Minnesota Vikings Stadium Bill Passes House, Goes to Senate at LinesMaker

Minnesota Vikings Stadium Bill Passes House, Goes to Senate

ST. PAUL, Minn. (NFL/Newsfeed) — The Min­nesota Vikings took a giant step Mon­day night toward a new taxpayer-subsidized foot­ball sta­dium when the state House approved leg­is­la­tion, but law­mak­ers upped the share the team would have to pay.

On a 73–58 vote, the $ 975 mil­lion sta­dium plan remained alive. The state Sen­ate was to vote Tues­day on a com­pet­ing plan, mov­ing the Vikings closer than ever to a replace­ment for the Metrodome.

Demo­c­ra­tic Gov. Mark Day­ton hailed the vote by thank­ing fans who have flooded law­maker phone lines, email inboxes and the Capi­tol itself to push for passage.

“The voices of the peo­ple of Min­nesota were heard tonight,” Day­ton said.

Vikings vice pres­i­dent Lester Bagley, who has spent about a decade try­ing to get the team to this stage, said fran­chise own­ers will find it tough to stom­ach an amend­ment that would put the team on the hook for $ 105 mil­lion more.

“There’s time to work on it and get it fixed,” Bagley said. “I don’t want to take away from the moment. It was a great day.”

Early in a nine-hour debate, the House over­hauled the pro­posal to boost the team’s share from the $ 427 mil­lion own­ers have com­mit­ted to find from pri­vate sources, includ­ing the NFL.

Rep. Larry Hosch told of being born dur­ing a Vikings game, with his dad hav­ing to break away from an over­time game to ferry his mom to the hos­pi­tal. Hosch said he can’t fathom not hav­ing Sun­day games to share with his own kids.

“It might not make sense in dol­lars and cents,” Hosch said, adding, “I can’t imag­ine a state with­out the Vikings.”

Oth­ers urged their col­leagues not to let nos­tal­gia cloud their deci­sions on a mas­sive pub­lic subsidy.

“It’s like pur­chas­ing a house and hop­ing you can make the pay­ments,” said Repub­li­can Rep. Mary Fran­son. “We are build­ing a sta­dium and we are hop­ing we can make the payments.”

The Vikings will play the upcom­ing sea­son at the Metrodome but are free to leave after that. The team hasn’t threat­ened to move, but fans fear they could relo­cate to Los Ange­les or another city seek­ing its own foot­ball team.

Sup­port­ers weren’t ready to pre­dict pas­sage. The leg­is­la­tion appeared all but dead until NFL Com­mis­sioner Roger Good­ell vis­ited in April, rais­ing pres­sure on law­mak­ers to act. After that, the bill limped through sev­eral committees.

Our sports betting news features unique sports betting articles as well as current sports news compiled from leading wire services. This arti­cle was dis­trib­uted by Syn­di­cated Sports news wire and aggre­ga­tion ser­vice, For more NFL news see: Min­nesota Vikings sta­dium bill passes House, goes to Sen­ate.

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Related Posts:

• Min­nesota Sen­ate Com­mit­tee OKs Vikings Sta­dium Sub­sidy Bill
• Min­nesota Pols in Tough Posi­tion as Vikings Sta­dium Vote Nears
• Cleve­land Browns Trade for Min­nesota Vikings’ No. 3 Over­all Pick
• Could Min­nesota Vikings Fol­low Lak­ers in Mov­ing to L.A.?
• Good­ell, Rooney, Min­nesota Gov­er­nor to Talk Stadium

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