LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Carl Pohlad: Minnesota Twins
built 777 days ago
This isn’t about Carl Pohlad or a new stadium, it’s about the Minnesota Twins and outdoor baseball and future summers and generations and pennant races. It’s about 162 games a year going out to millions of people all over the region. It’s about the seventh inning stretch and rain delays and extra innings and the Hot Stove league. Knot hole games and Hamm’s beer and Schweigert hot dogs and Harmon Killebrew. Rod Carew. Tony O. Herb Carneal.
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The city in question here is Minneapolis, where the Twins' owner, bank tycoon Carl Pohlad, has spent nearly a decade angling for public money to replace the unloved Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. (The Twins' ballpark was memorably described by Billy Martin: "I can't believe they named someone like Hubert Humphrey after such a dump.") The latest idea, raising $353 million via a 0.15% sales-tax hike for Hennepin County, where Minneapolis is located, is just the latest in a series of plans, proposals, and crazy schemes put forth over the years to fund a new Twins stadium with public money. In fact, it's not even particularly new - a similar sales-tax hike was proposed by then-Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton in 1999.
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Carl Pohlad is again listed this year as chairman of Twins Sports Inc. and owner of the Twins, and Jerry Bell again is Twins Sports Inc. president. Bell is working full-time on the new Twins stadium.
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“In principle,” says Republican Speaker of the House Steve Sviggum, “it should not make a difference whether Carl Pohlad owns the Twins, or Steve Perry, or Steve Sviggum. The issue remains the same: whether there should be subsidies, what kind of user fees might be applied. But there’s a perception of Mr. Pohlad right now that’s very negative—whether it’s a matter of his seeming willingness to offer up the Twins for contraction, or his offer four years ago of a grant that turned out to be a loan, or the North Carolina situation. All in all, it’s put a dark cloud over public support and legislative action on a stadium as long as Mr. Pohlad is the owner.”
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Pohlad’s Twins, who currently play in the cavernous 55,000-seat Hubert H. Humphrey “Hefty Bag” Metrodome, are pushing for a new publicly funded ballpark. Twins fans... who would rather see Johan Santana in a Yankees cap than put any more money than they have to in Pohlad’s coffers, are still reluctant.
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The real question, of course, is this: How can Carl Pohlad continue to deprive Twins fans of the beauty of outdoor baseball? How can the owner of the Twins continue to ignore the obvious economic disadvantage of playing in the Metrodome? How can he continue to put the franchise in jeopardy by refusing to upgrade his facility?
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