Stadium Blog Post

Booting the TCF deal would send an ill-timed message.

Star Tribune
March 19, 2006

Deny the University of Minnesota the right to put a corporate donor's name on a new stadium, as some legislators want to do, and Gophers football likely won't return to campus anytime soon.
And that will be only part of the damage the Legislature will have done to the institution on which Minnesota pins so much of its hope for the future. The Legislature should not take this fundraising tool out of the university's hands.

Hanging a corporate name like "TCF Bank" on a stadium or other campus buildings understandably irritates some of the Minnesotans who love the university as their own. But those same Minnesotans want their university to thrive -- and no higher educational institution can do so, in today's tax-averse political climate, without the ability to raise substantial sums from the private sector.

At the university, the imperative to find corporate partners to build new facilities has been a matter of state policy since 1992. The university is on the hook to finance one-third of the cost of new campus buildings with resources other than state-issued bonds.

That policy, ironically, originated with Senate DFLers. Now it's a senior Senate DFLer, Tax Committee chair Larry Pogemiller of Minneapolis, whose bill would strip away naming rights from the university's $35 million marketing contract with TCF Financial Corp. It also would toss out the university's plan to raise student fees $50 a semester to cover $53 million of the proposed stadium's $249 million cost.

Even if the Legislature agreed to fill the holes Pogemiller's bill would blow in the university's stadium financing plan -- and that's a big if -- rejecting the TCF deal would send an ill-timed, ill-advised message to potential donors. Minnesota's chance to develop a new biosciences industry hinges on the university's ability to quickly ramp up its bio-agri-medical research enterprise in the next 10 years. That won't happen unless the university can amass large corporate donations to supplement state bonding dollars.

An effort to privately raise $125 million for medical research at the university is in its early stages. If the Legislature tells a major funder that, despite its contractual arrangement with the university, it cannot have its name on a new stadium, potential donors to the medical drive will take note of how Minnesota treats the university's friends. Now would be a terrible time for the Legislature to give any of those friends the boot.