Arlington Heights rejects proposal to block Bears subsidy, petitioners could try for public vote

Hey look, it’s actual Chicago Bears news! (The SEO goes wild!) The Arlington Heights village board voted unanimously yesterday to reject a proposal to bar public subsidies for any businesses, including for a Bears stadium, though the Koch Brothers–backed Americans for Prosperity still has the option to go back and gather more signatures to resubmit … hey, wait a minute, doesn’t this sound familiar? Scroll back, September 23, here we go:

Arlington Heights officials rejected a petition from the Koch brothers–connected Americans for Prosperity to ban public subsidies for a new Chicago Bears stadium (or any other businesses) on the grounds that it didn’t have enough valid signatures, though the group can always go back and get more and resubmit.

What looks to have happened is Americans for Prosperity went back and gathered another 30 signatures, at which point the village board had to actually vote on the proposal. The board, which is not in the business of tying its own hands, unsurprisingly voted it down. But while it only takes 1% of registered voters (557 people) to get a proposal on the village board’s agenda, with 12% of voters (“nearly 7,000” says the Chicago Tribune, though my math says around 6,684) you can force a public vote, so Americans for Prosperity may give that a shot next.

That’s not an insurmountable threshold, but still it’s always best to categorize the chances of a public ballot measure to block public subsidies as “don’t hold your breath” until proven otherwise. As I discussed for Global Sport Matters back in June, giving public money to sports team owners is generally unpopular, yet such subsidies are only rejected by the public when they can vote on them about half the time — and in the more common case where it’s up to elected officials to vote on them, they’re rejected only 4% of the time.

The reasons are manifold: Politicians are more easily cowed by sports lobbyists with one-track minds than by constituents who will base their votes on far more than just a stadium funding issue; the sports media tends to echo the arguments of team execs, since they’re the ones they’re used to relying on for their daily reporting; the bar for forcing a public vote is high, especially in states not on the West Coast; and even when voters in general do get to vote directly on a proposed subsidy, there’s a whole referendum industry that makes it likely that whoever spends the most on a media campaign will win the public balloting.

And, as I also wrote in that article about a rare rejection of a stadium subsidy, by the city of Dallas for a planned Cowboys stadium in the early 2000s:

In the end, the Cowboys ended up getting a new stadium in nearby Arlington. Taxpayers there contributed $325 million toward its construction — and even voted to approve tax increases to make it happen. Perhaps that’s the ultimate lesson: Sports team owners seeking massive infusions of public cash don’t have to worry too much about the opinions of voters or politicians in any one city so long as they can fall back on their hole card: appealing to those in the next city over. There’s always a Shelbyville.

Could the entire Arlington Heights stadium push end up being a gambit to get Chicago to agree to city-funded upgrades to Soldier Field? Probably not, but that’s the beauty of stadium subsidy shakedowns: You don’t have to decide who you’re trying to grift until you see what the marks do. Having a group funded by two of the richest men in the world opposing your plan helps level the playing field slightly, but even then Bears ownership holds a lot more of the cards than voters at large — which, when you put it that way, is a pretty damning indictment of how American democracy works these days.