The proposed University of Minnesota football stadium will occupy a 40-acre site in the heart of Stadium Village when it’s completed in 2009. But to hear university officials who presented a complicated plan for rerouting traffic around the site at City Hall on Tuesday it’s barely a blip on the landscape.

The stadium won’t be invisible, university vice president Kathleen O’Brien told the City Council’s Transportation and Public Works Committee, but it’s only one component of a larger development plan for the eastern edge of the campus. The real day-to-day beneficiaries of the street realignment will be the university’s planned research park, which will house new magnetic resonance and stem cell research facilities, where about a thousand researchers will eventually ply their trade.

“About every two years we’ll be building another research building in this area,” she said. “You’ll start to see a very dramatic change in this part of the campus.”

That change will include:
• eliminating Huron Boulevard between University Avenue and 4th St.,
• realigning Oak Street and Huron Boulevard,
• making University Avenue a two-way street between Oak Street and 23rd Avenue,
• making Washington Avenue a one-way street between Huron and University.

“We really are building and changing the campus of the University of Minnesota,” she said.

Committee chair Sandra Colvin Roy called the plan, “pretty exciting” and her colleagues voted unanimously to approve the reroutes.