Category: Minnesota Vikings

Friday roundup: NC may earmark $700m for stadium for imaginary MLB team, Steelers could seek upgrade on “expiring” 25-year-old home

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we get to this week’s news roundup, some old business from last week: I shamefully forgot to give a shoutout to John Mozena for his outstanding liveblog of the stadium-related papers at University of Maryland-Baltimore County’s annual sports economics conference after I was unable to attend. Please check out John’s work at the Center for Economic Accountability and throw some coin his way if you like, or at the very least get some of his free “Pay For Your Own Damn Stadium” stickers.

Back in the present, you’re stuck with me, and I’m stuck with this week’s avalanche of news items:

  • The North Carolina legislature is debating whether to set aside unspecified hundreds of millions of dollars in its final budget for a stadium for a potential future MLB expansion team “in or near Wake County,” which would mean the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill “Triangle” area, as distinct from the Greensboro-Winston-Salem-High Point “Triad” area that voted down paying for a stadium to lure the Minnesota Twins back in 1998. The state has a $700 million Economic Development Project Reserve that it can designate for “high-yield” development projects, and while sports stadiums are nobody’s idea of high-yield in terms of actual measurable impact, there’s got to be somebody somewhere willing to write a consulting report claiming otherwise.
  • Former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Charlie Batch says team ownership is ready to get back on line for a new or renovated stadium now that their current home is 25 whole years old: “Thirty years is the expiration date. Guess what Acrisure Stadium is? Twenty-five years. So I promise you, conversations are happening behind the scenes to figure out kind of what the next move is as the Rooneys are looking for an upgrade in their stadium.” The next move, apparently, is to send your former-players-turned-YouTube-creators out to talk up how stadiums just straight-up become obsolete after 30 years and somebody has to build you a new one and see if that flies.
  • Illinois’ efforts to retain the Chicago Bears in the wake of team execs’ announcement that they’re absolutely, definitely (maybe) moving to Indiana remain very much undead, with Gov. JB Pritzker saying his state is ready to act but first needs “the Bears to focus on what they want,” adding, “they have not been clear about what is the bill that they need, and how do they need to look, and then, can they get the votes necessary to get it done in the House and the Senate.” State house stadium bill sponsor Kam Buckner noted that both that body and the state senate have passed competing bills — there’s also now a third one, filed by State Rep. Martin McLaughlin despite the legislature not even being in session, that would raise the size thresholds on a “megaprojects” bill to where it would only apply to an Arlington Heights stadium — and “the Bears have to decide what makes most sense for them, which one of those bills is the bill they can get behind and wrap their arms around that can help them remain here in the state of Illinois,” adding, “We cannot have a special session until we have a deal. You don’t call a special session to draw up a flight plan. You call a special session to land the plane.” The hope here seems to be that if Bears officials pick a favorite tax break bill and declare that it’ll be enough to get them to stay in Illinois, that’ll get legislators in both houses to vote for it, which is absolutely the kind of bootstrapping your own momentum thing that you try to do when you’re pushing legislation that just got nowhere.
  • Building a stadium district in Denver’s Burnham Yard railyards may be easier said than done for Broncos ownership, given little details like the land is mostly zoned only for industrial use. This is Broncos owner Greg Penner’s problem, of course, except that, as the lengthy Denver Post article on this only reveals down in its 28th paragraph, Penner could end up asking for TIF property tax breaks to pay for his larger development. “The track record for delivering on these promises by teams in development,” noted University of Colorado Denver economist Geoffrey Propheter, “is shaky. And that’s being super generous.” (Credit where credit is due to the Post: “The naked man, in retrospect, was the least of Sean Herman’s worries” is an excellent teaser lede, though still not quite up there with “The freighter captain, the cop, the guy from the private security firm, the Swiss Army major, and the reporter never saw the pirates coming.”)
  • Athletics owner John Fisher now says his mistake in announcing a stadium plan in Las Vegas was not talking to the media himself enough about it: “Not hearing from me, I think, led to frustration from, frankly, the media. Like, who is this guy? Is he hiding? Who’s the real John Fisher?” He then went on to tell The Athletic absolutely nothing about how he plans to make a $2 billion stadium (with $600 million in public subsidies) in what would be MLB’s smallest market work out, especially when his development partner Bally’s may bail on its part and leave Fisher to fund such additional amenities as a $100 million parking structure. Hearing from John Fisher, it turns out, also leads to frustration, who’da thunk it?
  • San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones would like Spurs minority owner Michael Dell (net worth: $246 billion) to pay for some or all of her city’s $489 million share of a downtown arena. Dell hasn’t responded to her request, and Stanford University Roger Noll says that’s likely because the multibillionaire knows spending your own money on new sports venues is a dumb idea — “the incremental benefits of having a new arena are not as big as the cost” — which is why it’s only worth it if you can stick taxpayers with the bill.
  • The Minnesota Vikings‘ 10-year-old stadium needs a new roof because it got damaged by hail three years ago, but insurance should cover it, or at least the Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority does not believe “substantial use of public funds” will be required, which is slightly less reassuring than “insurance should cover it.” Anyway, it’ll probably never hail this bad in Minneapolis again, right?
  • The first of the Buffalo Bills‘ family of stainless steel buffalo statues has arrived, and fans are excitedly pointing out that bisons don’t really look like that! They’re not even usually made of steel!
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Friday roundup: Rays blink on June 1 stadium deadline, Illinois residents don’t want to break the bank to keep Bears

