Am I joking? Man, you have no idea how much I wish I was joking.
At the morning news conference with Goodell and Dayton, Rosen appeared in lockstep support for Arden Hills: "We're very excited about moving forward with this proposal and making sure we can get a stadium built."
But hours later, Rosen said in an interview that she was considering two options:
- One would amend her current bill to reflect the $1.1 billion Arden Hills stadium, which is hung up on how much road work is needed to accommodate it and who will pay for that road work.
- The second option would be to introduce two bills, one for Arden Hills and another for a $1 billion plan that includes building a stadium in downtown Minneapolis.
Okay, this has officially gotten stupid.
This bill was introduced as being site-neutral, so that the Vikings could negotiate with a couple of different locations, which they've done. They wound up selecting the Arden Hills site, to the delight of pretty much everyone that isn't directly in the city of Minneapolis, because the plan that Minneapolis presented for the site was garbage.
Now that all of that has been done. . .one of the people that wrote the bill has decided that, you know, maybe the stadium should just be in downtown Minneapolis anyway?
The team has said that the Minneapolis proposal is not a viable one. People have been jumping up and down about the cost of roadwork for the Arden Hills site and things of that nature, but nobody's bothered to say anything along the lines of, "You know, if the team has to play in TCF Bank Stadium for three years while this thing is getting done, they're going to lose between $40 and $50 million. Who's going to make that up?"
This is passing the point of ridiculous, quite frankly. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the Arden Hills site and the Arden Hills proposal. R.T. Rybak and the city of Minneapolis appear to be working fast and furious to blow the Arden Hills plan up because they sat around with their thumbs firmly lodged in their rear ends for too long, and now it could. . .and should. . .cost them a huge cash cow.
Get the damn Arden Hills deal done and break ground already.