It’s not that often that one news story gets a place of pride ahead of the Friday morning bullet points, but I’d say this one qualifies: Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has said that before he’ll consider granting the Chicago Bears owners tax breaks on their proposed Arlington Heights stadium, he wants them to pay off the remaining $534 million debt on Soldier Field first:
“We need the Bears to pay off what’s owed on the existing stadium. That’s going to be a really important feature of whatever happens.”…
The governor noted that the state works with a lot of private businesses on property tax incentives, but when it comes to the Bears, “if they want a … bill or some other help, we’re going to make that a pre-requisite.”
On the one hand, this is kind of a dumb number to choose: As we’ve covered here before in detail, remaining stadium debt is just bookkeeping, and has more to do with how a city chose to finance a project than with the actual cost to taxpayers. On the other: Sure, hell yeah, if Bears execs are going to demand a pile of future tax breaks, come right back at them with a demand for cash up front. This is what hardball negotiations look like when you have leverage, and it’s nice to see an elected official get serious with the haggling, even if you can quibble over the details.
If the Bears owners don’t want tax breaks, noted Pritzker, they’re welcome to move wherever they like. No reply yet from team execs, but you have to imagine they’re trying to count votes to figure out how to get a Pritzker-proof majority in the state legislature, which looks like an uphill battle. Or they could, you know, build their new stadium without any public assistance at all, though the last time that option was presented to them they started shopping around for other sites in or new Chicago where they might get somebody else to help pay the bill, we could yet see this again.
Okay, enough about the Bears, let’s move on to the speed round:
- After saying last month that his new stadium plan would require “city and state support for infrastructure and programmatic build out,” Detroit City F.C. owner Sean Mann has now put a price tag on that support: $88 million in property tax breaks toward a $193 million total project cost. (Mann previously said the stadium would pay full property taxes, but apparently had his fingers crossed behind his back at the time.) That’s $88 million for a team in the second-tier USL Championship, which is, I’m not going to say a record because that would take a lot of research to confirm on a busy morning, but I think we can all agree “a lot.”
- How’s development around Worcester’s new Red Sox minor-league baseball stadium going, seven years after Worcester-based economist Victor Matheson warned that new housing could end up just cannibalizing development that would have happened anyway? Even worse than that, it turns out, as much of the land around the stadium remains undeveloped, and since tax revenues from that land were supposed to be siphoned off to pay off the stadium, now Worcester is having to dip into its general fund to cover those costs instead. Somebody please check in with the Worcester Chamber of Commerce to see if they still think that their project will be different.
- Prospective Orlando MLB expansion team co-owner Rick Workman has bailed to become a minority owner of the Tampa Bay Rays, leading prospective co-owner John Morgan to bail as well, saying: “The fix is in. What I believe will now happen is this group will seek a sweetheart deal in Tampa, while stringing the prospects of Orlando as a bargaining chip. Get lots of free land and entitlements and make a real estate profit on the surrounding land at the taxpayers’ expense.” That was always the most likely scenario, especially since it seems like MLB expansion is going to put off until next decade sometime, but it’s bracing to hear a wannabe owner say the quiet part loud.
- The Denver Post editorial board says the Broncos owners’ plans for a new stadium at Burnham Yard is “an announcement that all of Colorado can celebrate,” before noting several paragraphs later that the team hasn’t said if it will pay fair market value for state-owned land, siphon off stadium property or sales taxes, or receive any other tax subsidies. Editorial writing sounds real easy, no editors or fact-checkers telling you you’re not making any sense, just say whatever you feel like and hit publish, that’s the life!
My prediction is the $500M is a non-starter for the Bears and the PILOT legislation will die on the vine (at least this fall).
What I’m unclear on is why PILOT legislation is ultimately necessary. Why can’t the Bears pursue a more “straightforward” TIF deal with the Village of Arlington Heights and drop the PILOT deal?
