Sailing The SS Mondale

Officials Behind $500 Million Vikings' Stadium Subsidy Get Free Luxury Box Tickets for Family and Friends - Hit & Run : Reason.com:

The only thing surprising here is that the Star Trib actually did an article on this little boondoggle.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that the six members of the Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority (MSFA), the quasi-government agency created in 2012 to oversee the public subsidies for the building of U.S. Bank Stadium, get free tickets to two lower-level luxury suites for all events held there. Even though taxpayers covered more than half of the cost of the $1.1 billion stadium, which opened earlier this year, the public is being kept in the dark about who occupies those 36 seats and the adjoining luxury suites during Vikings home games and other events.

We are all rent seekers, and we ALL like to get paid. Nothing unusual there -- most of us don't get Vikings luxury boxes in payment, but then very few of us are named "Mondale" or descent from Wendy Anderson!

There is zero surprise that Ted Mondale would figure that a $20K+ a year benefit is highly deserved -- as he says, "he works hard on game days", and so it is important to have some of his family and friends share in those difficult times. I know my family and friends always enjoyed coming into IBM to help me work on a severity 1 problem! My brother in law pumps 50 million gallons of hog manure a year -- the family and friends are always fighting for a better spot to help out when a ripe new shed is all set to go!

The Vikes stadium us a glass $1.1 billion representation of a Viking ship. Glass is a good metaphor -- it is a lot like an NFL offense with no O-line.

The Star-Tribune says they were given the names of 12 current and former public officials who attended and paid for suite tickets to NFL games. After the initial request for information was made, several other officials—including the mayor of Minneapolis and her husband, several state commissioners, Minneapolis' city attorney, and city council members—also wrote checks reimbursing the board for the tickets they had apparently used.

I wonder why they wrote those checks? No doubt they had just "forgot" and finally got around to it.

The article is well worth the read -- one can only imagine how hard Ted worked on getting the multiple billion dollar light rail that covers a full third of it's OPERATING cost each year!

It's really all OK ... he's a MONDALE!

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