Search Results for: pulltabs

Well, isn’t this interesting: One day after a Minnesota state representative suggested possibly delaying the Vikings stadium bond sale until the state figures out how to pay for them, two other state reps say they’re introducing a bill to do exactly that:

Republican state Sen. Sean Nienow of Cambridge says he’ll introduce a bill that would delay the sale of bonds for a new Vikings stadium until a revenue stream to pay them off is secured.

Additional tax revenue from newly authorized electronic forms of charitable gaming, which was supposed to pay the state’s share of the stadium, is coming in much slower than anticipated, and the backup sources aren’t expected to be able to produce more than a few million dollars per year.

Nienow says he and Rep. Mary Franson, R-Alexandria, plan to introduce the bill next week.

Now, on the one hand, this doesn’t mean that the Minnesota legislature is blowing up the Vikings deal or anything: It’s just two elected officials, and all they’re doing is asking for an alternate revenue stream to be identified before going ahead with the bond sale. On the other, if you recall how damned near impossible it was for the legislature to agree on e-pulltabs as a revenue stream, it’s not going to be easy for them to come up with a new one.

If this bill passes, in other words, Vikings owner Zygi Wilf could be looking at another long, drawn-out battle over who should pay the costs of building a $1 billion stadium, and how. Of course, the state is going to need to have that battle regardless now that there’s no e-pulltab money in the till, but if the bill passes, then Wilf has to sit on his hands and not start construction until it’s figured out. This is going to be a very lucrative month to be a Minnesota lobbyist, I’m expecting.

The Minnesota state legislative panel overseeing the Vikings stadium plan met for the first time on Tuesday, and electronic pulltab revenues are still in the toilet, still nobody can figure out where the money will come from to pay for the stadium, blah blah blah, hey, what’s that now?

[Rep. Jim Davnie] said he believed lawmakers would have to consider delaying the August bond sale if they’re not confident payments could be made without tapping the state’s general fund — even if it delays start of construction on the new stadium, scheduled for this fall.

That’s not exactly “We’re scrapping this whole fugly stadium plan now that the financing plan exploded even more dramatically than Kevin Ware’s shinbone,” but it’s certainly a hint that the e-pulltab mess could, potentially, lead to the Vikings deal being delayed or even reworked. It’s probably too much to hope that the state will tear up the old deal and go back to the drawing board, but given that any Los Angeles move threat pretty much died along with that city’s downtown stadium plan, it sure wouldn’t be a bad time to try.

Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton has moved on from blaming his own gambling board for not telling him how they came up with outrageously optimistic gambling revenue projections, to saying that it shouldn’t be about blaming anybody for the Vikings stadium mess:

“We’re all in this together,” Dayton said Tuesday. “We’re all responsible for its creation.” He said it is far too soon to panic about whether the electronic games will eventually cover the state’s share of the new stadium.

“We’ll work this out,” Dayton said. “It’s not about pointing fingers about what happened last spring. … Unless somebody can prove conclusively otherwise, I would say everybody — the Gambling Control Board, the Department of Revenue, the Legislature, Republicans and Democrats, and my administration — everybody acted in good faith, and has applied their best judgment to a totally unprecedented situation.”

Right, because nobody could possibly have predicted that an untested gambling scheme wouldn’t actually bring in $62.5 million a year OH WAIT:

After a two-hour-long hearing where the bill was savaged both by charitable gambling groups worried that they’ll lose money if electronic pulltab gambling is approved to fund the stadium, and legislators worried that Gov. Mark Dayton’s estimate that pulltabs would generate $62.5 million a year was pulled out of thin air, the bill was abruptedly pulled from discussion for retooling.

Of course, the bill was just as abruptly unpulled from retooling when the NFL commissioner flew into town and threatened that the Vikings would move to a new stadium in L.A. You know, the L.A. stadium that totally isn’t happening now. But in any case, all the concerns about overstated gambling revenue projections were brushed aside by the plan’s sponsors, and now here the state is, with a massive budget hole and no way to fill it.

Still, all Minnesotans are equally to blame here: the Gambling Control Board, Republicans, Democrats, people who voted for the stadium bill, people who warned it would be a disaster… Because it’s not about blame now, it’s about pulling together to find a solution. And what does Dayton suggest?

