May 19, 2011

Road cost recalculation trims Vikings stadium fund gap to $200m

Minnesota transportation commissioner Tom Sorel may not have been asked to come up with a cheaper Vikings stadium road plan, as he said Tuesday, but he came up with one anyway: Road upgrades will now cost $131 million, according to a report Sorel released yesterday, down from the earlier $175 million estimate, but up from the $80 million Vikings officials claimed they could be done for.

"It's progress and this makes it more manageable," Vikings stadium czar Lester Bagley told the Minneapolis Star Tribune yesterday. Still, no one has proposed any way to pay for even $131 million in road costs. Add in the fact that the Vikings say naming-rights money goes to pay off their share, and the state says it's theirs, and the funding gap is still at around $200 million or so. "We've got to find creative financing," Bagley told the Strib, shortly before practicing this over and over again.

But hey, all that can be worked out by the state legislature before it adjourns on Monday, right? After all, it's not like they have anything else they need to be working on.