Photo: David Harvey, Flickr

We crossed a line in the turf this month when the publicly owned place where the Minnesota Vikings (alone, now) play football was renamed “Mall of America Field at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.” Let the re-branding of one of Minnesota’s greatest statesmen begin. 

The Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission, the public body that owns and operates the Humphrey Metrodome by authority of the State of Minnesota, gave its blessing for the Vikings to sell naming rights for various parts of the facility.

The Mall of America gave the Vikings an untold sum to buy naming rights to the field for three years. As the Star Tribune’s Steve Brandt points out in his “Dateline Minneapolis” column:

It’s just another example of the commercialization of the public realm in the Twin Cities. We pay most of the bill to erect stadia and arenas through sales taxes, tickets or state bonds but the sponsors who kick in the relatively few last dollars in the deal get the naming rights. There’s Target Center. Xcel Energy Center. TCF Bank Stadium. And Target Field is on the way.

Two doors down from the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota is a business-school building where every classroom carries a corporate logo. The university’s marching band has twice formed the logo for TCF Bank — at the opening game at the university’s new TCF Bank Stadium, and at the university’s final football game at what is now Mall of America Field at the Hubert H. Humphrey Stadium.

Brandt laments “how far we’ve ebbed in our sense of the distinction between the public and private realms.” But that’s what makes the Mall of America the perfect private purchaser for a public place-name. The mall was the site of a landmark 1999 Minnesota Supreme Court ruling that free-speech rights don’t extend to its public spaces.

Say, speaking of free speech: Here’s how one of Humphrey’s best-loved quotes – from his famous speech to the 1948 Democratic National Convention when he was mayor of Minneapolis — could be rebranded for today:

My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of naming rights, I say to them we are 29 years late. To those who say that this naming-rights program is an infringement on the state’s rights, I say this: The time has arrived for the Mall of America to help the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission to get out of the shadow of state’s rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of naming rights. People — human beings — this will be the issue of the 21st century. People of all kinds — all sorts of people — are looking to the Mall of America for leadership, and they’re looking to the Mall of America for precept and example and shopping.

Image: mnhs.org

Minnesota’s John Kline, the ranking Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee’s subcommittee on health, employment, labor and pensions, said that Canadians are crossing the border to access health care in the United States. “Well, when they come south for health care, medical care, they stop at the Mall of America and we’re glad to have them there as well,” he said.

But, are Canadians flocking to Minnesota — or the United States — for health care? The only quantitative study on the issue was conducted in the late-1990s by the journal Health Affairs.

Several sources of evidence from Canada reinforce the notion that Canadians seeking care in the United States were relatively rare during the study period. Only 90 of 18,000 respondents to the 1996 Canadian National Population Health Survey indicated that they had received health care in the United States during the previous twelve months, and only twenty indicated that they had gone to the United States expressly for the purpose of getting that care.

Kline’s witness was Dr. David Gratzer, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank, the Manhattan Institute. The institute has received funding from health insurance giant Cigna and several members of the health care industry make up the institute’s board of trustees.

Though the Mall of America doesn’t publish raw numbers (PDF), Canadians are one of the top foreign visitors annually.

If ever there was a year in which Buy Nothing Day might really take off, it’s 2008, as the foul economy clouds consumer confidence and impedes the Black Friday shopping impulse. But since a byword of BND, as the international grassroots anti-consumerism movement is known for short, is “Do Nothing,” Buy Nothing Day could achieve wild success today without much notice. Of economic necessity, many people have done their non-shopping early and will carry on with minimal purchases through the holiday season without having ever heard of BND.

In Minnesota, we can expect some BND celebrants to descend on the Mall of America, offering a special Buy Nothing Day credit card-cutting service, for example. Hardy Duluth BNDers were planning to spread the cheerful word of alternatives to consumerism among those in line at Best Buy at 4 a.m. And the St. Louis Park Target may be targeted as well.

Activities can take many shapes — mall-wandering, costumed zombies; street parties; picket-sign protests; empty-shopping-cart conga lines; and “pranks and shenanigans of all kinds,” according to Adbusters, the Vancouver-based organization that helps spread the word on BND. But going on a relaxed family outing would also be in keeping with the spirit of Buy Nothing Day.

