We're getting another sports facility whether we want one or not, and decisions about it will be made without my consultation or that of any other voter asked to share in the costs.

Since the day this stadium was proposed, nothing anybody has said in opposition has made any difference. It is like a large cruise ship, impossible to turn around before it crashes into the rocks. You might as well be standing on a hill in Tuscany and watching the Costa Concordia rushing to shore. You can yell all you want, but you know where this baby is headed.

In December 2012, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources released the "Final Scoping Decision Document," an assessment of the impact of a structure with prominent glass features on bird life along the Mississippi River migratory corridor. It recommended that any design take into consideration the risk to birds of colliding with all that glass. The stadium plan presented this month ignored these concerns and, as always, has pushed ahead as if objections are little more than background static.

There is a perverse business and political logic at work here: If citizen concerns don't matter, the safety of wildlife matters even less. In their reckoning of acceptable tradeoffs, taxpayers were the initial collateral damage, casualties of the not-so-friendly fire of their assault on the democratic process. But thousands of dead birds never registered on their radar, even though the warnings have come well in advance.

Garrett Tomczak, Golden Valley