doodledee

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a Twins stadium. Well, ok, that's not exactly true, but we do have an agreement between Hennepin County and the Twins to bilk the taxpayers out of enough money to build one. I say ‘bilk' because - obviously - no citizen will be allowed to vote on whether or not they think their taxes should have to go up in order pay for the stadium, but whatever. (Reminder: they tried that whole "ask the voter" thing back in '99 in St. Paul and, well, uhh, it didn't exactly "pass". And by "didn't exactly pass" I mean "pretty much everyone voted against it". Whoops!)

Now I'll be the first to admit that I stopped paying attention to all the threats and rumors and politicking and boo-hoo'ing about the new stadium stuff a long time ago, so maybe I'm out of the loop, but - lack of a referendum aside - this deal doesn't seem to be all that insane. The proposed stadium isn't huge, it doesn't have a stupid retractable roof, it's downtown, and it's next to transit. It's not exactly a fantasy deal, but if you have to have a [partially] taxpayer funded facility, this one seems almost reasonable.

That said, I'm sure the fine print will end up burning us all somehow. Already Pohlad is saying stuff like "I'll give you most of my share of the money 10-minutes before the first pitch is thrown". I'm not good enough at compounding interest to know if that's a big deal or not, but it sure feels squirrelly. And I'm sure there'll be plenty more of that type of nonsense.

But who cares. We almost have closure on the stupid stadium issue and I should be able to see homeplate from my desk. Damn right that gets my vote.

Twins, Hennepin have stadium deal [strib] [includes above image]