According to Paul’s Campaign for Liberty, two billboards in downtown Minneapolis and an ad campaign on the closed-circuit televisions at the Mall of America (MOA) were purchased by the Hancock, Wisc.-based American Liberty Coalition PAC.

Both billboards feature quotes from Paul’s book, The Revolution: A Manifesto. A 40-foot-by-40-foot billboard proclaiming “Truth is treason in an empire of lies” sits atop the Minneapolis landmark 1st Avenue nightclub. Paul’s Rally for the Republic will take place across the street at the Target Center on Sept. 2.

A second billboard, 14 feet by 48 feet, located near the Metrodome reads: “We’re being taxed to blow up bridges in Iraq and rebuild them, while ours are falling down.” The quote references the tragic collapse of the 35W bridge located less than a mile from the billboard’s location.

Additionally, a one-minute-long video featuring a computer generated image of Ron Paul will air once every eight-minutes on 100 televisions throughout the Mall of America.

Now the Bloomington City Council is poised to dive back into those same waters. On Sunday, Bloomington got authority from the state Legislature to impose new sales taxes that would help fund a planned Mall of America expansion. And Monday night the Council adopted new restrictions on public assemblies, in anticipation of Republican National Convention protests that could spill from St. Paul into Bloomington’s streets, hotels and the environs of the mall itself.

Minneapolis attorney Marshall Tanick tells Minnesota Monitor the convergence of new protest regulations and another round of public investment at the Mall of America may reopen issues that seemed settled after the State v. Wicklund opinion. Tanick has written frequently about the specialized field of mall law, most recently in Minnesota Lawyer, where he compared the Wicklund case to a December 2007 California Supreme Court ruling permitting public protests in malls. Along with residents of other states where courts rulings have diverged from Wicklund, Californians, he concluded, enjoy far broader free-speech rights in their shopping malls than Minnesotans.

Steven P. Aggergaard, another local attorney, delved deeply into the question of free speech in publicly funded, privately owned spaces in a 2006 law review article. He thought he saw light shining through the seeming wall the state Supreme Court erected with its Wicklund opinion. He agreed with the trial judge that the state constitution seems to offer protections for speech in places built using public funds – particularly speech directly tied to the political process, as demonstrations during the Republican convention likely would be.

“Nice try,” says Sandra Johnson, the associate city attorney in Bloomington, who prosecuted the case against the fur protesters in the 1990s and drafted the new public assembly ordinance for the city. She finds Aggergaard’s arguments “wishful thinking” and takes pride in the unanimous Wicklund ruling for which she argued. A self-professed free-speech geek whose job obliges her to approach the issue from the side of the regulators, Johnson said that beyond providing for public safety, the proposed ordinance is intended to eliminate opportunities for city staffers processing parade permits to impose arbitrary costs or free-speech limits on particular applicants.

Teresa Nelson worked on a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the protesters in the Wicklund case as a new lawyer with the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union. Now the staff attorney for the renamed American Civil Liberties Union – Minnesota, Nelson found fault with the new Bloomington ordinance as originally proposed and met with Johnson last week to suggest changes. The new version is “greatly improved,” she told Minnesota Monitor before the Bloomington City Council acted Monday, but still vulnerable to constitutional challenge on two points: requiring applicants to indemnify the city against harm, and giving the police chief the discretion to require applicants to obtain insurance for their planned events. Even if city officials have the best, most unbiased intentions, Nelson says, an insurance company could easily require certain groups to pay more for coverage. And some courts haven’t been sympathetic to the kinds of exemptions the ordinance offers for religious, educational and government applicants.

The Bloomington City Council voted 6-1 Monday to approve the revised permit requirements Johnson proposed, but not before making further changes, including several sparked by Council Member Amy Grady. Her vision of a simple, 52-mom, anti-war demonstration hit by high permit fees, insurance requirements and failing those, misdemeanor charges, seemed to turn council opinion. They removed the insurance (though not the indemnification) requirement, dropped the penalty to a petty misdemeanor, and made the protest permit fee $15 instead of $60.

