Neighborhood residents have petitioned the Minnesota Court of Appeals in an attempt to block the University of St. Thomas from building a new college sports arena at Cretin and Grand avenues in St. Paul.

With the goal of hosting men’s and women’s hockey, basketball and other functions, the university has proposed a sports and entertainment facility spanning 270,000 square feet on its south campus.

Residents banding together under the title “Advocates for Responsible Development” have called the project’s Environmental Assessment Worksheet, or EAW, “inadequate, incomplete and misleading,” and asked the court to require a more elaborate review known as an Environmental Impact Statement.

Among their concerns, the worksheet focused on the environmental impact of what the university described as a typical game drawing some 2,100 fans, instead of basing their figures on near-capacity games, which would feature up to 5,500 or 6,000 fans depending upon the seating configuration. And those numbers have inched up from 4,000 to 5,000 fans with time.

A rendering shows the Lee and Penny Anderson Arena on the St. Paul campus of the University of St. Thomas. The arena will be the new home for the school’s hockey and basketball programs. (Courtesy of the University of St. Thomas)

University officials have said they expect to host up to 35 capacity or near-capacity games annually.

The opponents projected traffic jams will regularly occur on Cretin, Grand, Cleveland and Summit avenues, with 350 to 750 cars parking on neighborhood streets up to 112 times per year.

The citizens’ group also noted that the university is well into construction of a new science building, the Schoenecker Center, directly next door to the future arena, yet the worksheet failed to take into account the “cumulative potential effects” of the two projects on the surrounding neighborhood. Like the arena, the center has auditorium-style seating and also could host concerts and other events.

Between them, the projects take the place of some 390 surface parking stalls.

“The EAW really focused on this tiny six-acre site, and yet almost all the maps they used in the EAW covered a half-mile or a mile,” said spokesman Donn Waage, a resident of Fairmount Avenue, in a interview Monday.

Wage said the citizens’ group has some 36 supporters, most of them neighborhood homeowners. Their petition was filed by attorneys with the Minneapolis law firm of Bassford Remele.

Environmental petitions often fall short

In St. Paul, requesting further environmental review through an EAW or EIS has become a common tactic of opponents to real estate development and other projects, with limited success. Petitions were unable to stop tree removal during a recent street project on Cleveland Avenue, the demolition of St. Andrew’s Church in the Como neighborhood, construction of the Lowertown ballpark at CHS Field and installation of chemical containment tanks by the Mississippi River on the city’s West Side.

Opponents have also petitioned the Minnesota Environmental Quality Board in an effort to prevent the demolition of the Hamline-Midway Library and prevent the installation of an elevated bikeway along nearly five miles of Summit Avenue.

In January, St. Thomas received a record $75 million donation from Lee and Penny Anderson toward design and construction of a shared Division I hockey and basketball facility west of the Anderson Parking facility off Cretin and Grand avenues.

St. Thomas, which recently began playing in Division I athletics, plans to construct the arena in place of three existing buildings on the south campus — the 1890s-era Cretin Hall dormitory, the 1960s-era McCarthy Gym and an 1890s-era service center.

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