City council is last hurdle for new stadium

The Minneapolis City Council is expected to approve the local financing for a new Vikings stadium on Friday, but the preliminary results will be apparent today.

With the champagne bottles long since disposed of that celebrated the state’s decision to approve a Vikings stadium deal, there is still one vote remaining.

The past several years, stadium proponents were in the minority. This year, opponents are still clinging to the hope the Minneapolis City Council will undo what it got rolling with its pre-Legislative vote of approval by the narrowest of margins (a 7-6 vote).

Today the council’s intergovernmental relations committee will take a preliminary vote on the stadium plan. Since all the members of the city council also sit on the committee, it is believed that Friday’s official vote at 9:30 a.m. will be a mere formality after today’s vote.

In a last-gasp effort to show its opposition, the Taxpayers League of Minnesota, which conducted its own phone survey yesterday, claims that more than 50 percent of Minneapolis voters responding to the unscientific poll were against the stadium bill. In addition, protesters demonstrated outside the city council chambers Wednesday. It wasn’t a mass demonstration – media estimates assessed the protester numbers as being somewhere between 30 and 50.

Those in the know continue to say that they have the needed votes to give final approval to the stadium plan. We’ll find out today if those predictions are accurate, but, after 14 years of fighting, the stadium debate is expected to end with today’s committee vote and Friday’s official city council approval.

THURSDAY NOTES

The Packers made a late free-agent signing Wednesday, agreeing to a contract with former Miami Dolphins defensive end Phillip Merling.

Perhaps due to the new rookie salary cap and the locked in contract terms for most contracts, there has been an unprecedented amount of early signings, with several teams already inking their entire 2012 draft classes to contracts rather than waiting until the eve of training camp to get their top rookies signed and delivered.

The Bears might be without wide receiver Johnny Knox for the entire 2012 season. Knox suffered a gruesome back injury late last season and, while he is in recovery mode, there are concerns that he won’t be ready for the start of the season and may be placed on injured reserve if there isn’t significant improvement in the next couple of months.

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John Holler has been writing about the Vikings for more than a decade for Viking Update. Follow Viking Update on Twitter and discuss this topic on our message boards. To become a subscriber to the Viking Update web site or magazine, click here.

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