access_time personNeil deMause

Time to catch up on what else has been going on this week while we’ve been doing wall-to-wall Tampa Bay Rays coverage. But first, the latest in Tampa Bay Rays news!

  • With elected officials in Tampa still insisting on asking pesky questions about whether giving Rays owner Patrick Zalupski $2.1 billion or more in total stadium subsidies would leave the city and county with a budget shortfall if tax revenues fall short (or even if they’re just diverted from other uses), Rays execs finally blinked: CEO Ken Babby has backed away from his June 1 deadline for a deal, saying the team is now just “focused” on getting a “nonbinding” memorandum of understanding that would send a signal to the state that “the county, the city and the Rays are committed to this partnership.” (Zalupski added that even an MOU by June 1 isn’t absolutely necessary, but he wants one “real soon” thereafter, even if “it’s purely symbolic.”) Translation: Let’s get at least the state part of the deal done before Ron DeSantis leaves office, then we can come back and haggle over financial details for the city’s and county’s portions. It’s not clear if Tampa and Hillsborough County will be able to push for a less spendy MOU — or be willing to reject the plan entirely if they can’t — but score at least one point for elected officials refusing to fall for the two-minute warning.
  • A new poll shows that most Illinois residents oppose throwing a lot of state money at a Chicago Bears stadium to ensure the team doesn’t move to Indiana — or at least, it does if you include the 36.9% who want to allow the team to break their Soldier Field lease and build a new stadium in Illinois without any taxpayer funds, as well as those who want to force the Bears to keep playing there through 2033, are those even real options, this is a weird poll. Other poll findings: Opposition to funding most of a stadium’s cost with public money is consistent across the political spectrum, and Illinois residents outside the immediate Chicago vicinity don’t give a crap where the Bears play, with those in the southern half of the state “downright apathetic.”
  • Meanwhile, it turns out the clause in Illinois’ proposed tax break bill that would add “property tax relief” to any subsidy for a Bears stadium or other “megaprojects” wouldn’t be much relief at all: An average Illinois homeowner would only get $1.29 off their property tax bill as a result. (And that’s even if their overall property tax bill didn’t go up by more than that to cover lost revenues from the megaproject tax break.) The total cost of the megaprojects bill in future tax expenditures has yet to be calculated — and may be uncalculatable, since we don’t know how many future developments would apply or how much of a tax break they’d negotiate with local governments, but that doesn’t mean nobody should give it a try before the Illinois legislature goes ahead and votes on this thing.
  • And also meanwhile, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is trying to block a potential Bears move to the suburb of Arlington Heights by pressing Chicago-area state legislators to oppose the megaprojects tax break bill. State senate Legislative Black Caucus chair Willie Preston then said he’s on board to oppose it, then said he was misinterpreted, then said he would just like a megaprojeets tax subsidy that would let the Bears stay in Chicago somehow. Illinois Kremlinologists please report to the situation room, stat.
  • New Jersey has cut train fares to World Cup matches from $150 to $105, thanks to what Gov. Mikie Sherrill says are private companies that have “stepped up to lower the costs for ticket holders,” whatever that means exactly. (Sherrill has promised that New Jersey Transit’s $48 million in expected World Cup costs won’t come out of transit riders’ pockets, but the details of who’s donating what in exchange for what here are still very murky.) The price cut will be good for soccer fans, unless it ends up increasing the ticket prices that fans will accept now that they’ll be saving $45 on getting to the game, in which case it will only be good for FIFA.
  • A report by Oxford Economics says that World Cup cities should expect to see only a “modest bump” from fan spending this summer, says report author Barbara Denham, and no measurable impact at all on overall economic activity, noting “there’s a lot of displacement of tourism” as other visitors steer clear of cities that will be mobbed by World Cup fans. And that’s even if, of course, the World Cup mobs don’t steer clear as well: Add Seattle to the list of cities where fans are getting set to show up disguised as empty hotel rooms.
  • Houston Texans owner Cal McNair isn’t saying what kind of stadium renovations he’ll seek in advance of his team’s lease expiring at the end of 2032, but he did say he’s hoping they’ll be “transformative,” which is usually code for “a lot of zeroes after the dollar sign.”
  • A Minnesota legislator wants to apply the same ticket tax paid by Vikings ticket buyers to currently exempt buyers of luxury suites and earmark the proceeds to provide services to youth victims of sex trafficking. Bill opponents, clearly not eager to look like they’re siding with either luxury suite buyers or sex traffickers, have instead objected that she submitted her bill to the wrong committee.
  • Residents of Denver’s historic La Alma-Lincoln Park neighborhood are trying to work out a community benefits agreement with the Broncos owners to keep from being overwhelmed by traffic and displacement if the team builds a new stadium nearby. Community leaders say this will be the first legally binding CBA negotiated by an NFL team with a community group rather than a local government — something they might want to think carefully about, as history shows that it can be a problem if it comes time to enforce a CBA and none of the community group signatories are still around to do it.
  • New Orleans has just seized the lead in the race to be the first major sports city to be abandoned due to climate change.
  • And finally, RIP Gap cofounder Doris Fisher, who will now not be around to see if her middle son spends the family fortune on building a spherical armadillo.
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Friday roundup: Pittsburgh cancels in-person school while hosting NFL Draft, this is just a thing that happens now?

