Here’s an anonymous comment I received earlier today regarding Vikings stadium corporate welfare: It isn’t always about pinching every little penny. Sometimes you have to do what’s right for the greater good of everyone. The Vikings are a state institution that have been here for over a third of the time that Minnesota has been [...]
BLOOMINGTON, MN – Vikings fans gathered at the Mall of America at noon to demonstrate their lack of financial support for a stadium. Fans called upon state legislators to extract money from Minneapolis taxpayers, and gamblers across the state, to subsidize their game day experience to the tune of $77 per ticket for the next [...]
The Big 4′s Pat Kessler tweeted an interesting nugget regarding how Ted Mondale is misleading Minnesota’s legislature. Can you spot the error(s) here? One person who didn’t was Vikings wilfare queen, @notch17, who seems to believe that, since $1.14b is nearly twice as much as $618m, the state would earn a 100% return on its [...]
The latest Vikings stadium financing scheme includes, potentially, the contribution of money from local businesses. But, as Tom Scheck has tweeted, our local business leaders don’t appear to be all that interested in leading on this issue: It sounds like they’d prefer to socialize the costs, then spend money at a stadium (or to slap [...]
Here’s another interesting nugget from the Indianapolis Colt’s corporate welfare deal for their stadium. The people built the stadium, but the team controls the ATM machines: Were a stadium to be a true “People’s Stadium” wouldn’t it make sense to have free ATM machines? Why would the people charge themselves to access to their own [...]
A commenter from Santa Clara named Tom left a comment that I’ve decided to promote as a post regarding how the NFL shoved a new 49ers stadium down his communities throat: To the good people of Minnesota. Please educate yourselves on what has transpired in Santa Clara with the 49ers stadium, so that you can [...]
One thing I’ve mentioned earlier regarding the Vikings stadium corporate welfare plan is that Minneapolis would take a hit on property taxes because acres of value real estate would flip from taxable to tax exempt. Cam Gordon ran the numbers on this and found that it comes to a more than $400,000/yr tax burden that [...]
Here’s another example of the costs Minnesota and Minneapolis taxpayers would be on the hook for under the terms of the current Vikings stadium bill. Assuming Wilf pays for a retractable roof, then sticks the public with maintenance costs on that $120 million contraption, we’d also have other costs to deal with, like keeping seats [...]
The language of the current Vikings stadium bill says that the public is required to maintain the stadium at NFL standards and specifically mentions Indianapolis’ Lucas Oil Field as an example of what those standards should be. Put another way, if Indianapolis decides to waste their public’s money, we may be contractually obligated to do [...]
The MN Senate released their cost projections for the Vikings stadium yesterday. This data combines the revenue the State of Minnesota and City of Minneapolis would extract on Zygi Wilf’s behalf to build a stadium for Zygi Wilf’s private NFL franchise. If we compare that to the sales and income taxes the team expects to [...]
