Promoting community-conscious campus development

The University of St. Thomas proposes to build a 250,000 square foot multipurpose arena (about 40% as large as Xcel Energy Center) that will seat 4,000 to 6,000 people, depending on the configuration (estimated up to 7,000 with standing room, staff, and other building users). The primary sports tenants will be the men’s and women’s basketball and hockey programs, which will have a convertible basketball floor and hockey rink in the main arena space; the arena will also include two additional basketball courts and a second hockey rink.

Other parts of the building will provide locker rooms, coaches’ offices, strength and conditioning facilities, sports medicine and nutrition services, and equipment spaces. The arena will be busy year-round, with concerts, fairs, speakers, convocations, and commencement ceremonies. Prospective users are not just the university; high school tournaments would also bring large crowds and promoters could rent the venue for concerts.

Cretin Hall
Designed by nationally renowned architect Cass Gilbert and funded by railroad magnate James J. Hill, Cretin Hall housed aspiring priests studying at the St. Paul Seminary. When the University of St. Thomas acquired the majority of the seminary’s property, UST remodeled Cretin Hall. It currently houses 90 UST students.

Service Center
Archbishop John Ireland’s concept for the St. Paul Seminary included a gymnasium for the seminarians. James J. Hill funded and Cass Gilbert designed a gymnasium housed in the same building as the power plant. The towering smokestack has a cross embedded in its brickwork. UST now calls the building the “Service Center.” UST’s website describes Cass Gilbert’s buildings as “perhaps the most notable work” on its campus.

McCarthy Gymnasium
Built in 1968, St. Thomas replaced its pool in 2010 with a wooden floor for basketball, volleyball, badminton, pickle ball, and other activities. The renovation added new locker and shower areas and refurbished the racquetball and handball courts.

265 parking spaces
St. Thomas removed 127 parking spaces when building the 130,000 SF Schoenecker Hall. The arena would eliminate 265 additional spaces. These spaces serviced Grace Hall, Brady Hall, Owens Hall, O’Shaughnessy Hall, Bins Refectory, and the Facilities & Design Center. These spaces will not be replaced, leaving those users searching for parking spaces in the residential neighborhood.

68 mature trees and their surrounding grounds
These trees serve as habitat for fauna along the environmentally fragile Mississippi River Gorge.

Advocates for Responsible Development (ARD) was founded by members of the Macalester-Groveland and Union Park neighborhoods to raise concerns about community and environmental impacts from the construction of UST’s proposed arena. Those concerns are summarized on the five topics with their own pages on this website: traffic, parking, greenhouse gases, historic preservation, and environmental damage.

The St. Thomas campus sits on the bluff atop the Mississippi River, and is otherwise surrounded by a residential community consisting of single-family homes, duplexes, and apartment buildings. Over the past several decades, St. Thomas has been adding density while eliminating parking. The result is that St. Thomas students and faculty park throughout the surrounding residential neighborhood, which has responded by instituting permit-parking zones to eliminate the constant traffic of UST cars.

For four reasons, the arena would create a much worse community problem than already exists. First, it stands on the shoulders of the giant problems that UST’s development has already caused. Second, the arena would eliminate 265 parking spaces, so the supply actually shrinks. Third, the arena is huge: 5,500 seats plus standing room, staff, security, vendors, etc. Fourth, the arena is primarily to entertain people who are not already on campus and must travel to campus for the event. That means thousands of cars coming at the same time, with less parking to meet the demand. The spill-over effects into the neighborhood will far exceed anything that has preceded it.

The problems do not end there. The arena would sit on the bluff above the Mississippi River, destroying habitat in the river corridor and changing the groundwater flows (the groundwater is only 6-12 feet below surface). The smog caused by idling buses and cars circling the neighborhood in search of parking would create greenhouse gases.

The City of St. Paul required an Environmental Assessment Worksheet (EAW), but did not require an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which is more comprehensive. ARD’s position is that state law requires the production of an EIS for a project of this scope, and that the EAW was insufficient because it studied only part of the problem, ignoring other ongoing projects on campus (such as the ongoing construction of Schoenecker Hall) and intentionally failing to address greenhouses gases created by the two ice rinks and crowds coming to the arena. Due to those concerns, ARD filed an appeal to the City of St. Paul’s decision not to require an EIS for the arena. Briefing will be completed in February, and oral argument will be scheduled soon thereafter.