Monday roundup: A "purple solution," a memorial and bike ride, a greener downtown

Happy Cyber Monday! Try to resist shopping online while at work.

If you picked up the newspaper on Sunday, you may have noticed an advertisement from the Vikings giving a "purple solution" to help pay for the $1.1 billion stadium in Arden Hills, Heron Marquez Estrada reports. The ad can be seen at the bottom of this post. The Vikings propose dedicating the tax revenue derived from the team, players, other employees and fan purchases to pay for the public debt incurred to pay for a stadium for the football team. "In other words, all the money would come from sources that would not exist 'but for' the Vikings being in Minnesota," the ad says.

Despite recently being dubbed the "City by nature," Minneapolis doesn't have the greenest downtown, I reported. The Minneapolis Downtown Improvement District is soliciting public and private partners to see if that can be changed.

On Sunday, about 40 bicyclists gathered to honor the memory of Thomas Malloy, the 61-year-old Minneapolis cyclist who was struck by a pickup truck and killed two weeks ago, I wrote. The bikers held a memorial service near Malloy's ghost bike and did a ride to the St. Paul place of worship that Malloy was heading to when he was killed.

City homeowners have complained that the preliminary tax notices they got in the mail appear to indicate that their taxes are going up, even while their home values appear to be going down - but the tax hikes might be exaggerated, Steve Brandt reports. The school board isn't expected to set nearly as high a levy as indicated on those so-called truth-in-taxation statements.

The self-proclaimed "Warrior Princess" of West Broadway, Jariland Spence, says she's been ordered out of the building whose storefront she converted into a prayer center, Matt McKinney reports.

Randy Furst profiles OccupyMN leader Osha Karow, 23, a red-bearded former student at Southwest State University in Marshall, who suffers from internal bleeding related to a kidney problem and has no health insurance.

A Minneapolis man was arrested and illegally detained for more than a month by federal immigration agents who sought to have him deported even though he is a U.S. citizen, according to a lawsuit filed recently in federal court in Minneapolis, Paul McEnroe reports. The case is thought be the first federal suit of its kind in Minnesota, and it appears to follow a national pattern.

Some doubts have been raised that Minneapolis will have voting machines in place for 2013 that could count ranked choices automatically, Steve Brandt writes. In 2009, it took more than two weeks after the election for the last winner to be declared after a hand count of second-choice ballots determined the outcome.

In his biz column, Eric Wieffering writes about the decline of the downtown Minneapolis retail scene. University of St. Thomas professor Dave Brennan asked Twin Cities area consumers this year how much they plan to spend during the holidays, and where they will do most of their shopping. More than 21 percent chose Rosedale, followed closely by Mall of America. The market share for downtown Minneapolis: about 2 percent.