Ed’s Projects

Doug Grow has a nice round-up at MinnPost of the opinions from people involved in previous stadium welfare negotiations regarding the current Vikings stadium Wilfare proposal on the table to build 21,000 parking places (and a stadium) in Arden Hills with $650,000,000 of the public’s money.

The general sentiment is that the Vikings will stick around at the Dome for now, and may possibly end up in a new stadium in downtown Minneapolis sometime in the future.

However, one thing that stood out in the article to me was the discounting of the threats the Vikings have been making:

They also discount any implied threat that the team might leave if a new stadium isn’t been approved in the next few months.

“To their everlasting credit, they have never said they are leaving if a deal isn’t done,” said [Sports Facilities Commissioner Paul] Thatcher. “But there’s this implication that the moving vans are parked just down the block from the Metrodome because their lease is up [at the end of the current season].”

How am I supposed to reconcile that with this tweet from the official Minnesota Vikings stadium lobbying Twitter account, @MNMomentum:

Perhaps they’ll claim that THEY didn’t say that. They were just retweeting the desperate threats of @savethvikesorg’s Cory Merrifield on the official Minnesota Vikings owned and operated Twitter account?

Did @mnmomentum ignore Merrifield’s tweet? No. Instead, they retweeted it in what surely can be viewed as an endorsement.

Or, what should I make of this desperate plea that was retweeted by the official Minnesota Vikings stadium welfare lobbying Twitter account:

While it may be true that Lester Bagley has never officially said that the team is leaving is we don’t meet Zygi Wilf’s welfare demands, quickly, that the Vikings will pack up a purple U-Haul and head west, the social media PR behavior of the organization tells a different story.

To me, it sure looks like the Vikings are leveraging and fanning the fear of fans to extract $650,000,000 out of the public.