Continued: Click “Read More”Background: The Wicklund case

The 10 or so fur protesters arrested for urging shoppers to boycott Macy’s inside the Mall of America just before noon on May 19, 1996, got more attention than they could have imagined. Hennepin County District Judge Jack Nordby rejected a motion from their attorney, Larry Leventhal, to dismiss trespass charges. But Nordby did so with a 62-page ruling asserting that the Minnesota Constitution protected their right to protest in a public place that had received significant public funding.

His unusual treatise on Minnesota’s higher standard of protection for free speech prompted an unusual pre-trial appeal from the prosecution and ultimately resulted in the unanimous ruling by the state Supreme Court that rejected Nordby’s argument and returned the case to his court. In his verdict at the trial shortly thereafter, Nordby lambasted the Supreme Court, and nine years later the high court’s slap still burns him. “It was a terrible, dishonest opinion that misrepresented my argument and the state constitution,” Nordby said Sunday in an interview. Leventhal, who defended the 1990s mall protesters pro bono, likewise told the Minnesota Monitor he found the Wicklund opinion “very disappointing” because it “circumvents the rights of free speech. Citizens should be able to share in the benefits if governments erect alternative Main Street areas” — such as the Mall of America.

Leventhal’s arguments lost in the state Supreme Court — resoundingly — and protesting without private permission inside the Mall of America remains illegal. But two stops up the Hiawatha Light Rail Transit Line from the mall, another privately owned public square has sprung up since the Wicklund case: a development called Bloomington Central Station. Government provided $3.5 million of the $4 million that went into the centerpiece of the 50-acre mixed-use development: a 1.9-acre, privately owned and operated plaza. Bloomington retained an easement to use the plaza as a public park. Indeed, the city’s Web site describes Bloomington Central Station Park, which opened last June, as “a public park featuring seating areas, garden rooms, water walls and fountains, paved and lighted walkways, and public art,” and Bloomington’s park and recreation department is sponsoring a public concert series there this summer. Earlier planning documents blurred the public and private to pitch the project promising a “central open plaza/park that democratically allows tenants to leverage this special asset” with “a ‘living street’ similar to a plaza or town square.” Both attorneys — Bloomington’s Nelson and ACLU-MN’s Johnson — found the prospect of applications for public assemblies there intriguing from a free-speech standpoint.

With all the legal and linguistic line-blurring it’s not surprising that, as urban expert Judith Martin observes, most Americans are confused about what is public space and what is not, and where their free-speech rights seem to apply. (Martin, who chairs the urban studies department at the University of Minnesota and long served as president of the Minneapolis City Planning Commission, testified as an expert witness in the Wicklund case.) The trend among governments and developers, Martin told the Minnesota Monitor, is “to reduce the possible spaces where that kind of perceived freedom is actual freedom.”
]]> http://minnesotaindependent.com/3965/public-funds-private-mall-expansion-rncs-approach-may-re-open-free-speech-question-at-moa/feed 0 http://minnesotaindependent.com/3902/rnc-fashion-show-will-john-mccain-be-wearing-zubaz-at-the-convention http://minnesotaindependent.com/3902/rnc-fashion-show-will-john-mccain-be-wearing-zubaz-at-the-convention#comments Tue, 13 May 2008 20:28:15 +0000 Paul Demko http://www.minnesotaindependent.com.php5-9.websitetestlink.com/?p=3902 Official merchandise for the Republican National Convention was unveiled at the Mall of America earlier this morning. Roughly 50 folks gathered in the mall rotunda to witness the runway fashion show. “The excitement in the room is palpable,” noted one TV cameraman as we waited for the show to begin.

RNC president Maria Cino noted that the convention will kick off in 100 days and expressed her adoration for the Twin Cities. “A big part of what we love is right here,” she noted, “the Mall of America.”

Based on today’s fashion show, the RNC believes delegates also love cheesy T-shirts (”when in Minnesota fly Air Force One”), goofy hats — and Zubaz. Bloomington Mayor Gene Winstead, who looks uncannily like Rudy Guiliani, seemed particularly keen on the latter fashion accessory. Here’s a slideshow of the event:

Created with flickrSLiDR.

  * A new hockey arena/event center at Bemidji State University (state’s share).
  * Land for a new, 2,500-acre state park at Lake Vermillion.
  * Early completion of the new I-35W freeway bridge, moving the bridge’s ceremonial finishing touches from Christmas to within a news cycle or two of the closing gavel at the Republican National Convention.