Editorial: Vikings stadium plans don’t work
Published 9:29 am Monday, March 19, 2012
Daily Herald editorial
Sponsors of legislation that would clear the way for the Minnesota Vikings to get a new stadium in Minneapolis should, this week, be seeing more clearly than ever how difficult it will be for the state to subsidize the project. Perhaps it is time to recognize that the reasons for those difficulties lie in the fact that it does not really make sense for the public to subsidize one of the wealthiest organizations in the country.
Helping the team pay for a stadium with general tax funds has clearly been a non-starter for years. The latest work-around would use charitable pull-tab gambling revenue to generate the state’s share of the $975 million needed to build a new stadium. Unfortunately, the charities which run pull-tab gambling don’t necessarily see that as a win for them. Nor is it clear that charitable gambling would ever generate enough revenue — which once again would drop hundreds of millions of dollars of expense on the taxpayers’ shoulders.
The reality appears to be while most Minnesotans appreciate having the Vikings here, very few of them are willing to pay for the privilege. If they were, the team could easily raise the money via donations or higher ticket prices. But that won’t work because there just aren’t enough Minnesotans willing to foot the bill. That leaves the team and stadium supporters scrambling — as they have been for years — to come up with some way to extract the necessary funds from financial thin air. That is not easily done, as is evident by the hurdles that every stadium plan has faced.
Building a stadium for the team is a great idea, provided the team either pays directly for the project or is at least the entity that is on the hook if other revenue sources, such as gambling, don’t pan out. If those things can’t be made to happen, the project just doesn’t make sense.