"Easy Mark" Dayton

Mark Dayton wanted a stadium. They saw him a mile away:

The botched projections showing that electronic pulltab sales would explode in Minnesota and immediately start paying for a new Minnesota Vikings stadium were based largely on estimates made by gambling businesses with a vested interest in the new but untested form of charitable gaming, the Star Tribune has found.

Sales estimates were based on different kinds of gambling devices played in other states, made by national gambling equipment managers and vendors, according to e-mails obtained by the Star Tribune. Express Games MN, the first e-game vendor approved by the Minnesota Gambling Control Board, reviewed and analyzed the sales estimates that were part of the final stadium legislation.

Botched, they tell us. No, I don't think that's the right term. Botched would assume good faith and maybe ignorance. This was different, though. Ignorance is one thing, willful ignorance is quite another. And that's what we have here. Even David Schultz can see it:

The sales estimates were developed in the rush to find a funding formula for a new football stadium, and records show they were not challenged by the Department of Revenue or other fiscal analysts.

The Vikings lease at the Metrodome had expired, the team was threatening to move, and Gov. Mark Dayton and many legislators were committed to keeping the team in Minnesota.

Those estimates became the foundation for the state Department of Revenue’s projection that the new games would rake in $35 million for stadium funding by the end of this year.

In November, that figure was sliced to $17 million. In February, it was slashed to $1.7 million.

“There was a willful blindness ... driven by pressure politics,” charged David Schultz, a Hamline University political analyst and a professor of nonprofit law.

‘How do I build a model?’

No need, actually. The model has always been the same. Make a promise you can't keep and try to push the ramifications to the "out years." Well, boy howdy, we're at the out years already, before the first spade has entered the ground. The technical term for such modeling is "garbage in, garbage out." And the mounting pile has such an aroma that even Schultz, who has been one of the premier ratifiers of DFL conventional wisdom around these parts for a generation, has to acknowledge what everyone should have acknowledged a year ago:

Schultz believes the sales estimates went unchallenged because of their high stakes.

“This was a deal that was going to happen no matter what,” Schultz said. “The governor wanted a stadium. The money couldn’t come from the general fund. The charities had been asking for electronic games.”

With funding projections for the Vikings stadium now slashed by $33 million for this year alone, future estimates will be more accurate, Barrett and Massman said.

“Now they’re starting to be based on actual activity,” said Massman.

It's pretty much axiomatic -- the lies you tell other people can hurt, but the ones that really cost in the long run are the ones you tell yourself. "Actual activity" in charitable gaming was never going to get the Vaseline Dome funded. At about 10 cents on the dollar, you almost got a better rate of return from Solyndra. But I don't suppose that the lies Mark Dayton told himself will hurt very much, as long as he has Alida Messinger's attack machine available. But the lies we told ourselves -- at least the lies that those of us who wear the purple face paint and the Helga Braids told ourselves -- are going to be hitting our wallets. Because this stadium will go through and we will be paying for it. Count on it.

I suppose it's churlish to remind people that we should have known that the whole thing was crap a long time ago. Okay, I'm a churl.