Vikings stadium, property taxes and other cosmic connections

Biggest impediment to getting a new Vikings stadium approved any time soon: The Vikings 2-9 record.

People can accept losing teams though, and especially in Minnesota Nice country. The Wilf's shouldn't take Minnesota Nice for granted.

The 2-9 record isn't totally unacceptable to Minnesotans, and we're kind of like Packer fans in that respect: Keep believing in something even when the facts suggest your faith would be better appreciated at the first Lutheran church.

No, we'll accept a 2-9 record if the team looks competitive. And for the most part, the Vikings have been competitive in almost every game. They just can't be consistently competitive for the regulation amount of minutes in a game.

Embarrassing games like the second Green Bay game, though, better be gone for the season. We just don't have that much patience. At some point, we don't like stuff rubbed in our noses, even though we are humble Minnesotans.

Property taxes and the Vikings

One of the suggestions by the Vikings in recent full page ads in state newspapers was the idea very similar to what many of us know as "Tax Increment Financing." It's a tactic that has been used for every kind of small business in Minnesota and it's been used on projects from small town grocery stores to suburban strip malls.

The Vikings essentially proposed a kind of tax increment financing for the Vikings stadium: TIF as we call it, holds that revenues generated by a project be used to pay off that government's subsidy for that project.

So the Vikings proposed the public part of the stadium be paid off with revenues from player income taxes, stadium sales taxes and memorabilia taxes among other things.

The theory here is that because you wouldn't have those revenues if or (But For) there were no Vikings, it's legit to use them for a project, essentially creating a wash, or if you believe certain people, a "long-term" gain with short-term financing that doesn't really cost the general fund anything.

It's as good an argument as one might make to outstate Minnesota, where I surmise a good portion of the opposition to a Vikings stadium lies.

But I must say, of all the TIF projects I've heard proposed to small town councils in outstate Minnesota, that is one of the most creative, and possibly most saleable, ideas out there.