The Minnesota Twins love playing in Minnesota. Team representatives talked to local media this week and brought up their desire to play in the state for “decades to come”. In fact, the team wants to put pen to paper to stay at their current ballpark until 2059! In return, the team doesn’t want anything big or flashy. They just want a lot of taxpayer money given to them every single year. No big deal.
Get the State Legislature to stop fighting and agree “to convert an existing sales tax and about 20% of the money going to the stadium”. The team claims that “an ongoing source of taxpayer funding” allows their ballpark to stay in “top shape”. I surely would have thought that MLB giving the team extra money for “lost revenue”, from TV contracts, could help pay for any ballpark problems.
But as the executive director of the Minnesota Ballpark Authority noted in an interview with the Star Tribune, the most important reason for this proposal passing was:
“Dan Kenney, executive director of the Ballpark Authority…added that the lease extension should be attractive to prospective new owners because it gives them “some cost certainty” and guaranteed public funding in the future”. — Star Tribune, 01/10/25
Yes, new owners must be put first. My next thought is why taxpayers are being asked to fund anything to do with the ballpark, considering they largely paid for it to be built.
To refresh anyone’s memory, in 2006, the Hennepin County Board agreed upon a 0.15 percent sales tax increase that went towards “most of the cost(s)” of building the new ballpark.
When the funding was agreed to, we heard public officials talking about how this new ballpark would allow for new “public investments” and would make the area around the new ballpark “economically viable”. I can’t find any substantive proof of the ballpark spurring on any new investment in the area. Some Twins fans/writers believe they have increased development in the North Loop area…but have they? Maybe someone could prove me wrong on this point.
There are some who believe that the Twins’ current ballpark has been a good financial asset for the area. They point out that the debt for the ballpark was paid off early. That is true. But paying off the debt does not show that the ballpark was any sort of economic catalyst for the area. Even the articles that praise the ballpark’s economic effect in the area do admit that “favorable interest rates, as well as the early payments and shortening the debt” allowed local officials to save more than $150 million dollars.
Speaking of that sales tax increase, since the debt is paid off, the tax will go away, right? Of course not. One politician even admitted publicly that “many members were eying that money (from the sales tax increase) to spend on things”. Some politicians want to keep it going to support local hospital costs, while others would like to use the money to pay off other sports venues in the area.
“Instead of taking a victory lap with taxpayers when Target Field gets paid off, the Star Tribune indicates Hennepin County commissioners want to perpetuate the tax for years to come. The county board thinks they have what the doctor ordered to make it happen by directing tens of millions of dollars from the sales tax to two frontline hospitals” — AmericanExperiment.org, 11/27/24
Before this article ends, I can’t forget to write about how the Twins are home to my favorite public relations pitch when trying to sway public opinion in 1997 on paying for a new ballpark. The Twins SBNation called it “one of the biggest PR blunders in franchise history”. How bad could it be? Well, the Twins decided to put together several commercials to issue around the city. One involved their new Rookie of the Year, Marty Cordova. There he is visiting a local Ronald McDonald House and talking to a cancer patient undergoing chemotherapy treatment.
“A narrator read a dark message to accompany the footage, telling fans…’If the Twins leave Minnesota, an 8-year-old from Willmar undergoing chemotherapy will never get a visit from Marty Cordova‘. The spot ends with the narrator encouraging viewers to call their state legislators and pressure them to vote in favor of a costly stadium financed by the public” — TwinkieTown, 11/03/2020
It was pulled the following morning.
