We decided that we're going to just move forward and we're saying no to the roof.”

School Board Director Phil Biermeier

A relationship between the City of Hastings and Hastings Public Schools that has put generations of Raider hockey players on the ice has reached another difficult point, with the school district saying it will not contribute toward a proposed $215,000 roof replacement over varsity locker rooms at the Hastings Civic Arena.
The Hastings School Board reviewed the arena relationship during a Wednesday, Aug. 12 workshop, looking at more than two decades of agreements, correspondence, rental rates and maintenance responsibilities surrounding the two varsity locker rooms used by the high school boys and girls hockey programs.
School Board Director Phil Biermeier said in a follow-up interview that the district's position after that discussion is straightforward.
“We decided that we're going to just move forward and we're saying no to the roof,” Biermeier said.
The next question, he said, is what happens when the district and city revisit their annual arena arrangements before the upcoming hockey season.
The immediate issue is a varsity locker room roof replacement estimated at $215,000, along with an estimated $30,000 HVAC project. Both are listed for 2028 in information prepared for the board by Director of Finance and Operations Jennifer Seubert. An east rink board replacement is also listed as an upcoming project, although no estimate was provided.
The city owns the Hastings Civic Arena and the varsity locker rooms attached to it. Hastings High School, however, has exclusive use of the locker rooms for its varsity hockey programs under a longstanding agreement.
That distinction between ownership and use is now at the center of the disagreement.
The district's legal analysis acknowledges that the existing locker room agreement does not specifically identify who must replace structural components or pay for capital expenditures such as a roof. It concludes, however, that because the city owns the locker rooms, ownership responsibilities include structural repair and replacement.
The district has also framed the question as one of stewardship of school funds. Materials presented to the board state that the city owns the facility, the district has no ownership interest or maintenance responsibility for the structure, and paying for a roof replacement would improve another entity's capital asset.
Biermeier described the district's position more broadly during the interview.
“From the school district's perspective, is we cannot spend taxpayer money on facilities we don't own,” Biermeier said.
Minnesota law is more nuanced than that shorthand description.
Minnesota Statute 126C.10, subdivision 14, limits the purposes for which a school district may use operating capital revenue. Among the permitted uses is renting or leasing buildings, including repair or improvement costs when those costs are part of a lease agreement. State law also allows school boards to lease property needed for school purposes.
Taken together, those provisions do not create a blanket prohibition against a school district spending money connected to property it does not own. Instead, the terms of the lease or other agreement become important when determining whether repair or improvement costs can properly be paid with district funds.
That brings the dispute back to the language of the Civic Arena locker room agreement.
The district's position is that the agreement does not make ISD 200 responsible for replacing the roof. Its legal analysis notes that the agreement is silent on responsibility for structural replacement and capital expenditures, while explicitly establishing the city's ownership of the locker rooms.
For Biermeier, the larger concern is that the disagreement is not happening in isolation. It comes after several years of rising arena costs and previous disputes between the city and school district over capital expenses at the facility.
“We're basically kind of done having the conversation about the hockey arena, because we don't own it,” Biermeier said. “That's plain and simple. That's where we're at.”
The history of the varsity locker rooms helps explain why the issue is considerably more complicated than a typical landlord-tenant disagreement.
Documents dating to 1999 show that the locker rooms were created specifically for Hastings High School hockey.
At the time, Hastings High School varsity hockey coach Russ Welch had secured approximately $150,000 from an anonymous donor for construction of locker rooms serving the boys and girls varsity and junior varsity hockey programs.
Early city correspondence made clear that Hastings did not intend to pay for construction of the rooms. A March 1999 memorandum recommended preliminary City Council approval for the Hastings Hockey Boosters to construct the locker rooms on city property, with the understanding that the city would not be responsible for construction costs.
Those discussions also contemplated the school district assuming additional operating, maintenance and insurance costs associated with the new rooms, while the completed addition would eventually become city property.
That last piece was eventually put in writing.
A September 1999 letter signed by then-Superintendent Wayne Haugen and Hastings Hockey Boosters President Mark Gelhar stated that the school district and hockey boosters agreed to donate the new boys and girls locker rooms to the City of Hastings once construction was completed.
A formal locker room agreement between ISD 200 and the city followed in 2001.
Under that agreement, the school district received use of the varsity locker rooms while renting the Civic Arena for boys and girls varsity and junior varsity hockey.
The agreement divides routine responsibilities between the two entities.
The city agreed to provide weekly maintenance of the rooms, including cleaning toilets, sinks, mirrors, showers, floors, benches, windows and walls. It also agreed to provide heat, electricity, cleaning supplies and equipment.
The school district agreed to sweep the locker rooms after use, maintain order and cleanliness, secure the rooms during and after school activities, and pay for damage associated with negligence or vandalism caused by school users.
Most importantly for the current debate, the agreement explicitly states that the district has no ownership interest in the locker rooms.
“The School District acknowledges that it has no ownership interest in the Locker Rooms at the Hastings Civic Arena,” the agreement states.
Its interest in the rooms, according to the document, comes only from the agreement granting the school use of them.
The agreement does not contain similarly explicit language about who would someday replace a roof.
That omission takes on added importance under the state's school finance law. Minnesota Statute 126C.10 permits operating capital revenue to cover repair or improvement costs in a leased building when those costs are part of the lease agreement. The Hastings agreement, according to the district's legal analysis, contains no provision assigning structural roof replacement to ISD 200.
Biermeier said the district also views the written 2001 agreement differently from the city memorandums that preceded construction.
He said those earlier documents help explain how the project developed but do not, in his view, create a continuing contractual obligation requiring the school district to pay for structural improvements on city property.
