MINNEAPOLIS — On Thursday, the Minneapolis City Council is holding an initial vote to approve the new Vikings stadium scheduled to open in 2016. Yes, approve — initial reports from the council are that its 13 members favor of the project by a 7-6 margin and are unlikely to change their stances.
So there will be that initial vote. There will be more discussion, and then there will be a final vote in the council's Friday meeting. All that after a House of Representatives vote, a Senate vote, conference committee, another round of votes in the House and Senate and Gov. Mark Dayton's signature on the bill. But contrary to how things may seem, this never-ending vortex of signatures and votes will end. Positions will be appointed and plans will be solidified, and at some point the bureaucracy and politics of it all will fade.
That's when it gets fun.
Months of planning lie ahead, from design tweaks to construction decisions. The first step in that process will come within 30 days of the city council vote, when a five-person authority will replace the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission as the controller and operator of the new stadium. Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak will appoint two of the new authority's members, and Dayton will select the remaining three, including its chairperson. That group will work to make the stadium a reality, and in the coming months, it will also be responsible for promoting the new stadium across the country and attracting major events to the area.
This is the kind of stuff that even the stadium's opponents can't disagree with. The project is going to happen, and no matter where one stands on whether it should, it's time to embrace the mantra of "the People's Stadium" that Dayton spouted throughout the legislative session. It's time to realize that this can be about more than the Vikings, and the stadium has the potential to provide a huge economic boost to the Twin Cities.
"Most of the attention on this issue was focused on the Vikings, but the reality is that (the Metrodome) doesn't work for the state of Minnesota right now," Vikings director of corporate communications Jeff Anderson said. "We had no chance to bring back the NCAA Final Four, another Super Bowl, Major League Soccer, all these other major events that bring economic activity and people into Minnesota."
In recent years, the condition of the Metrodome has pushed Minneapolis off the list of potential sites for major sporting events, conventions and concerts. It's the worst timing because the NFL has become more and more amenable to hosting the Super Bowl in colder climates if the city has a state-of-the-art covered facility. The NCAA has adopted a similar mentality, and Indianapolis, with its four-year-old Lucas Oil Stadium, has become a popular site for such big events, hosting the Super Bowl in February and the Final Four in 2010.
"They will come to a northern climate to kind of showcase a new facility, provided it's climate-controlled," MSFC executive director Bill Lester said of the NFL.
Dreams of hosting such major events shouldn't be far-fetched once the new facility is completed. The NFL's five newest stadiums — Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, University of Phoenix Stadium in Phoenix, Lucas Oil Stadium, Cowboys Stadium in Dallas and MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. — have hosted three Super Bowls already, in Dallas, Indianapolis and Phoenix. After hosting the 2008 game, Phoenix was also awarded the Super Bowl in 2015, and MetLife Stadium will host it in 2014. In addition, these facilities have already hosted a Final Four (Indianapolis), the NBA All-Star Game (Dallas) two Big 12 Championship games (Dallas), the BCS National Championship game (Phoenix) and major soccer, wrestling and boxing events. Cowboys Stadium is scheduled to host the 2014 men's Final Four, and Lucas Oil is slated for the men's Final Four in 2015 and the women's Final Four in 2016.
Lester, who has served on the MSFC since 1987, was involved in planning the 1992 Super Bowl and the 1992 and 2001 Final Fours at the Metrodome. Although his position with the new stadium is unknown — MSFC members may or may not hold some of the spots on the new authority — Lester has decades of experience attracting events to Minneapolis. With a new stadium that will likely be thousands of square feet larger than the Metrodome, there will be more staging space for large events, and the stadium will also sit at the crossroads of one existing light rail line and another that's under construction. With those additions and the city's resume, it's hard to imagine that something like climate would get in the way of major events coming to Minneapolis.
"If you have the right facilities, they'll come there," Lester said. "We have hotels set up and good support of the convention visitors and the business community. So this would be one of the final pieces of the puzzle, if you have a large-capacity, climate-controlled facility."
And though the Super Bowl might seem like the obvious event to focus on attracting to the new stadium, it's just one of many. The stadium authority will also work closely with the University of Minnesota to try to attract events like the NCAA men's basketball tournament and other signature games. Lester said that it's unlikely the stadium would get a football bowl game — there are too many of those already — but it could aspire to host the Big Ten Championship football game or even a Final Four.
Right now, the Big Ten Championship football game is schedule to be held at Lucas Oil Stadium through 2015, and the Final Four has been awarded through 2016. However, Minneapolis has remained on the NCAA's list of potential future Final Four hosts despite its subpar facilities, Lester said. That's in large part to keep some element of competition among the cities posting bids, and at times Minneapolis seemed out of place among other cities boasting stadiums with retractable roofs and warmer climates. But by keeping itself on that 10-city list, Minneapolis has a better gauge on the competition, and once the new stadium becomes a bargaining chip, it might be easier to win a bid.
"They keep us on the list because it's in their best business interest to have competition for those events," Lester said. "Especially because we're a community that knows how to do it. We've hosted 10 NCAA men's basketball events since 1986, including two Final Fours. And then Target Center also hosted the women's Final Four."
