House says yes to new U of M stadium

04/07/2006

Senate, governor likely to follow

BY ARON KAHN
Pioneer Press

A $248 million campus stadium was approved on a 103-30 vote after several failed attempts to blunt the measure’s forward progress. The Senate and Gov. Tim Pawlenty are expected to grant their blessings as well.

A nostalgic St. Paul bank president, who slipped into the House gallery after work to watch the debate, was more than thrilled. Rick Beeson remembered the last game on campus 25 years ago. It was outdoors, of course, snow was flying and the opponent was Wisconsin.

The Badgers won the game but not the snowball fight in the stands, recalled a smiling Beeson, who was 28 years old then and not a half-bad snowball hurler.

“I’m hugely excited,’’ the 52-year-old season ticket holder and Park Midway Bank president said. “I’m tired of traveling elsewhere in the Big Ten to get the college-game-day experience. It’s simply not attainable at the Metrodome.’’

The proposed 50,000-seat brick-and-glass stadium, approved late in the evening after Beeson and other supporters had left, would open in fall 2009 and replace the former Memorial Stadium, which was demolished after the Gophers began calling the Metrodome their home in 1982.

Its surrogate, likely to be called TCF Bank Stadium, would sit on a surface parking area just east of Williams and Mariucci arenas.

Financing for the building — known informally as a “land-for-stadium’’ deal — requires the state to buy 2,840 acres of university research land near Rosemount for $9.4 million a year for 25 years and preserve the land for public recreation. The university would use the annual $9.4 million to help pay long-term debt on the football facility.

While the stadium’s price tag is $248 million, the long-term borrowing costs require the large amount of state help, supporters say.

The state and university would split the long-term costs, with the university’s share coming from private contributions, student fees and a $35 million naming-rights deal with TCF Bank.

The bill — the first stadium measure of any kind to advance this far in the past four years — survived many proposed amendments, including an attempt to remove the land-sale portion and provide straight funding of the stadium at $7.4 million a year and another to require a referendum of students on their proposed fees of $25 per semester.

The Minnesota Student Association voted recently to support the student fees.

The attempt to remove the land sale encountered the most debate. Rep. Jim Knoblach, R-St. Cloud, said the land isn’t worth buying because the U would retain the right to conduct research on portions of it. But Rep. Dennis Ozment, R-Rosemount, who helped put together the land deal, said preserving the green space will be a valuable legacy.

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Ron Abrams, R-Minnetonka, said the university athletic department will earn $3.4 million a year more by holding football games at the campus stadium, money that would be used to help support 25 non-revenue sports. If the U were forced to stay at the Metrodome after it was vacated by the Minnesota Twins and Minnesota Vikings, it would cost the institution $7 million a year to maintain it, he said.

But returning tradition to campus was a key element in the stadium drive. The university was a commuter campus when Abrams and hundreds of thousands of others were undergraduates in the 1970s, when fewer than half lived on or near the grounds of the land-grant institution. Now, according to U officials, about 70 percent of students live on or near campus.

The university’s is the first of up to three stadium issues to be taken up during this session. Stadium bills for the Twins and Vikings are being debated in committees.