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been quite a week: In case you missed it, I spent much of it keeping up with the comment storm after this Q&A about a paper on housing policy published on Monday. (Turns out people have very many feels about housing policy.) Add in a busy week of stadium news, and I should probably take the day off from typing to avoid a repetitive stress injury — but not before taking a run through the week’s additional stadium and arena news, that’s more important than my wrist tendons.

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Vikings execs want $20m a year in tax money for upgrades of 9-year-old stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Hey, remember how the state of Minnesota approved using revenues from electronic pulltab gambling (basically bingo apps on iPads) to help fund $500 million in Vikings stadium expenses back in 2012, and then e-pulltab gambling initially didn’t get off the ground, so state legislators had to raid a fund of tobacco tax money instead? Well, good thing people finally started using e-pulltabs, and the state used the resulting revenue to pay off the stadium early, and now can use that to backfill what it would have spent the tobacco money on otherwi—

The Minnesota Vikings want state lawmakers to put up to $20 million a year in tax revenue from electronic pulltab gambling toward the future upkeep of U.S. Bank Stadium.

The Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority (MSFA), which operates the state-owned stadium, estimates the nine-year-old facility will need nearly $300 million in maintenance over the coming decade.

Yes, Vikings execs say that their nine-year-old stadium is in such dire shape that it needs $300 million in upgrades (no details provided on what), so it needs a steady flow of tax money to pay for it. What else is an NFL franchise worth $5 billion that turns an annual $111 million profit to do?

The Vikings subsidy bill is co-sponsored by Democratic state Sen. Nick Frentz and Republican state Sen. Jeremy Miller, who argued “Do we want to have to come back to the Legislature every time there is a capital need?” (Frentz) and “This is an asset of the state of Minnesota and it is our responsibility to maintain the stadium” (Miller). No one appears to be arguing “If the Vikings owners wanted to get a guaranteed stream of upgrade revenue, they should have put it in their initial stadium agreement, but then they probably figured that never would have passed the legislature at the time and instead they’d wait 13 years and see if they could get the state to throw good money after bad, as one does” — maybe once this enters the legislative debates over how to pass a budget to fill in for federal cuts and keep the state government from shutting down at the end of June, we’ll get more diversity of opinion.

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Stadiums and arenas are set to collect $18B in property tax breaks over their lifetimes

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a year since I excitedly got my copy of Geoffrey Propheter’s book Major League Sports and the Property Tax, so I figure it’s maybe time that I actually review it. (What can I say, a lot of shit happened last year.) Propheter is one of the most active researchers and commenters on sports venue deals, and was a property tax analyst for the New York City Independent Budget Office for three years, so he’s the perfect person to investigate the knotty question of how much exactly local governments are subsidizing sports team owners via property tax breaks.

