St. Paul City Council hosts public hearings on proposed University of St. Thomas athletic complex

Frederick Melo, Molly Wilson, Pioneer Press
·5 min read

The University of St. Thomas is moving ahead with plans for baseball and softball fields, an indoor training center and parking lot in St. Paul’s Highland Park neighborhood and officials discussed their plans Wednesday at a city council public hearing.

The university last summer proposed a new college sports campus in the southeast corner of the Highland Bridge development, west of Cleveland Avenue. Last July, university officials announced they had scrapped plans for an NCAA Division I hockey arena at the site and would redraw its designs, limiting the complex to college baseball and softball facilities south of Montreal Avenue.

Those plans have since come into sharper focus, and the future transformation of 13 acres of Canadian Pacific Railway land into a Division I sports destination appears more and more likely. That said, university officials acknowledge that several years of planning and fundraising are ahead.

“I’m very excited about this,” said council member Chris Tolbert, who represents Ward 3. “This is going to add some diversity, I think particularly some very family friendly vibrancy.”

Athletic fields

On Wednesday, the St. Paul City Council held back-to-back public hearings related to six master plan amendments for the proposed athletic complex, ranging from parking, landscaping and other design standards to final platting.

The university made a $250,000 donation toward the future Mica Park, a 1.5-acre greenspace that will be shifted just east of its previously-announced location near Finn Street and Montreal Avenue in order to make room for the college sports complex. That will double the park’s development and design budget to nearly $500,000 and increase usable park space by more than a third, according to a city staff report.

Working with master developer the Ryan Cos., St. Thomas is planning a 1,500-seat baseball field, a 1,000-seat softball field, an indoor training facility and 330-stall surface parking facility at Highland Bridge, which in May triggered a major update to a mandated environmental review of the former Ford Motor Co. Twin Cities Assembly Plant land area.

The parking lot would be shared by users of the nearby Highland ballfields and other parks and playgrounds at Highland Bridge, though scheduling will have to be worked out.

Fall practice for St. Thomas ball teams runs from September through October, with six total home games. Spring season starts when the snow melts, with 20 home games during the regular season beginning the last week of March and ending in May. Post-season games are primarily on weekends and may extend into early June.

The university expects the fields to be made available to high school and youth programs periodically.

With a hockey facility removed from the planning, Ryan still intends to establish 110 units of affordable housing originally north of the site and west of Finn Street, as well as 100,000 square feet of office space east of Finn Street, as proposed in the Ford site’s original master plan.

If market conditions make an office building unlikely, other uses may have to be explored, according to a May 26 memo from the city Planning Commission’s Comprehensive and Neighborhood Planning Committee.

University, public reaction

With an eye toward environmental cleanup, the St. Paul Port Authority last October agreed to buy Canadian Pacific’s 13-acre “Soo Line” property, technically located at 1011 S. Cleveland Ave., for $6.43 million, with the expectation that St. Thomas would purchase the site from the Port Authority by December 2026. The university would pay the same price and closing costs, plus interest, as well as the cost of environmental remediation beyond any grants obtained.

Wednesday’s public hearings drew a mix of neighborhood residents and university officials who expressed their support for the plans.

“We made our transition from Division III to Division I. It’s extremely important that competition facilities have amenities that are commensurate to the visual level … that also serves the community,” said Phil Esten, the university’s vice president and director of athletics.

Amy McDonough, chief of staff with the president’s office at the university, said communication has been key.

“It’s been really important for us to engage with neighbors as partners in this and engage with the council early and often,” McDonough said.

If you were to follow the third-base line of the proposed baseball stadium, you would hit the house Jim Ginther has been living in with his wife for 33 years. He said he was originally hesitant about the project.

He said he was worried about a possible a three-story parking ramp there.

“A three-level parking lot would have come right up and peeked into everybody’s house that lives on Hampshire Avenue,” he said.

An amendment to the master plan changes the parking garage into surface parking.

“We lucked out on it. I mean, there could have been other things that went in there, but it did require a lot of remediation,” Ginther said. “And, there was a lot of cleanup to do.”

The athletic complex will require adjusting the boundary of a tax incentive area — a “tax-increment finance” district — previously established within Highland Bridge, reducing the district without altering property values, assessments or debt obligations within the new boundary, according to a city staff report.

Once contemplated for Highland Bridge, St. Thomas still plans on establishing Division I hockey and basketball facilities on its south campus in St. Paul.

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