Are you one of 90,000 music fans heading to the Minnesota Yacht Club Festival later this month? If so, be sure to skip the light rail.

All 13 of the Green Line’s St. Paul stations — from Raymond Avenue to Union Depot in Lowertown — will be offline for maintenance from late on the night of July 11 to early on the morning of July 21, dates that overlap with the three-day music festival at Harriet Island Regional Park on July 18-20.

The unusual nine-day closure will allow Metro Transit to replace worn track and perform other routine rail maintenance in the corridor, as well as repair concrete on the Cedar Street bridge over Interstate 94.

Word of the closure took the St. Paul mayor’s office by surprise this week, drawing some consternation inside City Hall and a flurry of calls from Deputy Mayor Jaime Tincher to Metropolitan Council Regional Administrator Ryan O’Connor, who was previously the county manager for Ramsey County. Tincher met with Met Council and Metro Transit officials around 2 p.m. Thursday for some tense talk, but the mayor’s office had no immediate changes to announce afterward to the maintenance schedule that was posted this week on Metro Transit’s website.

“We just found out this week along with everybody else,” said Emily Buss, a spokesperson for Mayor Melvin Carter’s office, as the meeting unfolded.

Tincher “called him right away and was like, ‘What’s going on here? You guys have known about this event for months now.’ We’ve been communicating with the Met Council since January saying, ‘Hey, this is coming up,’” Buss said. “I guess they decided routine maintenance had to happen right now.”

Metro Transit officials maintain they’ve made no secret of their scheduled track work, even if the mayor’s office was unaware of it. Metro Transit spokesperson Drew Kerr on Thursday shared a newsletter, published in April, that listed key light rail maintenance dates throughout the year, including the planned Green Line closures in July.

“Unfortunately, it is not possible to avoid all events due to scheduling constraints,” Kerr said in an email.

Getting 90,000 people downtown without the Green Line

The Green Line closures coincide with two Minnesota United home games at Allianz Field — 7:30 p.m. July 12, vs. the San Jose Quakes, and 7:30 p.m. July 16, vs. the Los Angeles FC — as well as the three-day Yacht Club festival, which runs from July 18-20 at Harriet Island, across the Mississippi River from downtown. Some 30,000 fans are expected to attend each day of the festival, which brings together 30 bands, including widely recognized acts like Hozier, Sheryl Crow, Weezer, Green Day, Fall Out Boy and Sublime.

This will be the second consecutive year of the Yacht Club Festival at Harriet Island, which hadn’t hosted marquee acts since the River’s Edge Music Festival in 2012.

How do you get 90,000 people to Harriet Island without the light rail?

“The good news is that, in St. Paul, there is an abundance of transportation options available to get people directly to and from the Minnesota Yacht Club Festival grounds and to nearby downtown St. Paul,” Kerr said. “This includes two new bus rapid transit lines, the Metro B Line and Metro Gold Line, the Route 94 with service to/from Minneapolis, and Route 54 with service to/from Bloomington.”

Kerr said that along University Avenue, Green Line replacement buses will operate on a similar schedule as trains, stopping at or near affected stations while offering comparable travel times.

City Council President Rebecca Noecker was surprised to be informed Thursday that the Green Line would be offline in St. Paul for the entirety of the festival.

“That’s really concerning. We obviously need all of our partners pulling together when we’re doing something as significant as the Yacht Club Festival,” said Noecker, who took in the shows with her family a year ago. “We went both days last year and it was incredible. I’ve never seen Harriet Island so full. You couldn’t see the grass, which is the way it should be in that space.”

Kathryn Kovalenko contributed to this report.