Messages from the Council Chair

Hosting a great, safe Super Bowl

January 2018

For the next 10 days we’re going to hear a lot about the Super Bowl.

Council Chair Alene TchourumoffThis is an opportunity for the Twin Cities metro area to shine, a new stadium in a beautiful city, great music, and an ice palace in Saint Paul. But it’s important to remember that all this excitement is built on a firm foundation that has been laid by years of hard work and planning by the Met Council.

The Super Bowl has become a much larger spectacle than it was the last time the Twin Cities hosted the championship in 1992. The game and the special events in the week leading up to the big event will attract 1 million visitors to downtown Minneapolis. The staff at Metro Transit has put in thousands of hours of planning. Our drivers, dispatchers and staff who will be serving as transit ambassadors will assume hundreds of hours of extra shifts over the next two weeks.

Our region has planned for a transportation system that can easily accommodate those visitors, while at the same time taking care of the day-to-day needs of our regular riders who use transit to get to work and school every day.

The Met Council has also worked with Homeland Security and law enforcement to ensure that we will have a safe Super Bowl. We’ve been through our system to make sure that security is tight in the secured zone around the U.S. Bank Stadium and that our infrastructure is protected.

I’m proud of the tireless effort Metro Transit and Met Council staff have put into making sure that we host a great Super Bowl. Even though the Vikings didn’t make it to the big game this year, the Twin Cities region will still come out a winner on Super Bowl Sunday.

Alene Tchourumoff