St. Paul to require EV infrastructure in new, expanded parking lots

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Renters in certain St. Paul apartment buildings may be better equipped to own and operate electric vehicles under a new city policy designed to encourage the use of EVs and protect the environment.

The policy, adopted by the City Council on Wednesday afternoon, requires new, expanded or fully reconstructed parking lots to include infrastructure needed for electric vehicle charging, such as circuitry and paneling. Mayor Melvin Carter is expected to sign the measure in the next few days.

Brynn Hausz, the city’s director of council operations, said in an email that the policy doesn’t require charging stations or apply to parking lot maintenance, such as striping or resurfacing.

Rather, it requires parking lots serving multifamily residential properties to have 80% of their spaces as “EV-capable,” which includes conduit and panel space, and one out of 30 spaces to be “EV-ready,” which includes the conduit, panel space and wiring.

Commercial and institutional parking lots, Hausz added, “only require 20% of the spaces to be EV-capable and have no EV-ready requirements.”

Though the policy has a cost impact to businesses, at least one local developer says there hasn’t been a lot of pushback from developers because the impact is small and the benefits of installing infrastructure upfront are great.

Dan Collison, senior director of Business Development & Public Affairs at Minneapolis-based Sherman Associates, said in an interview that it’s “crazy expensive to go back and retrofit to do EV charging. We see EV charging as a sustainability issue, but also an amenity” for people with electric vehicles.

City estimates put the infrastructure costs at around 0.1% to 0.2% of the total development cost.

For example, city documents note, the additional cost would have worked out to about $22,600 for a new $18.7 million, 62-unit apartment building at 520 Payne Ave., or $41,400 for a $32.5 million, 81-unit building at 695 Grand Ave.

Hausz added that St. Paul officials have reviewed cost estimates in other cities and “truth-tested them” with their own estimates. Based on that research, she said, it costs about $600 to make a parking space “EV-capable” while “EV-ready” spaces cost “a bit more.”

Additional costs aside, advocates say the requirement benefits the environment and makes it easier for renters to make the transition to EVs. By the 2030s, the city said, EVs “are projected to be a majority of car and light truck sales in the U.S.”

In a press release, the city said current EV owners “predominantly reside in single-family homes,” but multifamily residents are “increasingly drawn to EV ownership as prices decrease.”

Addressing what she calls a common “misunderstanding,” Council President Mitra Jalali stressed that the policy doesn’t require charging stations. Based on “high-level estimates,” charger installations would cost around $4,000 to $5,000 per space, Hausz said.

The idea, Jalai said, is to make sure that “on the front end, the circuitry, the paneling, what is needed to overnight charge your car, if you have an electric vehicle and you live in multifamily housing, is more available to you. This is significantly cheaper than trying to retrofit it.”

In a public comment, Sherman Associates said it is “in general support of this proposed policy change, as our firm is deeply committed to environmental sustainability in all the properties that we develop, build, own and operate.”

But the developer, which owns and manages close to 8,000 housing units and 600,000 square feet of commercial space, added that it had “several points of caution and additional perspectives” on the matter.

For example, based on its evaluations and monitoring of demand for EV charging stations, Sherman Associates said in a July 2023 letter that any city policy “should be driven by the primary use of the property, not the number of parking spaces.”

For his part, St. Paul resident Steve Gjerdingen fears the installations will attract copper wire thieves.

“Even if there isn’t a charging station on the surface, if wires are required to be present in the ground, you better believe that thieves will be targeting these wires,” Gjerdingen writes in a public comment. “I’m just trying to save new businesses the hassle of dealing with frequently recurring and expensive infrastructure replacement costs — and the demoralization that goes along with them.”

In the end, the adopted policy is “a great balance,” which addresses various needs and concerns, Council Member Rebecca Noecker said at Wednesday’s meeting.

“I’m especially glad that we were able to balance both our needs for preparing for a more climate-resilient future and also understanding the needs of some of our smaller businesses and making sure that our ordinance reflected what we really needed to see and not imposing any additional burdens,” Noecker said.

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