Q: Hi;
It appears that there is a dead mountain lion on the side of southbound Highway 169 before you approach Hotel 8. Looks like it was hit by a vehicle. It’s been there three days.
A: Another area resident had the same impression, stopping by The Free Press to suggest a photo and story.
While it’s unlikely that a mountain lion/cougar/puma would be struck by a vehicle in southern Minnesota, it’s not entirely out of the question. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has recorded 107 wild cougar verifications this century, usually through security camera footage but also from paw prints and mountain lion carcasses.
Although the DNR does not believe Minnesota has a resident breeding population of cougars, the big cats are believed to be wandering into the state on a semi-regular basis from the western Dakotas. The verified cases occur throughout Minnesota, including in the fall and early winter of 2023 in Brown, Nicollet, Martin and Blue Earth counties; in December of 2021 in Steele and Rice counties and in September of 2020 in Le Sueur County. Far western Nicollet County also had a cougar in March of 2018.
But in last week’s instance, the “cougar” along Highway 169 was actually a road-kill optical illusion. Before The Free Press had a chance to check it out, the man who stopped by to suggest a story decided to take a closer look.
After pulling to the side of Highway 169 to examine the carnage, he called the newsroom with his report: Not a cougar, just a deer that had taken such a beating from its interaction with a high-velocity vehicle that a broken leg extended behind the deer’s body in a way that looked like a mountain lion tail.
Q: Have you asked the city what ever happened to the original lights from the first project on Riverfront Drive that were installed. They were vintage lights that could have been used. Were they trashed? What a waste of taxpayer money! $800K could have been saved and all the blocks could have been lit.
A: Good question, and not one that The Free Press’s city reporter thought to ask when writing about the lengthy saga of the Old Town street lights.
A bit of background: A 2016 master plan for the Old Town business district had called for a variety of streetscaping, including antique-style street lights that would match the 19th century architecture of the storefronts. But when a $10.7 million reconstruction of Riverfront Drive between Main Street and Third Avenue was undertaken last year, towering highway-scale street lights were installed.
After hearing from disappointed business owners, the City Council agreed in March to a plan to replace a nine-block segment of lights and make some other aesthetic additions such as benches and bike racks. Although the planned work had to be scaled back when costs came in higher than expected, a revised plan was approved last month to install smaller-scale decorative lighting along six blocks at a cost of more than $800,000.
Along with better matching the architecture of the area, which dates as far back as 1869 and is on the National Register of Historic Places, the vintage street lights will be capable of hosting brackets for holiday lights, banners and hanging flower baskets.
So, why weren’t the previous lights just reused? They were, after all, the same old-timey design seen throughout downtown Mankato and stretching as far as Sibley Park.
But they didn’t just LOOK old, according to City Manager Susan Arntz.
“The historic looking lights that were on Riverfront Drive were at the end of their useful life and were no longer illuminating properly,” Arntz said in a written response. “They would not have been able to be reused as part of the project as the block did not meet the MnDOT State Aid Standards for lighting on the block.”
Those MnDOT dollars, part of the annual allocation to the city from the Minnesota gas tax and other fees dedicated to road projects, were part of the funding package for the Riverfront Drive project.
As for the fate of the previous lights, they were recycled.
“It is important to note that the lights would have been removed and replaced as part of the project, regardless of style selected for replacement,” Arntz said.
The new old-style streetlights, while just 16 feet tall compared to the 30-foot-high cobra-head lights in place since last summer, will still provide adequate illumination despite the shorter heights and more ornamental designs.
That’s because each of the shorter poles will have two of the decorative light fixtures mounted on it instead of one.
The replacement project is expected to be completed late this fall, although it may be delayed into next year if supply-chain issues arise.
Contact Ask Us at The Free Press, 418 S. Second St., Mankato, MN 56001. Call Mark Fischenich at 344-6321 or email your question to mfischenich@mankatofreepress.com; put Ask Us in the subject line.