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Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Krinkie-Marty stadium plan

I can't find any news stories on it yet, but today Republican Representative Phil Krinkie and DFL Senator John Marty put forward what they consider to be a fairer stadium funding plan. Neither wants any public money to go towards a stadium, for different reasons, but given that the billionaire owners just won't put their hands back in their pockets, they put forward a bill that they hope will serve as a guideline for stadium negotiations. I understand that the main point is revenue recapture based on how much state or local governments kick in for funding: if, for example, Hennepin County pays for 75% of the cost of a new stadium, then the county would get 75% of the revenues that the team would receive after building the stadium, over and above what they used to get.

I still don't like government funding of stadiums, but this plan is a whole lot better than the current one. In the plan the county passed, they would pay for about three quarters of the stadium, but get no revenue whatsoever. Now, as an investor, I would not put up millions of dollars in capital improvements for a company without receiving some of the new revenue those improvements generate. I don't know enough about the Krinkie-Marty bill to know what it says about things like naming rights, concession revenue, and so forth, but the revenue recapture is enough to make it many orders of magnitude better than what we have now.

2 Comments:

At 12:39 AM, June 02, 2005, Anonymous Anonymous said...

A stadium plan we can hate less. Ugh. I'll deal with it, at least. At least some politican in office at least is beginning to grasp the concept that people hate the stadium plan.

Keep swinging that clue by four, I say.

 
At 9:32 AM, June 02, 2005, Blogger Hammer said...

Why dip a straw in the public trough when you can immerse your head and suck like an Oreck?

 

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