As Propheter says at the outset, “property tax exemptions are government spending by another name”: There’s no functional difference between a government cutting a sports team owner a $100 million check and one granting them $100 million in tax breaks. (Propheter notes one economist’s quip that you could easily eliminate the entire defense budget by replacing it with a “Weapons Supply Tax Credit.”) But where it’s easy to calculate cash allocations, it’s a lot more contentious to establish how much taxpayers are giving up in tax money they would have gotten, if a stadium or arena had been subject to normal tax rates.

Previous attempts at coming up with property tax subsidy numbers — most notably by Rod Fort and Roger Noll and by Judith Grant Long — were general estimates without delving into the nuances of tax assessment. Assessments are more art than science at the best of times, as they require figuring out how much a building is worth to its owner; for sports venues, it’s doubly problematic given the problem of finding other examples to use for comparison, thanks to each city only having a handful of stadiums and arenas, and most of those being tax-exempt.

As of 2022, 79% of the 126 stadiums and arenas for the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, and MLS were fully exempt from real property taxes, according to Propheter, the same as in 2000 and up only slightly from 1970. After running through a whole lot of math, he concludes that the 105 current stadiums and arenas receiving tax breaks would have owed an additional $654.3 million in property taxes in 2022 if they’d paid like normal property owners. Topping the list by far: the Minnesota Vikings‘ stadium ($25.1 million in property tax breaks in 2021) and the New York Yankees‘ stadium ($24.2 million) — the latter of which double-dipped on its tax savings by then calling the team’s own bond payments “payments in lieu of taxes” in order to get access to cheap loans.

When Propheter extends those exemptions over the life of the buildings’ current leases, he comes up with a total public cost of about $18 billion (using a 3% discount rate for future value; it’s a bit less if you bump that up a couple points) that governments are handing over to sports team owners by letting them off the hook for full property tax payments on their current stadiums and arenas. The average sports venue that gets property tax breaks, then, gets about $171 million in public money from that source alone, on top of any actual budgeted cash, diverted tax revenues, free land, operating subsidies, or development rights that a team owner is likely to rake in.

So, what’s that to you, if you’re not a team owner or a city budget analyst? As Propheter explains, “Like all spending decisions, allocating $1 to good X means not allocating that dollar to good Y.” In this case, the opportunity cost of giving up that tax money is far from theoretical: Of that $18 billion in tax breaks, he calculates that $7.5 billion comes straight out of money for K-12 education, the most common use for property tax revenues.

There’s lots more in the book to sink your teeth into, especially if you love lots of charts and tables laying out the tax status of each stadium and arena. (You know I do.) It is admittedly priced for the academic market, so if you just want some distilled wisdom from Propheter, follow him on Twitter, where just in the last week he’s written a thread of top research insights on tax increment financing and reported that Virginia’s “72% privately financed” Washington Capitals and Wizards arena actually comes in at 63% public, for a final taxpayer bill of $1.64 billion. Did he include a spreadsheet? Of course he did.

 

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Minnesota pays off Vikings stadium early, total taxpayer tab could still be $1.4B

access_time personNeil deMause

The state of Minnesota has paid off its debt on the Vikings stadium 20 years early, thanks to money from electronic gambling coming in faster than expected:

With the support of Gov. Tim Walz, the Legislature agreed this year to pay off the debt early, mostly by using the cash accrued in the stadium reserve account. That fund developed a surplus when tax collections from pulltabs surged in recent years.

This sounds great on the surface, especially if you only read as far as headlines like “U.S. Bank Stadium paid off as of Monday.” Being in debt is bad, according to the prevailing wisdom, and if the tax revenue being used to pay off the stadium has come in more quickly than expected, then the stadium has worked out better than expected, right?

Let’s try looking at the story a slightly different way, and see how it pencils out:

  • After devoting $348 million toward the Vikings’ stadium in 2012, the state still owed $378 million thanks to the reverse magic of interest front-loaded amortization. It is now paying that off with a combination of $366 million from a stadium reserve fund, plus $12 million from the general fund.
  • That stadium reserve fund is flush because electronic pulltab gambling — basically gambling on iPads — has finally taken off after a slow start. The start was so slow, in fact, that the state had to approve using cigarette tax money and corporate tax money to fill in the gap in the early years, until pulltab revenues started coming in.
  • Spending $378 million now will save the state $226 million in future interest payments, which is good! But it also means it won’t have that $378 million to do something else with now, and those interest payments would have been spread out over the next 20 years, so it’s entirely possible that the state will end up worse off, or at least just breaking even, in present value terms.

