News came at the end of this week that the Gopher football stadium was going to cost more than originally thought because it’s being built on mushy ground. Boy, if that isn’t an opportunity for a metaphor, I don’t know my Aristotle.
It’s been suggested by more than one wag that the reason the Minneapolis Library system is in such tough shape is that the city’s and state’s priorities are pretty mushy as well. Another, an unpaid advisor to a Library support group, has suggested that what the libraries need to do is drop the name “Library” and replace it with “Book Stadium”.
Think of the possibilities. As part of the U stadium finance plan, the University is charging each of its students $25 per year, whether they like football or not. (Whether or not you appreciate the irony that real students are being charged to pay for the playground of the pseudo students hired by the university to play football, you have to admire the University’s boldness in charging impoverished students 25 bucks on top of the rampant tuition increases and large increase to President Bruinink’s salary.) It’s also ironic that the Friends of the Minneapolis Library is currently running a campaign to raise funds to buy books for the Minneapolis Library that the city of Minneapolis seems unable to fund. The cost to buy a book for the whole city? $25 per book, and that includes a Friends membership.
Think of a similar program at the U. There will be about 51,000 students contributing to the stadium. That’s $1.275 million per year going to pay off the stadium–money that could be buying 51,000 books for a library, or making up the shortfall that Minneapolis needs to keep the three libraries open that are facing closing–and that’s just this year.
Thanks to some wise Hennepin County Commissioners, a tiny amount of the money from the sales tax which will fund the Twins stadium will be coming to Minneapolis and Hennepin County libraries. Here’s some more irony. The citizens of Minneapolis voted to tax themselves $125 million to build the new library and renovate the community libraries, but didn’t get to vote on whether they’d be taxed about $500 million to build the Twins stadium and, by the way, throw a small bone to the libraries.
Then there’s the Target Center, for which the city had to pony up a couple of million this year to cover operating losses so we’d have a spot to not watch NBA games in increasing numbers. When that expenditure was questioned by an executive of the Friends of the Library, a certain city council member nearly blew a gasket.
So, in the past year, we’ve been able to commit to three quarters of a billion dollars from various sources to build a couple of stadiums and a couple of million more from the city to keep one open that we should have never bought. The smart money says there will be a new Vikings stadium in our future soon, too. God knows what that will cost, but any conservative estimate is that it will be about thirty times the annual operating budget of the Minneapolis Library system.
I’m beginning to agree we indeed have gone about the funding of the libraries in the totally wrong way. “The (Insert Corporate Naming Rights Purchaser Here) Book Stadium” has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?
Addenda: More on this today at MNspeak and the Strib edit page, and Nick Coleman’s column.
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