Environmental Damage
St. Thomas would like to build an arena occupying 250,000 square feet, an absolutely massive edifice that would be almost 40% as large as Xcel Center, a structure utilized by the entire city. The arena’s footprint would be about as big as all of the other remaining buildings on its South Campus combined.
It is impossible to construct a building of this size without having a major adverse impact on the environment. This is especially true when building in the protected Mississippi River Corridor. The arena would lie within the Mississippi River Twin Cities Important Bird Area (IBA) that provides essential habitat for breeding, wintering, and/or migratory bird species. The IBA is a proactive, voluntary, science-based program to conserve the most essential habitats for birds. According to the Audubon Society, more than 345 million birds migrate through the Mississippi Bird Flyway each year.
According to the EAW, St. Thomas acknowledges that its South Campus lies within the IBA and has consciously decided to ignore its conservation provisions. In early January 2024, UST clear-cut 68 mature trees that housed birds year-round and were utilized by migrating birds. This devastating environmental blow also deprived mammals and insects of their natural habitat. Some of those trees are featured in the photos on this website.
With its huge size and two ice rinks, the arena would spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, a problem to which this website devotes its own page. St. Thomas intentionally did not include greenhouse gases in the EAW in its “analysis” of the arena’s environmental impact.
The arena site lies within two districts of the Minnesota River Corridor Critical Area (MRCCA) established by St. Paul’s 2040 Comprehensive Plan: the River Towns and Crossings District and the River Neighborhood District. The former seeks to restore natural vegetation and tree canopy in riparian areas, and the latter seeks to maintain the character of the river corridor within existing development and to protect and enhance habitat, parks and open space, public river views, and scenic, natural, and historic areas. The arena is inconsistent with all of these goals.
The arena plan includes a paved street atop the stream outlet that empties into the Mississippi River, known as “the grotto.” A statue of Jesus sits on the bank above the grotto, facing the grove that UST clear-cut in January 2024; the arena plan would have Jesus face a service drive and a bus loading zone. The grotto lies within the “bluff and bluff impact zone” identified in the St. Paul 2040 Comprehensive Plan. The arena and its service drive would lie within the bluff impact zone.
The maximum building height in the River Neighborhood District is 35 feet, Minn. R. Part 6106.0120, subp. 2, but the arena’s height within this district is twice that at approximately 58 feet. The arena’s height within the River Towns and Crossings district is even higher (66 feet), although the maximum height in that district is 45 feet.
The relationship between this site and the river continues further up the floodplain. The EAW states that groundwater lies just 6 to 12 feet beneath ground level at the arena site. The construction of an arena will create a dam hundreds of feet long that will divert groundwater to the north and south, where it will overwhelm residential basements. Multiple houses on Summit Avenue were forced to install sump pumps and other remediation after the construction of UST’s expansive science halls across the street.
The EAW avoids discussion of the arena’s negative environmental impacts because a full discussion would make it clear that this arena would significantly damage the environment of the ecologically fragile Mississippi River Corridor. The arena should not be built there.