Albert Einstein said “anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”  In the wake of reports that new e-gambling revenue is proving to be insufficient to fund the new Vikings stadium, Governor Mark Dayton and other stadium proponents recently have been heard mumbling similar sentiments.

With any mistake, and this one was a doozy, the important thing is to learn the correct lesson to carry into the future.  This is how that debate currently is playing out in Minnesota:

 What is the lesson(s) State leaders should learn from this revenue shortfall episode?

A. Never rely on private sector vendor input for fiscal note estimates.
B.  Never rely on huckster billionaire owner-endorsed revenue sources.
C.  Never believe anything that any lying stadium supporter says.
D.  Be patient, the revenue will be there eventually.

Over the last few weeks, all of these answers have been aggressively pushed in the news media, legislative arena and blogosphere.   Stadium opponents tend to go with one or more of the first three answers, while stadium supporters mostly go with answer D.

As Minnesotans try to identify the correct lesson to guide future decisionmaking, I’d argue for the addition of another option:

E.  If you really need a definite amount of revenue right away, don’t choose a never-before used revenue source.

Let’s be honest:  There is a very good reason why the e-gambling vendor, the Wilfs, the Governor and legislative stadium supporters were all fantastically wrong about the amount of revenue e-gambling could raise in the short-run:  There was no consumer demand history to guide estimates.  Zero. Zilch. Nada.

Nobody could possibly know if these games would be a boom or a bust, because the games had never been put in front of consumbers elsewhere.  They didn’t even exist yet.

Because of that lack of consumer demand history, the fiscal note for the Vikings Stadium bill was not an estimate.  Estimates are based on real world data and observations.  The fiscal note was not even a hybrid “guesstimate.”  It was, out of necessity, a flat-out guess.

Now, you may believe that the guessing that happened during the 2012 legislative session was ignorant, misleading, naïve, or utopian.  But the core problem here is that leaders never should have chosen a revenue source that necessitated 100% data-free guesswork.

If we learn that lesson from this historical episode, we will be a wiser people than if we delude ourselves that this was all some vast Wilf/Dayton/vendor/Legislature conspiracy.

I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy.  But in this case, the conspiracy theories make absolutely no sense.  After all, why would Wilf, Dayton and a bipartisan group of legislators intentionally choose a revenue source that they knew would be inadequate to pay for something that they really, really wanted to build as soon as possible?  Why would they intentionally do something that they knew would force them to return, hat in hand, to a legislative arena that has proven for over a decade to be a hell-scape for stadium supporters?

No, there was no conspiracy here.  The foundational problem was that leaders picked a revenue tool that was a) voluntary and b) had no track record, and these two things made a reliable fiscal note impossible, for a project where we really needed a reliable fiscal note.

That is the genesis of this mess, not conspiratorial leaders.

– Loveland

Note:  This post was  featured in Politics in Minnesota’s Best of the Blogs.