The Minneapolis city council may be on board, but the Minnesota Vikings stadium plan still has to navigate the treacherous shoals of the state legislature, where it’s being circled by sharks and — okay, I can’t possibly keep up this metaphor. Anyway, MinnPost’s Doug Grow outlines all the reasons why the Vikings owners aren’t quite dancing in the streets just yet:
“It’s breathing again,” said [Senate Republican spokesperson Steve] Sviggum of the stadium. “But only slightly.”
There are more reasons to believe that a stadium bill will run out of air than to believe that those slight breaths will become more robust.
Scandal, charitable gambling, the calendar, pending elections, political will and collegiality all appear to be working against this deal.
Republicans in the House and Senate are having a hard time working together on anything. They don’t even seem to be able to agree on when they should try to wrap up this session.
The big issue looks to be the state’s plan to use electronic pulltab revenues for stadium funding, something that, as noted at the legislature’s first-and-so-far-only hearing on the bill, would result in uncertain revenues as well as possibly cannibalizing income from the state’s charitable gambling groups, which fund things like youth sports facilities using pulltabs and bingo. In particular, House Republican leaders want a “Plan B” as a backup in case the e-pulltab money turns out to be a fiction — which means we’re back where we were last fall, scrounging around for some way to raise a few hundred million dollars (memorabilia taxes, ticket taxes, bake sales — whoops, that’d cut into school fundraising) that won’t piss off the Vikings or anyone else important, and that Democrats and Republicans in the legislature can agree on.
It’s not an impossible task, and surely Gov. Mark Dayton is working hard on ways to get it done before the dwindling number of days in this legislative session runs out. But with the easy road being for the legislature to kick this until next session and hope a better idea emerges over the rest of the year, that still looks like the likelier scenario.
Yeah it is a horrible plan still, but if you lobby the legislature hard enough you can usually get what you want regardless of the merits.
Neil I would love your read on the Dodgers sale. 2 billion!!!!!!!!!!!!???????????????
4 times what he paid 8 years ago? In the meantime he pillaged the team, alienated its fanbase, ran its businesses into the ground and saddled them with debt, and took out large amount of money for his own personal use.
What exactly is going on here? Baseball’s economics have not changed that much. It just makes zero sense. Any insights?
I’ve learned to accept stupid moves by elected officials, e.g. Minneapolis city council endorsing Gov. Dayton’s plan. That’ll come back to bite us in Minneapolis. My guess is that someone, probably the mayor of Minneapolis, will discover that the projected sales tax from Minneapolis could pay for the entire stadium. The Legislature will pass a billing saying Minneapolis can pay for the whole thing and said they were willing. So if Minneapolis wants to build a stadium, we’ll let them. The mayor, with dreams of a governorship swimming in his head, will volunteer to pay for it.
Was writing about the Dodgers sale when you posted that. (It’s up now.) Short answer: Right now sports is the only thing large numbers of people want to watch on TV, which means it’s the only thing advertisers and cable companies will pay for, which means owning a sports franchise — especially in a huge market like L.A. — is pretty much a license to print money.
Okay, that wasn’t that short an answer. And also, $2B still seems pretty crazy to me, even with cable riches on the horizon. They are getting the stadium and some of the surrounding land, though, so I guess we’ll see what their plans are for earning back their investment
If you parse the statements carefully, you’ll see that even the nominally anti-stadium pols are really just looking for some plausible reason to support a massive subsidy. I don’t know of one who has come out and said “this subsidy thing is a lousy idea.” Leave it for a little while longer, and I think the you’ll see the legislators’ views “evolving” just like the city councillors’ did.
The best quote of the farce to date: “I didn’t change my mind,” Colvin Roy said Monday. “I made up my mind.”
Next up: we have to pass the stadium bill to find out what’s in it!
Dave got it exactly right. There are certainly some legislators who will vote against any public funding for any stadium, but the majority seem determined to find a “safe” way to vote for the Vikings. Because, you know, if you take a principled stand and make it public, rather than just take a no vote when the time comes, you might draw attention to yourself and have some Vikings fan say he’s not going to vote for you next time, or worse, some union leader who says his or her union won’t support you for re-election. And then you have to take a public stand, which is hard if you don’t have much political courage to begin with. Certainly those veiled, if unspoken, threats on the part of labor were in the mix with the lobbying of the Minneapolis City Council. So you find out very quickly how all that campaign rhetoric about “doing the right thing,” “creating jobs,” blah blah blah is really about “we’ll just support that which we can defend without too much political cost”–even when the job creation costs are ridiculously high and the community benefits not “quantifiable.”
I find the way the whole stadium issue is being handled is appalling.
Did anyone here read the article in “City Pages” which detailed why the Vikings will not move and that hints that way are simply bargaining chip bluster? What did you think of it?
David Duke for Minnesota Governor in 2014!!!