In Highland Park, St. Catherine University has big plans for the four-acre woods next to Dew Drop Pond.

First, it will take out an acre of trees, and then pave over the southwest corner of campus to make room for 257 parking stalls. Long-term plans, still tentative, call for the university to possibly remove even more trees at 2004 Randolph Ave. and add even more stalls, allowing access to Cleveland Avenue.

“We have permits from Ramsey County, the St. Paul Watershed District and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers,” said university spokeswoman Sara Berhow. “We are waiting on a permit from the city of St. Paul.”

In the surrounding community, however, those proposals aren’t going over well.

The university maintains that parking demand has grown and will continue to grow if it relocates some of its Minneapolis-based programs to St. Paul, as proposed under an ongoing strategic planning process. Officials say they need the parking spaces for faculty, staff and students. But residents are skeptical.

If anything, the trend in university education is more online coursework, Ubering, walking, busing and bike-sharing, and less commuting, they say.

“Never have I arrived home to find my parking spaces filled with college student cars,” wrote housing advocate Tom Basgen, who lives within 200 feet of the proposed parking lot, in a recent column for the urban planning discussion site Streets.mn. “In fact, requests for parking permits in the nearby neighborhood are significantly down, such that there’s even consideration of removing some of the permit-parking-only zones.”

Kathy Carruth, executive director of the Highland District Council, noted that the university submitted preliminary drawings and plans to the city in November and notified the neighborhood group only after the fact.

The news caught residents off guard. St. Kate’s officials will discuss their plans when the district council’s Community Development Committee meets at 6:30 p.m. Jan. 16 at the Highland Park Community Center.

“We had no communication with St. Kate’s before the application was submitted to the city, and they have always been a good neighbor in the past,” said Carruth, who called Dew Drop Pond “one of the best features of their campus.”

PARKING VACANCY HAS DROPPED

Berhow said that a parking audit three years ago indicated that 8 percent to 11 percent of the 1,255 parking spaces on campus were vacant at any particular time. That vacancy rate has dropped to 2 percent or 3 percent for the average day. The school has nearly 5,000 students and 880 faculty and staff.

“The short answer is yes, we do need more parking,” Berhow said. “The city code says that for the size of our property and community, we should have a minimum of 2,100 parking spaces.”

She added that more and more students are choosing to keep cars on campus to reach off-campus jobs and internships, or to help care for family. Requests for student parking permits are increasing annually, and in annual student surveys, “the most common complaint we have from students is about the lack of parking on campus.”

“More than 1,700 people currently hold campus parking permits, so we have more permit holders than available spots,” Berhow said.

PUBLIC TRANSIT USE LOW

Highland District Council officials have noted that in addition to trends in telecommuting, both the city and state are encouraging less parking at university facilities and better pedestrian access and public transit use.

Institutions such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison have shown some reluctance to add parking, in part because they anticipate that car-sharing options such as Uber and autonomous vehicles will mature and cater to student populations.

“Use of public transit to campus is low,” Berhow said. “Based on ridership and use of bus stops adjacent to our campus, Metro Transit is not considering adding additional service near our campus. In the past, we have offered discounted and even free bus passes to students. Very few people used them.”

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St. Paul man threatened another man with a sword, charges say On Dec. 13, city planners informed St. Kate’s that its parking lot proposal had received conditional site plan approval, based on a Dec. 5 review by the city’s site plan review committee.

Spanning six pages, the 45 or more attached conditions require the university to obtain a general storm-water permit for construction activity from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, as well as approvals from St. Paul Public Works, the city’s Heritage Preservation Commission, zoning code enforcement and other city departments.

The university must also complete a Travel Demand Management Plan indicating alternative means of getting to campus. The plan will be reviewed by St. Paul Smart Trips, the city’s designated transportation-management organization.