The Vikings, legislators, and business leaders have been butting heads about the location of the new Viking’s stadium for months now. The team even threatens to leave Minnesota if they don’t get the stadium they want (which is estimated to cost more than $900 million according to the Star Tribune), in the location they want (Arden Hills).

Should the battle over the new stadium really demand the attention of government officials? While legislators busy themselves debating where a multi-million dollar stadium for a professional football team will go (a team whose players get an average annual wage of $1.1 million according to the NFL Players Association), there are other Minnesotans struggling to feed their family.

According to the website of a local food shelf, Volunteers Enlisted to Assist People (VEAP), an average of 6,200 people visit a VEAP food pantry location each month. Locations include Bloomington, Richfield, Edina, and South Minneapolis. A startling half of VEAP’s clients are children. VEAP isn’t the only food shelf to experience a dramatic increase of visitors in the past few months.

Poverty rates in the suburbs have been on the rise. In both Richfield and Bloomington, there’s a poverty rate slightly above 10% according to the American Community Survey, which was done by the U.S. Census Bureau. The poverty rate in the suburbs has been growing five times faster than that of urban areas, according to the article The Suburbanization of Poverty on The Brooking Institution’s website. The Brookings Institution is nonprofit public policy organization based out of Washington DC.

There are some positives about a new Viking’s Stadium. It would not only be great for fans, but it would also bring commerce to the city it’s built in. But does there really need to be a huge debate about it, when legislators have so many more pressing problems to address?

Instead of focusing on sport stadiums, Minnesota’s government should be concerned about those who won’t get enough to eat.