What’s happened here, then, has nothing to do with the stadium, and everything to do with bookkeeping: Minnesota is taking advantage of a big budget surplus year to pay down some debts early, using tax money now to save tax money in the future. But it’s still all tax money: If the state had approved e-pulltabs and not a stadium, it could instead be using that $366 million reserve fund for something else. That the reserve fund is flush is a sign that e-pulltabs worked well — if you don’t account for the social costs of promoting more gambling, anyway — but says nothing about whether the stadium was a worthwhile expense.

But still, it’s worth at least one small cheer that Minnesota can stop budgeting money annually toward paying for the Vikings’ football stadium—

A report commissioned by the stadium’s oversight board, the Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority (MSFA), the building will need $280 million in maintenance and upgrades in the coming decade.

Welp. Assuming the MSFA ends up paying for the maintenance and upgrade costs, this will take the total public cost to around $1.4 billion. “At least Minnesotans are gambling enough that we can keep pouring tax money into the place” may be better than the alternative, but not by all that much.

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Vikings’ 7-year-old stadium needs $279m in repairs, says company that could be hired to do the work

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s become common in recent years for team owners and stadium district bureaucrats to start demanding upgrades to sports facilities earlier and earlier, sometimes when the buildings in question are 20 years old or less. But, you may be thinking, would anyone have the chutzpah to ask for major upgrades to a stadium that hasn’t even reached its 10th birthday? The answer is yes, and the stadium is the Minnesota Vikings‘:

U.S. Bank Stadium is well-maintained and wearing well for its age, but to keep it that way for another decade, it’ll cost roughly a quarter of a billion dollars, according to a report from architecture firm Populous.

The Kansas City, Missouri-based company presented a cost estimate of $230,990,503 for stadium maintenance and an additional $47,812,500 estimate  (over 10 years) to build the second phase of the venue’s secured perimeter to the Minnesota Sports Facilities Board Friday morning.

That comes to $279 million, which is a sizable chunk of change, even for a stadium that cost taxpayers $1.1 billion to build in the first place. What on earth would cost so much?

The first cost can be broken down as follows:

• $80,574,375 for architecture and interiors

• $55,401,857 for A/V systems

• $27,325,272 for electrical and lighting systems

• $25,137,887 for technology systems

• $21,390,351 for structural systems

• $9,606,478 for the landscape and hardscape of the site

• $6,459,307 for mechanical, plumbing and fire protections

• $5,094,976 for graphics and wayfinding (building signage and site signage)

That is an awfully mixed bag of stuff, even within some of those categories: “architecture and interiors” could include anything from structural work to furniture, and “A/V systems” specifically includes things like the TV screens at concession stands, which one wouldn’t think would normally be the responsibility of the landlord. (The Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority is a state body that owns the Vikings’ stadium, though the team owners get the revenue from NFL games there.) And, of course, there’s the fact that the laundry list was compiled for the authority by Populous, who as one of the most prominent stadium design firms both should have a firm grip on the cost of upgrades and also has a huge conflict of interest as a firm that will very likely be bidding to do the upgrades.

But, no worries, the original stadium deal set aside a reserve fund for such future expenses, right?

“Is there sufficient money to cover these? The answer to that is no,” said Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority (MSFA) Chair Michael Vekich. “That is the work that we have to do collectively with [stadium operator] ASM, the Minnesota Vikings and … the governor and the Legislature.”

The Vikings and the public make annual contributions to the stadium capital improvement fund, which sits at just over $16 million. The audio-visual room — one of the areas that will need work soon — is alone expected to cost $14 million, the report said.

There is a separate “stadium reserve fund” that has $368 million in it — resulting from better-than-expected proceeds from the tablet-gambling revenues that were initially supposed to pay for the whole stadium, but ended up having to be supplemented with other state money when they started off slow — but the state is thinking of using that to pay off some of its stadium construction debt early. So it sounds like the sports authority is looking to get even more money authorized for additional repairs and upgrades, unless by “work with the governor and the Legislature” Vekich means something other than asking for public cash.

(There’s been no public statement thus far on the renovation proposal from Vikings owner Zygi Wilf, but it’s hard to imagine the authority would have floated this without at least running it by him.)

