Why is Rochester’s 10-acre Seneca site still vacant seven years later?
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In the shadow of Rochester’s iconic Ear of Corn water tower sits a long-vacant site about the size of 10 football fields. The water tower is all that’s left of the former Seneca Foods processing and canning facility that closed up shop in 2018. Olmsted County purchased the property the following year for $5.6 million.
But seven years later, the site is still empty, and county commissioners said that the process to find realistic options to fill the site has been slow, meandering and somewhat controversial.
The Olmsted County Board will discuss the future of the site in its regularly scheduled meeting Tuesday night and it has two proposals on the table. But both are far from being approved and one of them would only fill part of the parcel.
“Trying to find something suitable to put on it has not necessarily been easy,” said Olmstead County Commission Chair Dave Senjem. “Ideas are cheap. Making them work is a little harder.”
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Rochester is in a period of transformation. It’s halfway through a two-decade, $5 billion project to redevelop and revitalize downtown alongside Mayo Clinic’s massive expansion — and the city’s population is growing rapidly.
The Seneca Foods site appeared to be an exciting opportunity to meet this moment, as it sits in a prime location just a mile and a half from downtown and is already connected to basic utilities, including water, sewer and electric. But Senjem told MPR News it’s been a surprisingly long slog.
“I've been on the board for nearly four years, and there's been nothing that has really come forward on that property,” Senjem said. “Nobody from the outside has come to the board with any ideas for that property that have been at all feasible from the standpoint of the money recovery or what we might view as public substance.”
Why has the project taken so long?
When the county first bought the site in 2019, Senjem said officials had a plan in mind. The city was going to purchase it to build a transit hub and parking structure for Mayo employees, but the city and county couldn’t come to an agreement, and the plan fell through.
That meant county commissioners like Senjem, who was elected in 2023, inherited a project they hadn’t anticipated.
“Was it initially a good idea for the county to buy this?” Senjem said. “I'm not throwing rocks, but the city backed out, and so now the county is stuck with it.”
Former County Commissioner Ken Brown recalls that the board considered a number of ideas, including senior and low-income housing, a childcare center and even a strip mall with a smattering of small businesses.
But none of those ideas worked out, and Brown said plans then stalled out. There was no clear direction set and when half of the board members retired in 2022, that stalled the decision further.
But two new proposals are up for debate: a new performing arts center and a children’s museum — both of which will be discussed at Tuesday’s meeting.
Competing proposals
Rick Kvam, board president for the Southeast Minnesota Performing Arts Center, said the idea of building a new performing arts center in town has come repeatedly over the years.
Rochester already has two large theater venues in town, but neither can accommodate an orchestra, nor bigger-scale traveling Broadway shows and other similar acts. So the center’s board has proposed an even bigger building — a 2,000 seat venue that supporters say they believe they can fill on a regular basis.
“We think it’s way overdue,” Kvam said. “Every other town of our size in the area has something [like this.]”
But the project would be a heavy financial lift. Kvam estimated it would cost at least $100 million and he believes it’ll pay for itself in the long run. But Kvam said they need time — possibly years — to figure out if it’s feasible. And there’s a lot of skepticism in town that they can raise enough money and that they’d be able to attract the performers they think they can.
Kvam said the county had agreed to hold the site while the performing arts nonprofit figured this out. But then a new proposal came forward which could upend that long timeline.
Rochester’s SPARK children’s museum wants to leave its current location in Rochester’s downtown mall and build a bigger facility for child-centered play and learning on the Seneca site with green space for outdoor exhibits. But its current lease ends in 2030, and the museum needs lead time to design a new museum and develop exhibit plans for the new location.
Former commissioner Brown is now on the Children’s Museum board. He said the museum is ready to go.
“We have a provable business,” Brown said. “We have a viable business. We have a plan. Everything. We're ready to go now.”
It’s unclear if one proposal will emerge as the favorite at the Tuesday board meeting, and if a proposal like the performing arts center is selected, what that timeline could look like.
Senjem said he’s resigned to the possibility that the county may own the land in perpetuity — and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
If the county retains the land as natural space it could become an extension of nearby Graham Park.
“I mean, I could live with an arboretum,” Senjem said.
