MPR’s Laura McCallum reports on severe storms that rolled through the state the night of May 30th. The storms dumped hail in central Minnesota and roared through the Twin Cities, snapping trees in half and downing power lines. One particularly hard-hit area was South Saint Paul, with 80 mph winds measured.
The May 30th, 1998 storms were part of a larger weather event called The Southern Great Lakes Derecho of 1998, which traveled 975 miles from southern Minnesota to north central New York in 15 hours, with an average speed of 65 mph.
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SPEAKER: The Twins won a new stadium. The Vikings need a new owner. In the midst of these battles over the future of professional sports in Minnesota, the Sports Facilities Commission needs to renegotiate leases on an arena neither team likes, the Metrodome. NPR sports commentator Jay Weiner joins me now. Hi, Jay.
JAY WEINER: Good morning, Perry.
SPEAKER: I understand some talks now are under way to try to renegotiate these deals.
JAY WEINER: Exactly. Ever since the Twins and Carl Pohlad and Don Beaver lost their bid to get a stadium built in North Carolina, people have been trying to figure out ways to keep the Twins here still. Talks are beginning in a preliminary way between Arne Carlson's office, the Twins, the Sports Facilities Commission who owns and operates the Dome.
I think they'll start to heat up a little bit this week and probably next week, in hopes of trying to figure out a way to really wring more money out of the Dome's economics. And I think what they're going to find is that we're going to get back to square one on the Dome and Twins ballpark debate, and that is, there just really isn't enough money to get out of that dome based on the way it was built and the way the leases are set up for both the football team and the Twins.
SPEAKER: Well, and it's kind of a double edged sword. The teams need the revenues desperately, and the Metrodome needs money to keep up repairs.
JAY WEINER: Exactly.
SPEAKER: And there needs to be some repairs.
JAY WEINER: We've got a stadium now that's about 17 years old and it's competing in many ways with all these new publicly paid for ballparks around the country. The Dome has got to improve its concession stands, needs more restrooms, needs to make sure the roof doesn't cave in, and the Twins right now are generating, out of that stadium, about $16 million from tickets and concessions. They don't control any of the signs that are in there. They don't control the suites. That's controlled by the football team.
If you look at the new stadiums that have been built with public tax dollars, with the teams extracting all the cash out, a team like Cleveland is making $80 million or five times as much as the Twins. In a stadium, the Dome that was paid for in the good old fashioned way, that is, fans of teams paid for it, or teams via rent or sharing of money with the landlord, have paid off the bonds. The current days baseball teams get all the money and a broad-based tax pays for it. And that's the debate, of course, we've had over the last two years.
And when we get back to the core issue of does the Dome work or not, we're going to find, unfortunately, that it doesn't. That doesn't mean you got to build a new ballpark for the Twins. It does mean that the economics of baseball have really soared out of whack. And we've got to remember that when the Twins won the World Series in 1987, they had a payroll of $12 million. Today, they're at about 28. But the best teams, the Yankees and the Orioles, they're at $70 million.
SPEAKER: Well, it sounds like the Vikings have the better deal right now. Does that mean that it'll be easier to negotiate with the Vikings and the Twins or--
JAY WEINER: No. No. Actually not, because the Vikings, compared to their NFL cohorts, probably have a worse deal than the Twins. They get some of those dollars out of the Dome, like the sweet money, but they pay a high rent. And I think that the Vikings ownership is going to be coming in, this new ownership with heavy debt, far more than the current owners do, and they're going to be asking for major changes.
And the Vikings, of course, don't have an escape clause. The Twins have one. Twins have a little bit of bargaining power because they could, in theory, up and leave, although they really don't have anywhere to go right now. The Vikings, on the other hand, their lease runs through the year 2012, and they just can't break it unless they want to pay damages of $25 million or 30 million, which is not that much money these days, but it's a lot for a team that's going to be in debt. So I think, first, they're going to try to take care of the Twins and keep them in town for two or three years, then they'll have to deal with the football team.
SPEAKER: There's going to have to be a resolution. Do you think-- will these talks yield? I mean, they've been talking a lot. Will they yield anything, do you think?
JAY WEINER: Well, the Twins need a place to play next season. And unless something absolutely, tremendously dramatic occurs in Charlotte, which I don't think it will, the Twins need a ballpark. There's a hearing in Hennepin County District court next week, June 8, to deal with the Twins lease. I think once that's over and maybe they're tied here or they're freed up from the lease, talks will get serious, and I'm sure that the Twins and the stadium Commission will come up with something. As for the Vikings, that remains to be seen.
SPEAKER: NPR sports commentator Jay Weiner. Thanks very much.
JAY WEINER: Sure.