“There's nothing contractually through all of that documentation that you have there, there's nothing contractually that binds us to the building that we don't own,” Biermeier said.
That difference in interpretation has become one of the central sources of friction.
The district's presentation also points to the agreement's requirement that the city provide heat and electricity to the locker rooms, noting that there is an argument that providing heat includes maintaining a functioning HVAC system.
The roof presents the larger financial issue.
At $215,000, it would be significantly more expensive than previous improvements in which the city, district and hockey supporters have shared costs.
One example came in 2022 when a new scoreboard was funded through contributions from all three. The city contributed $10,500, the booster club contributed $10,500 and the school district contributed $7,000.
Biermeier said the district has asked whether other funding sources, including hockey boosters or outside fundraising, could be considered for the roof rather than making the school district responsible for the expense.
He also said the district wants future relationships with the city to be governed by clearer written agreements.
“We need to do this properly now to protect everybody from something like this happening again,” Biermeier said.
He contrasted the arena arrangement with jointly owned property, where both entities have a clearly established financial responsibility.
Biermeier pointed to the joint maintenance facility near the middle school as an example. When a roof, HVAC system or another major component of a jointly owned facility requires work, he said, costs can be allocated between the two parties because both have an ownership interest.
The Civic Arena is different.
The roof disagreement is also playing out against a significant increase in what Hastings Public Schools pays annually to use the arena.
District records presented during the workshop show arena expenses of $74,203.30 in 2021-22 and $72,835.90 in 2022-23.
Costs increased to $79,542.44 in 2023-24 and $81,900.70 in 2024-25.
They then jumped to $111,066.95 in 2025-26.
The district estimates arena expenses will reach $116,620.30 during 2026-27, based on a projected 5 percent increase.
That would put the district's annual arena expense more than $42,000 above what it paid in 2021-22.
Current rates shown to the board include $270 per hour for prime ice and $180 for non-prime ice, along with a $55 premium rate and a separate $15.76 hourly locker room charge.
Biermeier focused heavily on that $55 premium during the interview.
Adding the premium to the $270 prime rate brings the starting ice cost to $325 per hour before other charges.
“We pay 325 per hour, and that's before all the other expenses that we are obligated to pay,” Biermeier said.
The district's presentation showed the cost of a girls hockey practice from 3:10 to 4:30 p.m. at $453.21, with a second practice from 4:45 to 5:45 p.m. costing $340.76. A girls hockey game was shown at $906.52.
For boys hockey, sample practice costs were $425.95 and $396.69, while a game was listed at $991.71.
Games also include a $225 event charge for cleaning and personnel, including an on-duty manager, ice maintenance personnel, janitorial services, an announcer, scorekeeper, ticket staff and statistician or penalty-box supervisors.
Biermeier said those costs are important context when the district is also being asked to participate in major facility expenses.
That is also what worries him about what comes next.
Biermeier said he believes previous increases followed disagreements over requests for school participation in Civic Arena capital projects. He fears rejecting the locker room roof contribution could result in another increase when rates are established for the next hockey season.
That is Biermeier's interpretation of the history and potential outcome, rather than something established in the workshop materials.
“The only way they can get money out of the district here is to raise our rates as a lessee,” Biermeier said.
He said the district has little practical leverage if that happens because Hastings High School still needs ice.
“You can't just up and leave,” Biermeier said.
Other arenas are available, and the hockey teams can occasionally use alternative facilities, but moving an entire high school hockey program would create logistical and scheduling problems.
The Civic Arena remains the natural home for Raider hockey.
That is part of what makes the disagreement frustrating for Biermeier.
He described the arena as an important community facility and said the school district's position should not be interpreted as opposition to hockey or an unwillingness to pay its legitimate costs.
“It's a civic arena. It's not just a hockey arena,” Biermeier said.
The board's presentation included comparisons with other metro-area ice facilities.
For 2026, the examples showed prime ice at $280 per hour in Burnsville and Lakeville, $275 in Apple Valley, $260 in Eagan, $255 in Richfield and Rosemount, and $240 in Inver Grove Heights and South St. Paul.
Non-prime rates generally ranged between $175 and $210.
A separate comparison with TRIA Rink showed winter base rates from $195 for some non-prime periods to $265 during premium hours.
The comparison does not make every arena an exact match. Different facilities include different services in their rates, use different schedules and define prime periods differently.
For the district, however, the additional Hastings premium and other fees remain part of its concern.
Biermeier said the annual arena agreement will soon become the next point to watch as the hockey season approaches.
The existing arrangement is revisited annually, he said, and the district expects another agreement to be in place around the beginning of the hockey season.
Until then, the district's position on the proposed locker room roof appears settled.
“From our end, there's going to be no more money talk about we owe this or we owe that for this roof,” Biermeier said. “We're basically saying we owe zero on it.”
The dispute therefore shifts back toward the larger relationship between two public entities that have worked together for decades.
The Civic Arena belongs to the city. The varsity locker rooms belong to the city. Hastings High School has exclusive use of those rooms and is deeply connected to the reason they were built in the first place.
More than 25 years ago, local hockey supporters raised the money to construct them, then donated them to Hastings.
That arrangement worked when the main questions involved who swept the floor, who cleaned the showers and who paid the electric bill.
A $215,000 roof is testing the relationship in a very different way.
For Biermeier, the question is no longer whether the school district benefits from the rooms. It clearly does.
The question is where the financial responsibility of a tenant ends and the responsibility of the owner begins, and whether the existing agreement assigns a capital expense of this size to the district.
Minnesota law allows repair and improvement costs on leased buildings to be paid with operating capital revenue when those costs are part of the lease agreement. In Hastings, the school district's legal position is that this roof is not one of those agreed-upon obligations.
For now, at least from the school district's side of the table, the answer on the roof has been given.