Minnesota Vikings Stadium: Ramsey County Tries Again

I’m gonna take a EWAG (educated wild-ass guess) here.

All parties have established, and modified, their initial bargaining positions — save one, the legislature. They are cowardly and have offered no solutions, only objections. Gambling, new taxes, you name it. It’s an election year and many of the 201 legislators are simply scared to death of this stadium financing issue. They do not want to see a stadium bill come to a floor vote.

So my EWAG is this:
The Vikings will agree to a one year lease extension at the dome, per the clause regarding the games displaced by the roof collapse. We will then sail through the November elections, which returns control of (at least) the Senate to the DFL. Then we do this whole thing all over again next year.

As it looks like all of this, except the sales tax growth at the stadium, is money that would have gone into their pockets.

Anyway, I certainly see no reason for anyone to object to using these revenues. I guess I’d expect questions about whether these numbers are reliable, but how can you complain about he people who use it paying or it?

We’ll see what happens.

So, I understand that it might be a bit of a long shot for the Vikings to end up in Arden Hills, but it’s not dead yet. You have to give some credit to the fact that the Arden Hills proposal is still even on the table. This new proposal makes all the sense in the world. Maybe with some luck, the legislators will see that it is the most viable option, even though the team would be leaving downtown Minneapolis. Maybe if we get some positive thinking going on around here and everywhere else in Minny, we can make this happen!

I tend to assume that anything Ortega and Bennett do is coordinated with them, but this doesn’t say.

I’d be pleased if these developments lead to AH, but I suspect it will be no-go for 2012. Which of course means the cost of every proposal goes up another 4% or so.

Even Ted Mondale said, a few weeks back, that the objective is to increase and ensure the team’s profitability so they will hang around. Now, because the legislature continues to resist new local partner taxes, each local partner is forced to propose user fees that will reduce team profitability.

This ain’t rocket science, its political science. An inexact science, to be sure.

But Bagley says this doesn’t work for the team. Ugh.

On the other hand, they are still working with both AH and Minneapolis, so everyone involved still have a lot of choices they can make.

and if anyone nixes this, it will be Wilf…because he wants all the revenues going to him.

That has a much better chance of passing. The rhetoric has already been implanted in the public mind that any state funding towards this stadium is going to be straight out of the taxpayer’s pockets from direct taxes on everybody.

A plan that uses more Vikings related sources as revenue like the parking meters or ticket taxes is far more likely to get through as politicians only care about the current public opinion now in an election year and don’t give much care to anytime in the future.

Said ‘give me the land, tax free for eternity’, build his out door stadium with tailgating, and tell the State to go to hell when they want to host something there?