Day, who served as Senate Minority leader from 1997 to 2007, tells the Strib that racinos could help fund a new stadium, bringing in $125 million a year.

According to the Savage Pacer, he sees such racetrack/casinos as an answer to the state’s budget problems as well.

“Racinos will bring thousands of jobs and $250 million a biennium in revenue to our state,” he said. “The money could be used for programs such as education, transportation, health care or to fund a stadium. With the recent news of a $1.2 billion budget shortfall, it’s clear we need racino now.”

Common Cause Minnesota reacted quickly with a statement, noting that Day’s immediate registration as a lobbyist suggests the state should implement a two-year waiting period before departing legislators register as lobbyists. Day is the second Minnesota legislator in as many years to leave office for such a reason; in June 2008, DFL Sen. Dan Larson stepped down to join a law and lobbying firm in Minneapolis.

“When a legislator leaves office to become a lobbyists it only further erodes the public’s trust in their elected officials,” said Mike Dean, Common Cause Minnesota’s executive director. “The public is growing suspicious of elected officials who may use his or her government position to line up a future job by currying favor with special interests. The mere perception of impropriety underlying this type of behavior is detrimental to the public’s faith in government.”

Day’s resignation takes effect on Jan. 8.

Update: Sen. John Marty, who authored the Senate’s “Revolving Door” legislation, issued a statement Tuesday. “Most states recognize this conflict of interest and its potential to further erode public trust, and have already shut the revolving door,” the Roseville DFLer said. “It is time for Minnesota to do the same.”

The poll of 500 respondents, conducted Wednesday, found 49 percent wanted a combination of tax increases and budget cuts, while only 41 percent wanted just budget cuts and 4 percent only tax increases. Interestingly, 48 percent of Republicans approved of the combined strategy.

A majority, 53 percent, said that the wealthy should shoulder the burden, and only 12 percent thought there should be lower taxes on the wealthy.

Poll respondents overwhelmingly rejected a sales tax on food and clothing (81 percent) and also rejected public funding for a Vikings stadium (75 percent).

But in the first day of hearings over a temporary injunction that could keep Ridder and other former PiPress executives from working at the Strib for a year or more, the source of that confidence might seem nebulous.

In a videotaped deposition aired in court Monday, Ridder called the data he took on Pioneer Press revenues, expenses, personnel and advertisers “sensitive information.” He admitted to removing noncompete documents signed by himself and other executives he aimed to hire at the Strib, saying, “I was concerned that those documents could be used to slow my progress on to the Star Tribune.”

And witnesses he might have expected to be friendly offered less than favorable testimony. Art Brisbane, a former vice president at Knight Ridder testified — contrary to Ridder’s claim — that he didn’t recall verbally releasing Ridder from his noncompete agreement. Brisbane said such a move would’ve been a serious (and memorable) decision, and added that he recalled other conversations about Ridder’s desire to challenge noncompete clauses in the contracts of others, but not Ridder.

OhSang Kwan, a partner at Avista Capital Partners, testified that Ridder assured him his noncompete agreement had been repealed — apparently a fib to his new bosses. And James Finkelstein, another Avista partner, said Ridder shouldn’t have taken the information: “It was clearly a mistake.”Adding to Ridder’s woes, a computer expert hired to analyze computers accessed by Ridder found that around 3,300 files were transferred from Ridder’s Pioneer Press laptop to a portable USB drive on March 1 and 2; on March 6 — the day after Ridder’s hire — those files were moved to Ridder’s Star Tribune laptop. These files, which took up around 30 terabytes of information, contained “vital contractual information for 3,890 separate customers,” said former Pioneer Press writer Brian Lambert, who was in the courtroom.

Ridder took the stand in his own defense at noon today. In his opening statement, he said, “I talk to a lot of people in this community, and I think most of them know what this is all about. They see this as a competitive battle, an effort to vilify someone for competitive advantage.”

Still, prospects for a Ridder win seem slight — or at least not aligned with Ridder’s initial confidence. Especially since many legal experts commenting in past news articles have already questioned  his chances. In April, Dennis Farley of the Intelligence Group, a company that investigates corporate espionage, said the wholesale copying of competitor’s files is a no-no. “For somebody to be that brazen and to leave with his whole laptop, and a competitor to feel that it’s within the bounds of fair play to acquire all that information about their competitor really surprises me,” he told the AP.

As Minnesota Lawyer reported last month, “noncompetes have teeth in Minnesota.” Courts in the state have a national reputation for enforcing such agreements, the publication said:

Not only do noncompete agreements have relatively more muscle in Minnesota than in other states, but companies here can even impose them retroactively in some cases, thanks to the state’s Uniform Trade Secret Act, which provides that confidential business information is protectable as long as the information can be shown to be classified as a trade secret.

And Minneapolis employment attorney Lee Watson made a prediction in an April AP story: “Mr. Ridder, being where he is in the company hierarchy, it’s probably going to be enforced.”

If today’s hearing yields the kind of information yesterday’s did, the case might have a swift conclusion. Lambert, now writing for The Rake, recalls this exchange yesterday:

During a break midway through the proceedings, I stopped Dean Singleton in the hallway and asked, “Have these guys [referring to Avista] offered to settle this thing? Because based on what I’ve just seen I’d be astonished if they haven’t.”

  Singleton, who walks with a cane, pivoted and looked at me. “I can’t say anything about that. But if you’re astonished you’d be right.”
 

Last month Publisher/CEO Par Ridder went to a meeting of Strib circulation executives in a conference room named for Charles A. Freeman, one of the best-loved employees the newspaper ever had.  The glass-walled room was named in Freeman’s honor in 1991 after the company’s circulation/distribution manager collapsed in his office and died of a stroke at age 60.

So here you have Par Ridder, who demonstrated his sense of integrity by jumping from the Pioneer Press to the Star Tribune under questionable circumstances, and whose next court date is June 25, walking into a room that has a memorial to Chuck Freeman etched into an eye-level glass panel on the door.  The tribute is titled “A MAN OF UNQUESTIONED INTEGRITY.”

So what is Par Ridder response to having to confront the ghosts of past Strib executives and a door with “A MAN OF UNQUESTIONED INTEGRITY” etched in the glass?

Not a problem:  Par sells 4 square blocks of Strib land to Zygi Wilf.  The Charles A. Freeman conference room is not in the newspaper’s main building at 425 Portland Av.; it’s across the skyway in the Freeman Building, named for another former executive, Gale Freeman.  Wilf will demolish the building, so the wrecking ball will obliterate the Charles A. Freeman conference room and its etched-glass door, an inconvenient reminder of a time when integrity was a core value at the Star Tribune.