My point is that there is very little beside irrational venomous dislike driving the dislike of the Wilfs and it oozes from this forum and its unseemly.
I don't know why you feel the need to fight this fight here, but if you're going to carry on you need to at least accept that lots of people aren't happy about public stadium financing and that's not irrational or venomous.
Which I say as someone who supported public funding for the stadium.
And to add to that, to impose the view of a few posters of this forum to the entire board is silly. Plenty of people aren't participating in this conversation. I do think the Wilfs could have built a stadium on their own (or with considerably less subsidy), but I'm also not overly upset that some public money went into it (I think the state and it's residents will get quite a bit of use out of this new structure). Plenty of people here just aren't passionate enough to type out a response when the few overly zealous stadium haters get to posting.
Can everyone here just take the super super overly opinionated rhetoric out of their comments? If you don't like it state why, if you do, state why, there doesn't need to be name calling or attacks, it's a stadium, it's months from completion. end of conversation for like 30-50 years.
A comment from the
StarTribune article “Minneapolis planners reject Vikings bid to rename Chicago Avenue” March 14, 2016: “Can't stand Vikings ownership is shysters from New Jersey”
AMILLER92 -
I’m not fighting a fight, I’m calling out some very unseemly characterizations on this post, and on
SkyScraper. I can easily accept that lots of people aren’t happy with public financing but can also point out that the decision was made by those with the authority to act and its time to move on. In this regard, their complaint isn’t against the the Wilfs, but rather the state and local negotiators who agreed to what the Wilfs have a legal right to execute.
The side that was against public funding also tends to maintain the delusion that the Vikings would stay in Minnesota had a new stadium not been built. Had the State of Minnesota said “no, we will not finance a new stadium,” I would have disagreed but then would have said “okay” and moved on. The problem is that the State knew that such a decision would doom Minnesota’s ability to retain an NFL franchise.
Its just this simple, if Minnesota wanted an NFL franchise, they had to cough up the public dough. I don’t have to like it or even agree with it to recognize that thats the way it is. At some point, the rabid anti public funders refuse to recognize this - making their entire rant unreality based (that and also because we are years past that decision).
The Wilfs negotiated in good faith against a state that had the resources to represent its interests. There are no allegations of wrongdoing or undue influence. Like it or not, there is nothing in what the Wilfs did that separates them from standard practice among NFL owners - the NFL being the elite sports franchise in America today - when securing a new stadium and associated rights. Hence, the unending personal attacks against the Wilfs for securing what is a standard stadium agreement - where the Wilfs are putting very large sums of their own money into the project (more $$ than any other Minnesota sports franchise owner ever) - makes the charge of they’re being money grubbers inappropriate not least because its not true.
Even with the new stadium, the Vikings will yet again have the most expensive lease in the NFL. What’s remarkable about the Vikings is how severely they were disadvantaged by the Metronome and its onerous lease to the point where it made the franchise uncompetitive. (A good
CityPages article from 2007 concerning how financially deprived the Vikings were because they played in the Metrodome -
http://www.citypages.com/news/eye-of-th ... er-6688699 )
So, I don’t get the carping about naming right, branding rights, seat licenses (for fans who demonstrate a complete willingness to pay) and usage rights to a new park (the “Yard”) that they negotiated and secured in good faith with the State of Minnesota - that included their giving up potential property rights they could have secured for that purpose - for a park that exists in order to front the new stadium, that would not exist but for the stadium, for which the Vikings are contributing large sums of their own money to build, that Minneapolis Parks has declined to operate.
As this is a “Streets-MNForum” from UrbanMSP that has interests in urban architecture and fancies itself adept at calling out national and international styles, trends, etc, but which also wonders why MPLS is not keeping pace with other cities it benchmarks, consider this. The Wilfs are a recognized national developer with a stable reputation (not-with-standing an embarrassing law suit that reflects a personal relationship falling-out in a bitter way in a business relationship).
What do you think it means to the national level developer / investor / financier communities when owners they know have played by the rules, invested over $500 million of their own money, plan to spend over $250 million on a training complex, that when they execute a standard bundle of rights for a stadium they work hard to ensure will be world class, they turn to the local governing authority and ask for the standard courtesy of renaming the street fronting their new stadium and they are denied even though -
1) The same governing authority recently did the same for the Twins in their downtown stadium, in which there were no objections, as is a common practice;
2) the City Council offered to reassess their decision if the Vikings surrender the rights they bargained in good faith for in negotiations with the State of Minnesota;
3) Where a common sub theme in the media is a hostile anti-Wilf, anti East Coast, anti “shyster” meme that is fairly captured by the comment “Can’t stand Vikings ownership - is shysters from New Jersey.”
How are national and international developers and investors supposed to assess the local Twin Cities market, which considers itself “cosmopolitan”, even as it favors a local developer (Ryan) even after it fails to perform on parking ramp air rights at a time when the Shysters from New Jersey have a plan that meets the usage requirements of the development plan, meets the revenue parameters of the City of Minneapolis, have a design, have a contractor, and is willing and able to put immediate $$ down to start? You think this type of thing goes unnoticed?
In other words, at a time when the locals use derogatory and unseemly characterizations of the “shysters from New Jersey,” the local authority becomes emboldened to condition a simple naming courtesy on the undoing of a contractually bargained for right while playing favorites with local developers that comes at the actual cost of stalling out the DTE development plan (costing jobs), and folks in this forum wonder why large scale development in the Twin Cities is not keeping pace? (Oh, and the taxes!) This is not even handed or fair treatment. And the Wilfs are not treated in an even handed and fair way. I don’t have to be pro-Wilf to point out seriously unfair treatment and characterizations.
To many outsiders in the business world, “Minnesota Nice” has a negative connotation of inbred passive aggression. This at a time when the most popular movie about Minnesota is still Fargo and folks watch Making a Murderer and think of the upper Mid-West.
NATHAN
It may be only a few, but maybe more than you think, and it definitely gives this otherwise really cool resource an indelibly bad taste. In any event, there is no “super super overly opinionated rhetoric” that I couldn’t convert to an evidentiary fact capable of meeting rules of evidence. That’s why I find the rhetoric so distracting. If you like, I could turn this whole thing over to the Anti-Defamation League or some similar group and they could help you see that this goes way beyond mere opinion. But they would not be nearly as low key or polite about it.
With that, I’ve said all that I care to on this topic.