Questions Remain for Target Center Green Roof [Audio]

A downtown Minneapolis City Council member says shoddy work — and possibly ulterior motives — are to blame for a new report’s conclusion that Target Center can’t support the weight a green roof.

Council Member Lisa Goodman, who co-chaired an green-roof conference in Minneapolis last summer, said she wants to know why a report to the city’s environment committee on Monday apparently ignored an earlier, more in-depth study that suggested a green roof would be possible.

“Obviously some sloppy staff work was done here,” Goodman said Wednesday. “I mean, are we just simply listening to the managers of the Target Center?  … That’s what it looks like in the staff report.”

The City Council committee rejected the study this week and asked the city’s economic development staff, which prepared the report with engineering and architectural firm Leo A. Daly Company, to come back at the next committee meeting Jan. 7 with more information about how they reached their conclusion and how a green roof might be feasible.

Charles Lutz, deputy director of the city’s economic development department, defended his office and said staff was relying on the architecture firm’s conclusions. He also said they’re now working to hire a company that’s more experienced with green roofs to review the matter.

Audio: Listen to the Minneapolis City Council Health, Energy and Environment committee discuss the latest report on installing a green roof on Target Center. Click ‘Read More’ and scroll to the bottom of the page.

Green roofs are rooftops covered with vegetation and planting material instead of shingles and hard surfaces. They have an aesthetic appeal of adding parks and green space to otherwise gray urban centers, but they also offer many environmental benefits. They can help offset global warming, reduce heating and cooling costs and manage stormwater.

With the Target Center’s roof close to two decades old, the City Council has been discussing the possibility of replacing it with a green roof. (The city owns the arena and contracts with a management company, AEG Facilities, to book and promote events and run the day-to-day operations.)

In October 2006, the city hired Kandiyohi Development Partners, a Minneapolis company that specializes in green building projects, to evaluate the benefits of placing a green roof on the Target Center. Kandiyohi’s study resulted in a report favorable toward the green roof idea. Leo A. Daly was later hired to further evaluate the possibility.

The staff report, a three-page memo based on work by Leo A. Daly, says Target Center can’t support the weight of both a green roof and all of the lighting, speakers and other props the management company wants to hang from the ceiling. It also notes that the AEG Facilities hopes to improve acoustics by installing a sound absorption system on the ceiling, adding more weight.

“In order to maintain the Target Center’s current capacity to host large concerts requiring significant structural capacity, staff from the City and AEG Management MN, LLC determined that a new roof cannot exceed the existing roof weight in order to maintain current structural capacity,” it says.

Council Member Scott Benson, chair of the environment committee, said he finds the report hard to believe.

“I don’t know how you can outright say it’s just not feasible. That doesn’t make any sense to me,” Benson said. “I can see it might be more expensive. I can see how there might be more cost effective [solutions], but to outright say it’s not feasible just seems odd.”

Goodman’s criticism went further:

“I find your report to be almost to the point of untrue,” she told an employee of the architecture firm and the city’s economic development office during the meeting.

The new report, she said, reads as if the staff and its consultants are catering to the management company’s interests and ignoring the city’s sustainability goals, which among other things aim to improve energy-efficiency and stormwater management.

“It looks to me as if someone had an ulterior motive or a different opinion about what should happen and put it forward and thought we wouldn’t catch it,” Goodman said.

A spokesperson for Leo A. Daly did not return a phone call Thursday. During the meeting, head architect Frank Anderson explained that reinforcing the Target Center to support a roof would be expensive and limit use of the arena during the work. Using lighter materials for a green roof would create annual maintenance expenses, he said.

Lutz said in an interview Thursday the main issue is the Leo A. Daly’s inexperience with green roofs.

“They’re structural engineers but they’re not green roof experts,” Lutz said. “There’s probably new technology out there that Daly, not being the green roof expert, may not have known about.”

And if that’s the case, Council members say they want to know how Leo A. Daly landed the assignment in the first place. The environment committee voted to have economic development officials explain next month what process was used to select the firm and what competitive bids were taken for the architecture work. They also want a list of any green roof projects completed by Leo A. Daly, which has been the city’s main architectural consultant for Target Center for more than a decade.

Also, the Council committee instructed city staff to present a list of what needs to be done to accomplish a green roof at the Target Center. If it’s a matter of choosing priorities, Goodman said that should be left up to the City Council, not consultants or management:

“We own the building. That’s our policy decision to make. We might make the policy decision that hanging heavier things from the roof to improve sound is more important than dealing with the storm-water management of a building that sits on multiple blocks and doesn’t have any way to absorb storm water at all. We might make that decision. We might not.”

powered by ODEO