Gov. Tim Pawlenty inched closer Wednesday to becoming a pivotal player in the Minnesota Vikings stadium debate, suggesting that state lottery money and other means could help publicly finance the controversial project.
Pawlenty, whose office has taken a more active role in exploring funding options, said in a radio interview that the state could use proceeds from a new state lottery game to generate an estimated $12 million annually for a stadium.
While Pawlenty said he was not specifically proposing such a funding plan, he said lottery funds could be part of a public subsidy package that would generate the $29 million to $42 million annually that team officials say would be needed for a stadium.
"If you look at the Minnesota Lottery, for example, there's new games added all the time in the lottery," Pawlenty told a radio audience. "There was one just added the other day called Mega Millions that's going to generate $20 million a year," the governor said.
Although 40 percent of those funds -- $ 8 million -- is constitutionally dedicated to an environmental trust fund, "the other $12 [million] can be used for other stuff. People will say it should go into schools or roads or whatever, but ... that's another way to do [the stadium]."
The governor's comments were noteworthy on several levels. They signal that Pawlenty may be moving closer to brokering a proposal even as the Legislature convenes Thursday to grapple with a $1.2 billion shortfall. They also show that stadium proponents, who have been working largely behind the scenes, are sorting through a series of public subsidies that include a metrowide hospitality tax and federal stimulus money.
One particularly novel element that Pawlenty offered: a pumped up version of tax increment financing, a complex financing tool that typically has allowed developers to divert their property taxes to develop their properties.
The Vikings have examined a variation that would allow them to capture not only the increase in their property taxes, but also the rise in a broad array of tax revenue they would generate, including income taxes paid by players. They would then use that money to help pay for a stadium, which has an estimated $870 million price tag.