground where the Mahtomedi Assembly formed in 1883 and where the town's earliest cottages and stores went up.
No city budget line paid for that bridge. It existed because a group of neighbors decided it should, then found the money and the hands to make it happen, all before the city's Capital Improvement Plan had scheduled a single dollar for the park.
Trail lighting followed in 2022, funded by a state grant, lighting the same segment of trail that runs through the park.
The Fund With a Family's Name On It
That fund is the Wolgamot Lake Links Trail Enhancement Fund, set up through the Greater White Bear Lake Community Foundation and named for Steve Wolgamot, a former Mahtomedi City Council member. In 2022, the volunteer group recruited landscape architect Lindsay Buck to turn scattered ideas into plans the city could actually approve.
"The volunteering and ability of a group to accomplish wonderful big things when they set their mind to it."
That's Mary Kiel, president of the Mahtomedi Garden Club, describing what she likes most about watching the park grow. Buck, for her part, has said one of her favorite parts of the work has been seeing how excited everyone has been to come together.
The results show up in the labor totals. The initial phase of restoration alone, largely in 2024, ran past 2,000 hours contributed by 37 volunteers, an estimated $40,000 worth of unpaid labor. By November 2025, the cumulative total for the park had climbed past 3,093 volunteer hours since 2024, with more than 40 trees and shrubs and over 1,000 native plants going into the ground along the way. Volunteers pulled garlic mustard and buckthorn, spread woodchips, and built out a picnic area, and they came from Mahtomedi as well as White Bear Lake, Grant, and Pine Springs, which tells you the project has become something people cross town lines to help with. Even the bike rack manufacturer Rudy Racks, based across the border in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, shipped one over as a donation.
The next milestone lands this year. A 2025 fundraising push brought in $11,500 toward additional plantings around the picnic area and an in-ground slide by the creek, both scheduled to be finished in 2026.
Wildwood Park Is Doing the Same Things, Just Slower
Now put that timeline next to Wildwood Park, a 21.6-acre community park with a volleyball court and a reservable picnic shelter. According to the Mahtomedi Parks Commission's September 2025 minutes, a dog park and a floating boardwalk are on track to be complete in 2026, tied to a shoreline restoration project already underway. That much lines up with Streetcar Park's own 2026 finish line.
But look further out on the same document. Roughly $20,000 is set aside for 2027 to cover benches and tables. Pickleball courts, meant to replace the existing volleyball courts, aren't scheduled until 2028. Three amenities, three separate budget years, moving at the pace a municipal Capital Improvement Plan allows.
Compare that to Streetcar Park's own arc: a full covered bridge in year one, trail lighting three years later, then a sustained multi-year volunteer campaign that outpaced what any single city budget cycle could fund. The difference isn't that the city cares more about one park than the other. It's that one park found a funding path that runs outside the annual budget process, and the other is still inside it.
What This Actually Means If You Want Something Built
If you've ever wondered why your favorite corner of a Mahtomedi park hasn't gotten the update you'd like, the Streetcar Park story is the answer nobody tells you up front. The city's own process works, but it works on a multi-year rhythm, one project per budget cycle, competing against every other line item in the Parks Fund. The faster path, the one that got a bridge, trail lights, and a play area to a formerly overlooked patch of land in six years, runs through the same channels that built Streetcar Park: a nonprofit like the Lake Links Association, a family-backed fund routed through the Greater White Bear Lake Community Foundation, a garden club with its own small grant program, and a Tuesday evening crew willing to show up with gloves.
This is also, not coincidentally, how a fair amount of the rest of Mahtomedi's calendar gets built. Punkinmainia, the city's fall festival, usually held the second Saturday in October, which lands on October 10 this year, is sponsored entirely by the Lions Club and the American Legion, not a city department. The Mahtomedi Area Farmers' Market at Veterans Memorial Park, running its final Saturdays of the season through September 26, is run entirely by volunteers too. Mahtomedi tends to get things done through small organizations with specific names attached to them, not through a single large civic budget.
If you want to see it for yourself before the slide goes in, the covered bridge and the lit trail segment are open now, and volunteer work nights are announced through the city's Streetcar Park Improvement Project page, with Cindy Rasmussen handling questions for anyone who wants to bring a hand tool and join in. The farmers market wraps up its season in four more Saturdays. Wildwood Park's boardwalk and dog park should be ready by year's end too, on the schedule the city set for them.
Two parks, one town, two very different speeds. Worth remembering the next time you hear that something in Mahtomedi is years away. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it just needs the right fund and a Tuesday evening crew.
If you're weighing a move near a park like this one, or just curious what your own home might be worth in a town where neighbors build bridges before the city gets around to it, White Bear Lake Realty offers a free home valuation with no pressure attached.