Anyway, this $279 million in new expense would be worth it, according to Populous architect Brady Spencer, because it would be “protecting your investment in the stadium.” Exactly what kind of protection Spencer was talking about wasn’t clear — Minnesotans wouldn’t get any additional tax or rent money from the Vikings in exchange, or any commitment by the team to extend their lease, or really anything at all — but as all grifters know, the best way to separate a fool from their money is by calling it an investment.

 

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Friday roundup: Bears buy stadium land but won’t promise to build stadium on it, and other confusing news of the week

access_time personNeil deMause

We have made it to the end of another week, or will soon, anyway. Why not celebrate with a round of bullet points about ways in which pro sports team owners are seeking to extract money from the public purse to use to pad their own profits? No, no, that was a rhetorical question, I’m sure you have many good reasons why not, but you’re here now and it’s too late to go back. so:

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Minneapolis seeks state bailout on Vikings stadium debt so it can pay convention center debt instead

access_time personNeil deMause

Let’s start with the simple part of this story:

Rep. Mohamud Noor, DFL-Minneapolis, said he will seek relief from the city’s first scheduled debt payment of $17 million [on U.S. Bank Stadium] — and then push for a longer-term discussion about restructuring the stadium’s debt to give relief to Minneapolis.

The city of Minneapolis owes $150 million toward construction costs on the Minnesota Vikings‘ stadium, with the state covering another $348 million and team owner Zygi Wilf another $600 million. (Though when you add in the team’s property-tax break and city money being spent on stadium operations, Wilf’s tab is really closer to $0.) The pandemic has trashed the city’s budget, especially the sales taxes it had set aside for stadium debt payments, so Noor is looking to the state to bail it out.

The reason why the city is looking for state help — other than that cities will always do that when they can — has to do with the insanely convoluted financing structure the two levels of government set up during the rush to approve funding for the Vikings’ stadium. The city put off paying down any stadium debt until 2021, because it was busy paying off debt on its convention center until then. The state, meanwhile, decided to fun its share with pulltab gambling revenues — which turned out initially to bring in no money at all instead of the $62.5 million that had been projected, forcing the state to raid its cigarette tax fund instead to pay down stadium debt. Then Minnesotans finally started getting hep to the pulltab gambling thing and money started flowing from that, which led to a small but growing surplus in the pulltab fund, which led Minneapolis officials to start salivating over how nice that money would look plugging their budget hole.

So far this is all just city and state governments bickering over who’ll cover how much of $1-billion-plus stadium tab now that money is tight. But then we get to the debt on Minneapolis’s convention center, which is another drag on the city’s budget:

Earlier this fall, Minneapolis City Hall decided to refinance the remaining $26 million convention center debt for up to five years…

City Coordinator Mark Ruff declined multiple interview requests but provided a written statement saying the city had seen an “unprecedented decrease” in sales tax revenues from the pandemic. City staff recommended delaying the convention center debt for greater “flexibility,” he said.

But Ruff warned that if sales tax revenues do not recover quickly, “revenues will need to be diverted from future capital improvements at the Convention Center to debt payments.”

Put it all together, and we have: If Minnesota doesn’t share some of its surplus money it ended up with after dumping more cash into the stadium project, then Minneapolis won’t be able to spend more money to upgrade its convention center. A convention center that nobody wants to go to during Covid, and probably no one will want to go to even after Covid because convention spending is in a long-term decline. This is maybe not the argument that I would want to go to the state capital with, but all’s fair in love and bailouts.

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Friday roundup: Throwing good money after bad edition

access_time personNeil deMause

This will be remembered as the week that all 30 MLB teams played at once, after the Cincinnati Reds returned from being sidelined by a positive Covid test … for one whole day, until the New York Mets were sidelined by two positive Covid tests. Is this a sign that having 900 players plus coaches plus other staff flying around a country with some of the highest Covid rates in the world is likely to keep resulting in occasional infections? Probably! Is it a sign that the MLB season is doomed to fail? Probably not, given that the season is almost halfway over already, though it’s going to get interesting once the “Everybody Plays!” postseason kicks off and a positive test result means delaying the entire schedule, and/or maybe playing entire playoff series as seven-inning doubleheaders. There’s increasing talk of playing everything after the first round in a bubble in, uh, Texas and Southern California, which sounds like a terrible idea but the NBA has managed to keep its players uninfected in the eye of the Covid hurricane in Florida, so who knows, really. Maybe there are no good ideas right now, only more and less terrible ones.

Anyway, enough about the goofy baseball season that could end up with a sub-.500 team winning the World Series, let’s talk about what you’re really here for:

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