Mitch Leachman walks the park site once proposed for the new ºüÀêÊÓƵ Blues practice facility and describes what he sees as a “moonscape.â€
Forty acres on the northwest corner of Creve Coeur Lake Memorial Park are mostly flattened, covered with straw to protect seed put there by construction crews under the direction of the ºüÀêÊÓƵ Legacy Ice Foundation, a Blues-connected nonprofit that announced last week it was to build the facility in the federally protected park.
Hundreds of trees are gone. Massive retention ponds designed originally to gather water from a 1,000-space parking lot and building large enough to house four sheets of ice and administrative offices for the Blues create odd, disconnected craters that seem out of place. One of them has massive gashes from erosion and can’t hold water.
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“If we wanted to park cars on it, I guess it would be just fine,†said Leachman, executive director of the ºüÀêÊÓƵ Audubon Society and a member of the Creve Coeur Park Coalition that rallied to protect the park from the massive development project. “It’s not an inviting place.â€
It’s also not a done deal that the hockey proposal is dead.
The changing timeline near the supposed end of the project is as confusing as it was in the beginning. Then, ºüÀêÊÓƵ Economic Partnership CEO Sheila Sweeney said the grading work in the park was for a stormwater project, but public documents and further investigation showed it to be the for the unapproved ice center. Now, it’s unclear what the county actually plans to do with the property it has scraped bare.
• On Oct. 31, Sweeney wrote Missouri State Parks Director Ben Ellis to tell him the grading and seeding work on the park site was “all complete.â€
• Ten days later, in a statement released by the Blues, the ice center partners jointly announced that they were pursuing a new site in Maryland Heights, “bringing closure†to the proposal at Creve Coeur Lake Memorial Park.
• On Monday, the Maryland Heights City Council the city to enter into an agreement to build the ice center on land next to the Hollywood Casino. That same day, Ellis told me he expected that meant that the Department of Natural Resources wouldn’t be forwarding the ice center proposal to the National Park Service, which would ultimately have to approve it. Park Service employees had already questioned the scope of the work going on at the park and had asked the state of Missouri to put a stop to it.
• But the next day — the same day I walked the park land with Leachman — Ellis received notice from county parks director Gary Bess that the grading project wasn’t complete. Later in the day, a top aide to County Executive Steve Stenger asked the state Department of Natural Resources to keep the ice center proposal alive.
“This is to confirm our telephone conversation in which I informed you that ºüÀêÊÓƵ County wants to continue to move forward with its application for approval of the ice center project,†Stenger’s chief of policy, Jeff Wagener, wrote to the DNR in an email. The Post-Dispatch obtained the emails in an open-records request.
So what’s really going on?
Neither county officials nor a spokesman for the economic partnership returned calls and emails seeking comment.
Greg Smith, the attorney for Legacy Ice Foundation, either doesn’t know or won’t say.
“I don’t think this is something I can shed any light on,†Smith told me Wednesday about the county’s still seeking federal approval on the ice center project.
He did tell me that other than some minor “punch list†items, he believed that as far as Legacy Ice Foundation was concerned, the stormwater project that never was, was completed. “The site is completely graded and completely seeded,†Smith said. “The site completely drains.â€
Spring rains — and a future DNR inspection — will make that determination. By then, though, it will be too late to fix what has already been done to the park, Leachman said.
“We’d like to see it restored as parkland and open space,†Leachman says. “Right now it’s just a bunch of holes in the ground.â€
He envisions perhaps turning the retention basins into wetlands and planting the now-flattened ground with prairie grasses. If the ice center truly is dead — and that’s an open question — Leachman hopes the county swallows its pride and finds a way to turn the current “moonscape†into something more worthy of the park’s million-plus visitors a year.
“We want to inspire the parks department to work with the community and create a plan for the space,†Leachman said. “They need to do what wasn’t done in the first place.â€