Yard signs opposing a new 5,500-seat hockey/basketball arena at the University of St. Thomas are everywhere in the neighborhoods around the school, including a couple of signs far enough away to assume the occupants just don’t like hockey or basketball.
Where people are going to park is the principal concern of the opponents, who have twice asked the St. Paul City Council to forbid the development of the building. Between council rejections, opponents also appealed to the city’s Planning Commission to save them, but the commission voted 11-0 to approve the project.
As a graduate of the institution back in the days of its sleepy ambitions, charming folksiness and modest footprint, I suppose I should have a horse in the race. I do not, but I am as astonished as the next person that the opponents couldn’t have produced an endangered moth native to the grounds, or a couple of glyphs suggesting the land was home to the first female librarian to have championed the Dewey Decimal System.
Look! We found the remnants of her little log cabin! And her diary!
Not that they didn’t try. At the most recent council hearing on the matter, an opponent preposterously likened the arrival of the arena to a 19th-century taking of land from the Dakota. He should have thrown in a white buffalo, marking it as sacred land. The same opponent dug deeper with the imaginative stretch of trying to make the arena analogous to the interstate construction that uprooted Black families in the Rondo neighborhood.
Have you ever driven around down there? It’s a long way from Rondo.
Even the wisdom of Solomon cannot solve this conundrum. On the one hand, you have a successful school on its site since 1885. Its ambitions are no longer sleepy. It’s now a university, not the college of yesteryear. And they have been scrambling for athletics facilities since they went Division I, the big time. Opponents of the new arena might argue that they should have thought of that before they went Division I.
Ah, but they weren’t necessarily thinking D-1 when it happened in 2021. As a charter member of the MIAC, they had come to be regarded as, well, too proficient. They were kicked out, remember?
On the other hand, the neighborhoods around the school are some of the nicest in the city and terribly expensive to live in given the city’s irresponsible spending and its insatiable demand for unsustainable property-tax increases. It must feel like a punch in the gut to pay all that dough and now be wondering, “I hope I can park in front of my own house.”
It’s hard to pick a winner in a first-world problem. It’s either afflict the comfortable or comfort the afflicted.
We just don’t know who’s who.
Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.
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