It’s been like 22 years, how is there still more than half a billion in debt left on the Soldier Field reno?
I mean, accounting tricks, fine, yadda yadda. But, whuck?
“We used very expensive financing by not having enough money to pay the principal.”
https://www.nbcchicago.com/investigations/taxpayers-still-owe-640m-on-2002-soldier-field-renovation/2981068/
The debt kept getting refinanced to make the annual expenses lower. Same principle as taking a 30 year mortgage, making 3 years of payments, then refinancing to another 30 year loan. Often referred to as “scoop and toss” and is used regularly in Chicago.
https://news.wttw.com/2020/10/22/chicago-return-scoop-and-toss-borrowing-chief-financial-officer-acknowledges
Ahhhhh, now it makes sense. They went to Payday Loans! Thanks, all.
The same reason Illinois unfunded pension debt is in the hundreds of billions, Cook County has $30 billion in debt, and I haven’t gotten to the idiotic Chicago parking meter deal. Illinois is in no position to give da Bears billions in tax breaks. Nearly 50 years of gross financial mismanagement has left Illinois tetering on the brink.
“it’s a fine line between stupid and clever”
Nice to see that John Morgan, an Orlando lifer who decided that being a big fish in a small pond wasn’t nearly enough to sate his ego and power, is finally learning how things tend to go for true big league operations. I assumed he would have learned after the deVos delegation took the infamous trip to Kansas City during the Magic’s arena situation, but better late than never.
To the extent that there’s a “fix” involved with the Rays and the imagined tug of war between Tampa Bay and Orlando, it was obvious to everyone but Morgan and co that they were going to be used as leverage. These guys had the option of NOT playing that game. They went ahead anyway because their Napoleon complex wouldn’t allow them to walk away without a fight.
This isn’t a “Major League” city anyway — and considering that we don’t have a *minor league* baseball team here (making it by far the largest US metro area in town without one), we’re technically not even a minor league city, either.
Morgan’s pond is hardly small. His firm is the largest in the country with offices pretty much everywhere.
His firm is indeed the largest in the country now, which is a far cry from when it little to no presence outside of Orlando, and when he had two other Orlando lawyers as his partners, rather than his own wife (those of us who’ve lived here long enough will remember when it was called Morgan Colling & Gilbert)
John Morgan was one of the few people who successfully expanded his empire from Orlando — which *is* still a small pond compared to the bigger, richer, older, more relevant cities in the Southeast — to the rest of the United States. But he is far more of an exception than the rule. The people behind the Dreamers “plan” will soon learn that about themselves. They can still do it the easy way, if they can just put their egos aside.
The formerly Reno based National Championship Air Races got $28 million out of the state of New Mexico to move to Roswell:
https://www.kob.com/news/top-news/4-investigates-new-mexicos-air-race-gamble/
I suppose one could argue that the DOT money went towards much needed airport renovations. But as the attached TV coverage makes clear, the airport there is mainly a storage yard a la Mojave or Davis-Monthan AFB, and the vast majority of the annual “UFO Fest” attendees are first-timers and probably one-timers. So it’s not like there are stark-raving hordes of UFO freaks clambering out of 787s to get to eastern New Mexico. At the very least, I guess, let’s hope the team from Zeta Reticuli doesn’t show up and sweep the field.
Roswell??? I go to Albuquerque all the time, love the Balloon Fiesta, but have never seen a reason to continue East to anywhere near Roswell. Maybe if they moved it to Los Lunas or the West Mesa, but Roswell, aka the middle of nowhere???
The air races need to be in the middle of nowhere due to the frequent crashes
Orlando prospective owners found out the hard way the way then Rockets Les Alexander found out when trying to get the Oilers to relocate to Houston, this ultimately wound up salting such a bad wound, he raised the rent for the AHL Aeros so much that they relocated to Des Moines Iowa where they remain to this day (Wild ownership still owns the trademark to the Houston Aeros).