Inside CIDNA, the neighborhood group for 3,000 lakeside residents

Cedar-Isles-Dean is one of the area's smaller neighborhoods, home to about 3,000 residents between Cedar Lake, Lake of the Isles and Bde Maka Ska, with a commercial pocket set amid parkland, according to the Cedar-Isles-Dean Neighborhood Association (CIDNA). Its boundaries run from the Kenilworth Lagoon and Lake of the Isles on the north and east to West Lake Street on the south and France Avenue on the west.

CIDNA is the neighborhood's volunteer-led association, representing residents on development, transit, the trails and lakes, and quality-of-life concerns. Like its peers in the lake district, it is part of Minneapolis's neighborhood-organization system, with a board, open meetings and a role in directing local city funds. Mary Pattock has served as a longtime leader of the group and a frequent voice on Kenilworth corridor issues.

Much of CIDNA's recent attention has gone to the Southwest Light Rail project, which ran through the neighborhood's Kenilworth corridor and closed its trails for years. The Kenilworth and Cedar Lake trails, which the Park Board calls the most intensely used in the city's system, reopened earlier this winter after nearly seven years of construction closures, restoring the connection from downtown and Target Field to Cedar Lake Parkway and the Midtown Greenway.

That setting is the source of both the neighborhood's appeal and its exposure. Ringed by parkland and water and threaded by the Kenilworth corridor, Cedar-Isles-Dean is a connector for the wider lake district, which means infrastructure decisions made here ripple out to users who never set foot on its streets, even as the neighborhood has little control over their scale or timeline.

CIDNA welcomes residents at its meetings and posts agendas, contact information and updates online. New residents are encouraged to attend a meeting to learn what issues are active.