Ball park

plan

offered by

NU native

Efforts try to

keep Twins in

Minneapolis

By RON LARSEN

Journal Staff Writer

MINNEAPOLIS -- New Ulm native Bruce Lambrecht has placed himself and his development firm in the path of a storm over new places to play for the Twins and the Vikings in the Twin Cities.

Lambrecht and his partner, Richard Pogin, operating as Investment Management, Inc., in Minneapolis, are trying to keep the Twins in Minneapolis, rather than seeing them possibly moving to St. Paul.

It's not a modestly priced proposal that Lambrecht and Pogin are laying before Minneapolis and Hennepin County officials, either.

There's the $600 million housing and retail complex that would be built whether there's a Twins ballpark attached to it or not. Their proposed, "roof-ready" ballpark falls into the $300 million category.

Add a $50 million-$100 million retractable roof, and you're talking a cool $1 billion.

"Yah, we're talking some pretty big numbers, but when you break them down, it's not out of line," Lambrecht said.

But he's taking some media heat for envisioning the Vikings playing in a stadium just across the railroad tracks from the Twins ballpark and "Twinsville," the housing and retail complex.

"That's just a concept," he said, attempting to separate the two projects. "The Vikings have a lease at the Metrodome until 2011 so that's just a 10-year plan, a concept. There's no estimates on what that would be. If there were a Vikings stadium down the road, that's a concept to share one retractable roof."

Lambrecht said there are retractable roofs that could "potentially" be designed to go both ways.

"It could go over the ballpark if baseball needed it or over the stadium if football needed it. That's a concept. It hasn't been done in any place, but there's a model that has been worked out in Kansas City," Lambrecht explained.

"So, If you had both of them next to each other, you could conceivably have one roof, and it would have some tremendous savings. It's expensive, but, hopefully, it would be less than doing two."

He never thought he'd be talking that kind of numbers and concepts when he was growing up in New Ulm.

"I was born in New Ulm, and I graduated from New Ulm public high school. I have a couple brothers there -- Duane and Ken -- and my parents are Art and Marlys Lambrecht."

In 1988, he formed a development partnership with Pogin and began building parking lots in the city's warehouse district.

"Yah, we're Rapid Park, and we now control 7,100 parking spaces in the area where the housing and retail development will go."

Lambrecht admits that he and Pogin would benefit if the ballpark were built there, but he points out there would be more parking available than either the Metrodome or St. Paul could muster.

Also, the location is easily accessible from nearby freeways and highways. Plus, it's close to the warehouse district's entertainment spots and shops and the Minneapolis Convention Center.

So, whatever the future holds for Lambrecht and his mega-proposal, he puts only one condition on any discussion of it.

"Always refer to it as a ballpark; people don't like stadiums."