Dayton said the state will “push hard to get these games throughout the state … people who play them say they’re really a lot of fun, and more fun than paper pulltabs. And once we get the charities going, I think this will get up to speed, and we’ll see where we stand.”

With solutions like these, maybe blaming people doesn’t sound so bad after all.

Okay, enough about the Sacramento Kings for the moment! (There’ll be plenty of time for that tonight, when the Sacramento city council votes.) Let’s instead take some time to visit with a risky sports facility financing deal that’s already blown up:

Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton says he wasn’t aware that projections of how much revenue new forms of charitable gaming would generate for the Vikings stadium were developed with input from the gambling industry.

Yep, the predictions that e-pulltabs would bring in plenty of money to pay for a stadium, predictions that many at the time worried were overly optimistic and which turned out to be wildly inaccurate, were come up with by the time-honored tradition of asking the people who’d benefit if the new form of gambling were legalized. Because surely nothing could go wrong with that?

To be fair, the state gambling board says that it came up with its own projections, then merely ran them by gambling industry representatives to check their accuracy before releasing them. (Though given how the projections have worked out, you have to wonder whether the gambling board are idiots rather than dupes. Or both. There’s nothing saying they can’t be both.) But we can still get a chuckle over the governor of Minnesota complaining that he didn’t bother to ask where his own state officers got their projections from. I mean, what kind of elected official defends himself against a deal coming out badly by complaining that he didn’t read it before he pushed it through the legislature?

Gov. Mark Dayton apparently abruptly noticed that hey, whoa, the Vikings owners were planning to pay for their fraction of stadium costs by selling personal seat licenses, and those things cost fans money.

Oh, right. That kind.

Been losing sleep over the Minnesota Vikings stadium fund that is running out of money because e-pulltab gambling turned out not to be the hottest thing since sliced bread? Fear not, citizen! The Minnesota state gambling board has a better idea: e-bingo.

The new form of linked charitable gambling was approved by the Minnesota Gambling Control Board on Monday, March 18.

The “linked” part is key. Instead of competing against other people in the same location, players will match up with patrons at bars across the state. That means larger prize pots, which is expected to attract more players.

Yeah, that’ll totally work! Once the prizes are bigger, and you have to compete against everyone in the state, and you have almost no chance of winning… wait, start again. I mean, once you get people putting their meager wages down on e-bingo instead of the other pointless gambling habits they’ve picked up, thus undercutting revenues from those games… no, no, this is going to work, really! It has an “e-” in front of it, how can it possibly fail?

Meanwhile, speaking of those boring old e-pulltabs that don’t even allow you to lose to people on the other end of the state, MinnPost has looked at the demographics of the zip codes that buy the most of them. If you guessed that it’s predominantly the desperately poor that are in the ten highest-grossing e-pulltab locations, you’re a winner!

And just in case you thought this story could get any better than having two of the top e-pulltab sites being Knucklehead’s Bar & Grill and Aajax Likker, MinnPost further notes that right after the e-pulltab law passed, the head of the charity alliance pushing for it resigned and moved to Hawaii. Just like the patrons at Knucklehead’s dream of doing, only he gambled on something that he could make pay off.

Another day, another report on how e-pulltab revenues for the Minnesota Vikings stadium are falling woefully short. Current estimates are that revenues are barely at one-fifth of what was projected, thanks in part to long delays in getting approvals to install the gambling devices — though given that the chair of the state house’s commerce and consumer protection committee indicated that even on a per-device basis revenues are less than half what was projected, it doesn’t sound like getting more devices installed is necessarily going to be a solution.

So what do you do when a new gambling game isn’t providing enough revenue? Propose more gambling games!

Atkins said he will introduce legislation next week to approve a new electronic game run by the Minnesota Lottery, to be placed in bars and not requiring charities’ oversight. Proceeds would be put toward the stadium.

It’s still possible that the slow start is just due to bad management — from the sound of things, Minnesota went into this with very little idea how to actually implement e-pulltabs, despite having talked about it for years. But that low per-game revenue figure has to make you wonder if legislators didn’t wildly overestimate the gambling market in the state, in the blind hope that it would provide enough money to fill the Vikings’ yawning budget hole. If that turns out to be the case, then the next line of defense will be the “blink-on” revenues approved as a fallback last spring: a new lottery games run by the state and a 10% tax on luxury suites. And if that’s not enough … got any spare hospitals?