MnIndy file photo

The University of Minnesota is the latest public body to make a mess with multiple beverage-marketing deals. The U of M has canceled a contract with Red Bull because the energy-drink company’s on-campus ads conflicted with the university’s separate, exclusive contract with Coke. Last year it was the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board that couldn’t keep its dealings with the same two drinks straight.

Selling corporations exclusive access to citizen-consumers, while lucrative, creates perennial problems for public institutions.

The U of M had to back out of another deal last year, with Victoria’s Secret, after the lingerie retailer’s taste in Gopher-branded attire didn’t measure up to the university’s “image” and “values.”

Last week, the university’s marching band director denied the band had formed the TCF Bank corporate logo at the university’s new TCF Bank Stadium, so named under a $35 million contract with the bank. Rather, he said, when the student-musicians formed the letters “TCF” on the field during the opening game of the football season, they were spelling out the name of the building.

Once the line is crossed, public bodies cheerfully go above and beyond the obligations they create for themselves to corporate sponsors.

This month, the public Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission’s decision to let the Minnesota Vikings sell naming rights to various parts of the Metrodome bore fruit, as the field and several gates got new corporate names such as “Mall of America Field at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.”

Public agencies doing double-deals with beverage multinationals and slapping corporate logos on publicly funded educational facilities is another, but the Minneapolis park board took the trend one step further in the summer of 2008, when it sold Red Bull a permit to install huge cubes marketing its product — in the guise of a photography exhibit — on the bike lanes that run down the middle of the historic Stone Arch Bridge. Several bike-pedestrian crashes ensued.

The Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy, was the model for the Washington Avenue Bridge. Photo: AP via The Guardian

The 14th-century Italian bridge that inspired it has withstood the ravages of time, World War II and a 1966 flood, but the 42-year-old Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis might not be strong enough to hold up pedestrians, Hennepin County officials decided last week.

That’s after engineers at URS Corp. started work on readying the Washington Avenue Bridge to carry trains running along the planned Central Corridor line between Minneapolis and St. Paul. It’s widely expected that the bridge will need beefing up to support new rail traffic, but the necessity for remedial work to support existing pedestrian and bicycle traffic came as a surprise.

The county restricted walking and biking to the sheltered structure that runs down the center of the bridge’s upper level — only days before the start of the University of Minnesota’s fall semester, as crowds of students begin to cross the bridge on foot or bike to travel between the university’s East Bank and West Bank Minneapolis campuses.

Motor vehicle traffic on the bridge’s lower level wasn’t affected.

The move follows a string of bridge failures and closings in Minnesota over the past year. Most recently, bike and pedestrian traffic was forced to blend atop the Stone Arch Bridge in Minneapolis when the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board let the Red Bull energy drink company block the bike lanes along the bridge’s middle portion with 25 eight-foot cubes for most of July as part of a marketing event, with several minor injuries reported due to collisions.

If URS has a familiar ring, it may be because the firm conducted inspections of the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River for the Minnesota Department of Transportation. Preliminary results of reviews of the I-35W bridge collapse have revealed flaws not caught by those reviews, though the firm initially pressed MnDOT to approve extensive repair work.

Work to make the Washington Avenue Bridge strong enough to support people walking or riding bikes along its edges will continue well into next year. Temporary bike lanes under the overhanging eaves of the bridge’s upper-level sheltered walkway are now under construction.