Vikings stadium funding bust: Electronic pulltabs

Electronic pull-tabs
Rep. Melissa Hortman, DFL-Brooklyn Park, looked over an electronic pull-tab game during a House Commerce committee meeting Jan. 16, 2013, studying how the games are measuring up to financial expectations in the Vikings stadium financing plan.
MPR photo/Tim Nelson

A year after Minnesota banked on electronic pulltabs to help fund the state's new Vikings stadium, "revenue is down nearly 100 percent from projections," reports MPR News.

Former Republican State Sen. Amy Koch told MPR News' Tim Nelson what went wrong:

First was the expectation that 2,500 bars would install more than 15,000 games as fast as they could plug them in. The latest count has about 300 bars and only about 1,300 games.

"The bars, it's incredibly expensive to put them in," Koch said. "I'm not a big bar. There are smaller bars, yet. There's no way they're going to be able to afford to buy equipment and take six, eight months to pay off your investment and then see maybe a couple hundred bucks a month. It's not worth the trouble."

Meanwhile, she says many customers still prefer paper pulltabs.

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