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The hot, humid, hazy days of summer are here and so is the start of the football season. The only thing that lasts longer than a legislative session at the State Capitol is the football season. Like football, politics is a hard hitting game and there are guys who want to put you on the side lines. But a key difference between a football player and a state legislator is the player compensation, millions verses thousands.
Last week’s story out of the Viking’s training camp in Mankato was the new contract for their Number 1 draft pick Adrain Peterson, estimated to be $40 million over five years. Using simple math, that calculates to be about $8 million a year, or about a half-a-million dollars per game. That’s a long way from $31,500 that legislators make per year for all the grueling hours and late nights that they put in at the State Capitol.
You have to ask yourself, why would people who make only a few thousand dollars a year want to give hard earned taxpayer dollars to help a billionaire make his multi-million dollar payroll? One only needs to review the saga of the Twins stadium funding debate to determine how this phenomenon occurred. Therefore, taxpayers would be wise to heed the same advice given to reporter Bob Woodward in that Washington, D.C. parking garage when trying to investigate the Watergate scandal, “follow the money.”
Big new stadiums mean millions of new dollars in revenue for team owners. Currently, the Vikings are near the bottom of the league in stadium revenue, hence the Vikings “need” a new stadium. One thing you can bet on this football season, it is that before the season is over the Vikings owner Ziggy Wilf will be asking state legislators for hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to build a new Vikings stadium for his multi million dollar players.
But as the Vikings have racked up losses on the field, the owners have been racking-up their own losses at the Legislature. But 2008 maybe a different story, not on the field, but at the State Capitol. With the spenders firmly in control of both legislative bodies and taxpayers’ pockets already picked to pay for a new Twins baseball stadium and a new Gopher football stadium, the Vikings could have clear sailing.
But if Mr. Wilf can pay his players millions per game and generate total revenues of over $150 million per year, why can’t he build his own stadium you ask? Simple, it’s not the American Way. In the last 16 years, 17 new football stadiums have been built with three more set to open by 2010, and all have been built with some type of public subsidy. Therefore, it only figures that if other owners can fleece the taxpayers of their communities why can’t Ziggy?
In the 2006 election cycle, Mr. Wilf doled out thousands of dollars to both the DFL and Republican Party caucuses, and while this is not illegal, it can certainly be deemed “priming the pump.” Next, will come a gaggle of lobbyists for the 2008 legislative session. This one-two punch will likely deliver a vote in the 2008 session on a metro-wide sales tax to fund a new billion football stadium in downtown Minneapolis.
How can you be so sure? It’s just like that famous bank robber Willie Sutton, when asked why he robbed banks, his response was “because that’s where the money is.” So, just like that other billionaire owner Carl Pohlad, you invest a couple of million dollars in lobbying expenses and political contributions as well as a little paid advertising and maybe throw in a threat to move the team and the next thing you know the guys and gals at the Capitol making the whopping $30,000 a year fork over a couple of hundred million in taxpayer subsidies to a billionaire.
A better solution maybe the one that former Speaker of the House Steve Sviggum suggested several years ago, sell the Metrodome to the Vikings for the sum total of one dollar! Then Mr. Wilf can make his own decisions about what he wants to do with the dome. He can continue to have his millionaire players entertain us in the Dome or he can invest his own money to build a new playground. It’s time for legislators to close the state bank for billionaires.
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