Illinois school district: Are the Bears going to build new schools for everyone who’ll move to their stadium district, hmm?

One of the big hidden costs of everything-but-the-kitchen-sink stadium projects with big multiuse developments attached is that proponents generally count all the new benefits of development — lookit all the new taxes that will roll in! — without counting the new costs — lookit all the schools and police and fire services we’ll have to provide! This was one of the main arguments of Judith Grant Long in her book on how sports venues cost more than they claim to, and has been a point of contention in many a stadium deal since.

So it’s nice to see a mammoth development proposal — in this case the Chicago Bears‘ owners’ plan for Arlington Heights — questioned by the local governing body that could be left holding the bag — in this case the school district that would have to find seats for a flood of new students who would arrive once the Bears constructed a new $5 billion district:

Palatine School District 15 Superintendent Laurie Heinz said the team or the village should chip in to help the school district respond to the increased student population and its needs anticipated as a result of the redevelopment.

“We do not see any reason why the Chicago Bears and/or the Village of Arlington Heights cannot assist the District with a new campus or additions to existing campuses occasioned by the new Chicago Bears development,” she said.

District 15 is currently the second-largest elementary district in Illinois, reports the Pioneer Press, with around 11,500 students. Heinz suggested in a recently unearthed letters this summer to village leadership that the Bears should be required to pay an “impact fee” to cover the cost of building and operating new schools, and that Arlington Heights reject any plan to establish a tax increment financing district to kick back new property taxes to the Bears, since “locking billions of dollars of [equalized assessed value] in a TIF district for 23 years would be a real concern for our District.”

It sure would, and props to Heinz for pointing it out. But then, not getting billions of dollars in future property tax kickbacks could be a sticking point for the Bears owners, who have already expressed a desire for “property tax certainty,” which definitely sounds like “put a cap on our property taxes, ideally at whatever the current land that’s just a big racetrack and nothing else is paying.”

The Pioneer Press didn’t shed any light on Arlington Heights’ response to Heinz’s letters: Village Manager Randy Recklaus emailed a statement to the paper that “the Village has not received any requests for financial assistance from the Chicago Bears at this time, nor has the Village agreed to provide any.” As the groundwork for those discussions is laid, though, it’s important to keep in mind all the public benefits and costs of the stadium project, not just the ones that team execs want to include — so here’s hoping that Heinz and her warnings of siphoning off billions of dollars of TIF money stay on the agenda.

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2 comments on “Illinois school district: Are the Bears going to build new schools for everyone who’ll move to their stadium district, hmm?

  1. you can look at property taxes as an impact fee, and teams have already said they won’t pay it; in fact they want other taxes, e.g., sales, kicked back to them to help pay off what they built. The only way to get these very profitable businesses to pay what they should is to not give in, let the Bills go to Greensboro. Heck, it’s usually a bluff, the Yankees are not in Jersey, the Patriots are not in Hartford.

  2. I have seen this happen in communities without any professional sports franchises as well. There’s a sort of collective blindness that happens in many civil servants and officials when “growth” is mentioned.

    On a number of occasions I’ve seen officials positively salivating over the prospect of a new subdivision with all those new homes (and NEW TAXES!!!), to the extent they are willing to offer deep discounts on land (mainly to developers, not individual home or business owners) and development fees to “make it happen”.

    They tend to view the new development (be it 1% or 10% of the total size of the community) as manna from heaven… all these new taxes and no need for increased expenditure… (and they say this at the same time they say that property taxes are just the incremental cost of providing government services to the individual properties covered by the levy).

    Then, a couple of years later, they notice that their water and sewer mains feeding the new district are running at or over capacity, their street cleaning is way over (unadjusted) budget, and schools and hospitals are full or overflowing. And where will the money come from to fix these deficiencies???

    It absolutely happens with sports teams. It also happens for other reasons… People just generally see visions of sugar plums, even when the reality is both more stark and more obvious.

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