In fact, in emails between the nonprofit and county officials, the St. Louis Legacy Ice Foundation pushed the county to move up its timeline so that the Blues could be in their new practice facility by spring of 2018.

Now, there is no way that is going to happen, and the ice center project — at least as it relates to Creve Coeur Lake Memorial Park — is all but dead.

“There’s no question that this controversy has resulted in us receiving overtures from other municipalities,” Smith said. “We have to listen.”

So do state and federal regulators. Last month, the DNR received a letter from the Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic at the Washington University School of Law. Over two days in September, the clinic’s students walked the site with GPS units and determined that all the work that was done mimics precisely the ice center plans submitted to the county.

So while Smith maintains that the site is an improvement over what it was before, it now has deep retention ponds and swales that were designed solely to overcompensate for a massive building and 1,000-car parking lot. Reseeded or not, they serve little outdoor recreation or stormwater purpose in and of themselves.