Ald. Parielle Davis (7th) and 7th Ward residents Peggy Baxter and Fiona McCarthy arrived at the Ryan Field Community Advisory Council’s Wednesday evening meeting ready to offer specific suggestions to Northwestern and city staff on the stadium’s Sustainability Plan.

Instead, Davis said she was “honestly shocked” to find a plan which she described as an “absurdly light document” without data, accountability measures or a concrete timeline. Meanwhile, Baxter and McCarthy both said the plan looked like it had been written by ChatGPT.

The advisory council as a whole expressed concerns about the plan, which was submitted by venue management company Oak View Group, NU’s contracted stadium operator. Davis went further and threatened to withhold city approval to open the $862 million stadium by Oct. 2, in time for the Wildcats’ first scheduled game at Ryan Field.

“If they can’t come to us with at least a serious Sustainability Plan, and if they’re stalling in order to avoid, you know, hashing out any critical details, then we will just have to delay, and that might impact the football schedule,” Davis told The Daily. “I think they should understand the importance of this, that we’re not going to just rubber-stamp whatever they send our way.”

The ultimatum comes as the advisory body provides feedback to NU on several plans, pursuant to a memorandum of understanding between the University and the city. The Sustainability Plan aims to outline measures NU will take to ensure that the stadium aligns with the city’s sustainability goals by setting minimum standards, achieving energy efficiency, mitigating floods and managing waste.

But Dave Davis, NU’s assistant vice president of neighborhood and community relations, said the University doesn’t need any additional approval from City Council before the stadium opens. He said he was unsure of any mechanism Parielle Davis could use to stall the project, since the occupancy permit must be approved by the city manager.

As NU’s representative at the meeting, Dave Davis distanced the University from certain aspects of the consultant-written Sustainability Plan while also arguing that, because the plan requires annual approval and will “evolve over time,” it can only reach a certain level of specificity before the stadium opens.

“There are certain aspects we just won’t know until the stadium is up and operating,” Dave Davis said during the meeting.

In an interview with The Daily after the meeting, Parielle Davis acknowledged that the certificate of occupancy must be approved by the city manager, not City Council, but maintained that the current Sustainability Plan is insufficient because it lacks “years, benchmarks (and) goals.”

Specifically, Parielle Davis noted that the plan was only six pages long, as opposed to the 24-page Security Plan and 37-page Transportation Management Plan. Parielle Davis largely left the technical critiques to Baxter and McCarthy, but said that Oak View Group should have included more data, even asking OVG’s representative if he understood what was expected of him.

Cara Pratt, the city’s chief sustainability and resilience officer, said city staff reviewed the Sustainability Plan, which the memorandum of understanding recommends be broken down into two parts: construction and operations. She identified several missing components on both fronts, including what elements of the old stadium are being reused, the stadium’s embodied carbon calculation, the path to net-zero and what reusable food wares will be used.

McCarthy, an advisory council member who also happens to be a sustainability consultant, said the plan failed to measure up to industry standards by omitting key emissions data. Specifically, she said OVG should reference the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design and Green Globes frameworks and include a containment strategy for refrigerants, a plan to limit noise in nearby neighborhoods and data on emissions per person and per event.

“There should be plenty of data available that wasn’t included in the report, and we would really like to see more detail and more concrete answers provided,” McCarthy told The Daily.

For his part, OVG Senior Vice President of Operations Michael Ahearn, who attended the meeting virtually, did not push back on any specific criticism or explain the technical details of the plan. However, he said he would work with his team of consultants to incorporate the council’s feedback into a new draft.

Anhearn told the advisory council that his team could address a “number” of their questions “pretty quickly.”

At Parielle Davis’s request, Ahearn agreed to inform advisory council members by 5 p.m. on Wednesday of a timeline for when it would receive an updated draft of the Sustainability Plan incorporating feedback from the council and city staff.

“The next time we have a meeting, we won’t schedule it until we receive the next document to ensure that it’s worth being here for,” Parielle Davis said.

The Ryan Field Community Council is scheduled to meet again Tuesday at 5 p.m. in the Robert Crown Community Center. It will revisit the Security Plan, which it considered April 20, and discuss the Transportation Management Plan.

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