Lobbying begins for Major League Soccer stadium

The group looking to bring top level pro soccer to Minneapolis is heading to the Capitol next week, apparently looking for another stadium subsidy from lawmakers.

DFL Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk confirms that he has a meeting scheduled with Bill McGuire, the former UnitedHealth Group CEO and owner of the Minnesota United minor league soccer franchise. His team won an expansion opportunity from Major League Soccer last month, but that's contingent on building a new outdoor stadium in Minneapolis, expected to cost as much as $150 million.

McGuire said at the time that he'd seek a public "partnership" for the project.

But Bakk said that partnership won't include money from the state.

"There's no path this year, and I can't imagine what the path would be next year," Bakk said, following Gov. Mark Dayton's State of the State speech Thursday night. "There's just a lot of stadium fatigue at the Legislature. I tried to express that early on, back in the first week of February."

Republican House Speaker Kurt Daudt, who is also meeting with McGuire on Tuesday, also said his caucus wasn't interested in putting any more money into professional sports.

"I just think there's not an appetite for public funding for a stadium," Daudt said. "We certainly would love to have a stadium built, and we would support them in getting a team here. We think that's great for the Twin Cities. But we think that needs to be done with private dollars."

In an interview Friday with MPR News, Dayton said he would also meet with McGuire next week, but he agreed that public support for such a stadium was unlikely.

However, he allowed that he might support infrastructure improvements around a stadium.

"If it's something like an expanded exit or entrance ramp to the site of the facility, we've done that before," he said. "There's not going to be a general public subsidy as far as I'm concerned."

The soccer bidders may have considerable resources at their disposal. Besides McGuire, they include Bob Pohlad, a member of the family that owns the Twins; Wendy Carlson Nelson, an heir to the Carlson hotel empire; as well as Timberwolves and Star Tribune owner Glen Taylor.

Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber was in Minneapolis for the official expansion announcement last month and said that he wants to see that group put a stadium deal together by July to assure the league that a team would be ready to play as early as 2017, although the team could also take the field in Minnesota in 2018.

The push comes as work reaches the halfway point on a new Vikings stadium in Minneapolis. The state and city put $498 million into that project, sparking years of controversy over how much the Vikings owners were investing in the project themselves.

A new soccer stadium would be the seventh major sports facility to be built or get a major renovation in the Twin Cities since 2000.