In addition, University of Minnesota senior associate athletics director Marc Ryan said that the NCAA has promised Minneapolis it will be the site of the men's tournament's second and third rounds in the near future. Ryan said the exact date of the event has yet to be determined and depends largely on when adequate facilities are completed.
Obviously, coordination is key when it comes to hosting these events. Not only does the MSFC have to ensure the support of downtown businesses, but it also has to work with the University of Minnesota for NCAA events. The university has to act as the host for events like the Final Four and NCAA tournament games, and it must initiate the bid and then work with the MSFC if and when it is awarded. So much rests on who is appointed to the new stadium authority, Ryan said, because those relationships are crucial to Minneapolis' reputation as a city that's capable of hosting such large-scale events.
"When you start talking about Final Fours, everybody has to be on the same page to make it happen," Ryan said. "That's been one of our strengths in the past."
Ryan added that hosting the Final Four was not always a financial boon to the MSFC. Putting on such an event involves hours of planning and a good deal of manpower, and though the city benefits economically, the profits don't always fall to the planning commission itself. In order to make such events a reality, the new authority should be willing to make the same sacrifices as its predecessor.
All those questions of partnerships and coordination will become clearer as the new authority forms and begins to work. Regardless, though, Minneapolis already has a reputation as a city that can put on large events. Before the Metrodome became known as the stadium that collapsed, it could boast about hosting a Super Bowl and those 10 NCAA men's basketball tournament events. It was a venue for pro soccer and pro baseball along with football, high school games and conventions and even the Grateful Dead. This has been done before, and there's no reason to think it can't be done better the second time around.
There's one other sports possibility that's even more explicitly tied to the stadium bill, though: Major League Soccer. The bill provides that the Vikings have the exclusive right to establish an MLS team at the stadium for five years after the first NFL home game is played there – which would likely give the Vikings until 2021. The conditions of this provision are that the NFL team owners own at least 3 percent of the NFL team and purchase full or partial ownership in an MLS team. The MLS team must also play in the stadium with similar terms as the NFL team, and the MLS owners must finance whatever stadium improvements are necessary for soccer.
MLS is ready to launch the next stage of its development, Lester said, and Anderson confirmed that the Vikings' owners have been exploring ownership options with the league. But though the Vikings have roughly nine years to bring the franchise to Minneapolis, MLS is not as concerned expanding rapidly; commissioner Don Garber has repeatedly stressed that it might be as long as a 20-year process. In addition, bringing a team to Minnesota would be a huge expense – anywhere from $30 million to $70 million, depending on whom one talks to — and the market is relatively untested.
The preliminary stadium designs have included provisions for soccer, but the retractable roof that's still up for debate will likely play a large part in determining the stadium's suitability. Anderson said that either a retractable roof or retractable end walls will be necessary elements to incorporate soccer, and if the owners can find cost savings somewhere else in the plan, they'll include them.
In considering the new stadium and all it can offer Minneapolis besides 10 (or more, if the team makes the playoffs) Vikings games each year, it's important to think beyond just the Super Bowl and Final Four, beyond even MLS. Concerts, conventions, high school and amateur sports are just some of the other options that will bring revenue and an economic boost to the city, though they don't generate the excitement of a major sporting event.
Lester said that the city has been unable to compete for concerts and conventions like it did a decade ago because of the decline of the Metrodome. At first, that might seem more surprising than the city's inability to attract major sporting events, but with outdated technology and a need for physical improvements, the Metrodome was deterring even conventions that had been happy to call it home in the past.
"A lot of the technology would have had to be recreated, so this would put in whatever the state of the art is at the time that this is constructed," Meet Minneapolis president and CEO Melvin Tennant said. "Whether it's phone and Internet, the technologies relevant to the time are going to be included."
Tennant said that the new stadium could attract everything from the Alcoholics Anonymous International Convention, which has an estimated $50 million economic impact, to the Seventh-Day Adventists General Conference. In addition, Tennant said he and his organization are hopeful about winning a bid for a political convention after losing the chance to host the 2012 Democratic National Convention to Charlotte. Despite not winning that bid, Tennant said that the convention organizers were interested in the concept of a dome but said the Metrodome was simply too old, giving Meet Minneapolis hope that a new facility might be enough to lure a future convention.
From the Super Bowl to the Seventh-Day Adventists, this is a lot to imagine, much less plan. But with four years until the predicted opening of the stadium, there's time to organize and implement. Many bidding windows, like the Final Four, are closed for now, and Ryan said he's unsure when bidding for 2017 and beyond will begin. Announcements of things like the Super Bowl are likely years away — Indianapolis didn't win its Super Bowl bid until the spring of 2008, just months before Lucas Oil Stadium hosted its first NFL game — and though the conversations need to start, this is a years-long process.
A month from now, there will likely be a stadium authority in place, offering some level of clarity. In a year, the stadium will be even less abstract. Construction workers will break ground. Plans will look more like an actual design and less like a watercolor. Conversations with the NFL and NCAA may have started, and conventions might begin to reconsider Minneapolis for the future.
This week will be the first step in all this, when the stadium evolves from something little more than a sheaf of papers covered in political jargon into that much more of a reality. Before Minneapolis starts talking Super Bowl and Final Four – or even Alcoholics Anonymous – it must first talk Vikings and get this project off the ground. From there, good things should follow.
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