With all the talk about whether Minneapolis or St. Paul will be the first to offer Minnesota United owner Bill McGuire his precious property tax break for a new soccer stadium, it seems to have escaped notice that McGuire’s option to buy downtown Minneapolis land for a stadium site is set to expire. Like, today:
“The only thing that can change is they have a check on my desk on Monday morning. In reality, I doubt it,” said Robert Salmen, who owns two of the three parcels on Royalston Avenue that would be used for the stadium — about 80 percent of the proposed site.
A development entity representing Minnesota United team owner Bill McGuire secured the yearlong option at this time in 2014. Salmen said once it expires Monday, he does not plan to sell to McGuire.
“We have no interest. … Even if they’re interested at this point, we’re not going to proceed,” Salmen said. “We’re done with it.”
Now, Salmen could always just be trying to wrangle a check out of McGuire, but given that the latter is still in the midst of playing the Twin Cities off against each other, and buying Minneapolis land before securing a tax break would shoot his leverage to hell, that would seem to be a pretty stupid strategy. More likely Salmen is thinking that he can possibly get a bidding war going for his property — “When I want to sell, or if somebody makes a stupid offer, I’ll sell,” he told the Minneapolis Star Tribune — and doesn’t see any upside to continuing to deal only with one suitor.
Weirdly, there’s been no public comment from McGuire on this yet, though perhaps not so weirdly, since McGuire isn’t really a public comment kind of guy. More news later today if and when Salmen actually lowers the hammer, I expect.
When Katz was negotiating his options to buy land in downtown Edmonton, he deliberately set a short expiry date on same.
When the options were about to expire, he ran to the city and demanded that they buy the parcels as “otherwise this opportunity will be lost forever”.
His pal Mr. Mandel immediately surrendered, coughing up $74m in public money to buy the land Katz had negotiated the options on privately (without even talking to the city, we are told).
In one fell swoop, he had negotiated a weak willed and dimwitted city council into spending money on a project they hadn’t even heard about in any detail, let alone discussed or voted on.
My guess would be that Salmen would just like another cash payment (today) in order to extend the option to purchase… and probably to purchase at a higher price than was previously agreed, but hey… If you can get $2.5m just for agreeing to sign a piece of paper, why wouldn’t you?
When you are dealing with complete idiots, is it really all that unfair to extract the maximum amount you can from them? It seems to me our credit card and mortgage industries are more or less based entirely on this principal….
…ple…. dammit….