Sand in the Vaseline Dome

You know how sometimes the other team throws a Hail Mary pass and it works? This probably won't be it:

A last-minute legal challenge to Monday’s planned sale of bonds for the new Minnesota Vikings stadium could keep the field from opening in 2016.

At a hastily called news conference on Sunday, state officials said the sale of $468 million of stadium bonds had been unexpectedly halted.

Stadium leaders hope the Minnesota Supreme Court will rule quickly on issues raised in a Friday afternoon filing with the court, but said even a two-week delay in the bond sale could add a year to the stadium’s ambitious construction schedule.

“Major problems will result from any significant delay,” Michele Kelm-Helgen, chairwoman of the Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority, said Sunday in a conference call that also included state Management and Budget Commissioner Jim Schowalter. The authority will own and operate the $1 billion stadium slated to open in July 2016 on the Metrodome site.

Wait, I thought the stadium was going to be less than $1 billion. Now it can be told. A few observations:

• The cause of action for this suit, that Minneapolis voters didn't get a chance to vote on the stadium, was going to get adjudicated eventually. The end run that the politicians used to bypass an election was always going to be problematic and at this point the plaintiffs might have standing to sue, although I'm certain that the issue of whether they actually do have standing will be key to the Sports Facilities Authority's response to the suit. 
• Whether the plaintiffs have political support is another matter. One of the named plaintiffs in the case is Douglas Mann, who was part of the clown car of mayoral candidates last time, garnering 779 "first-choice" votes in the clown car ranked-choice voting system, which was marginally more votes than perennial candidate Ole Savior brought home. And this is the problem that stadium foes have had all along; while there were many foes, their voices were quite diffuse. At this point, with the Dome already well into demolition, the suit won't get a lot of support.
• Having said that, all of this was easy to predict. How it gets adjudicated will be interesting, but if you want a preview, take a look at this fascinating article from Powerline's John Hinderaker, who was involved in the legal argumentation for funding the Metrodome itself. If you want to know how (and more importantly, why) legal opinions get written, you'll learn a lot.

Meanwhile, not surprisingly, the Star Tribune article buries the lede:

Sen. Sean Nienow, R-Cambridge, a stadium foe, said that at a December finance committee meeting senators learned taxes and other dedicated revenues for the stadium were coming in under projection. He said he asked Schowalter about the shortfall and was told that borrowing funds was a possible interim alternative.

“Now we are seeing potential impact of that,” Nienow said. “If this gets delayed, that could create a problem.”

Emphasis mine. Huh, really? I thought the state was just swimming in money and that there were giant surpluses piling up higher than the Minneapolis skyline. Maybe that's a good thing, because it's quite possible that taxpayers are going to be on the hook for a lot more of this stadium than anyone was willing to admit.