Crain’s Chicago has another article quoting Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker as saying the ball is in the Chicago Bears owners’ court as far as coming up with a demand for an Illinois stadium bill, just like Pritzker already said last week. The governor went a bit further this time in saying that Bears execs are actually working on cobbling together a new bill — “I think they’re looking at both of the bills that passed — the one in the House, the one in the Senate — hoping to put the provisions of each of those together in a form that they think will pass” — and reiterated that he’s willing to call a special session of the legislature as soon as team officials have all their votes in a row.
That’s all old news, so instead I’d like to take the time to focus in on this paragraph from the Crain’s piece:
Even though the bill didn’t provide any public money for the stadium, many Illinois legislators were cool to the idea of providing property tax breaks to a privately owned football team at a time when constituents are worried about the higher cost of living and struggling with their own taxes.
Look, I get it. There are only so many minutes in the day to report and speed-type reports like these, though at least Crain’s writer John Pletz appears to have a more reasonable one-article-a-day workload. And journalism shorthand is an established thing, so wanting to say “public money” when you mean “direct cash subsidies” is sort of understandable.
Still: Saying the rejected megaprojects bill “didn’t provide any public money for the stadium” but did “provide property tax breaks” is just nonsense, and doesn’t belong in any self-respecting news outlet. Tax breaks are very much public money — they’re calculated as such in an annual “tax expenditure” report by the state comptroller, for one thing — and are equally valuable to team owners’ bottom line, as saving $700 million on your property tax bills is no different from getting $700 million worth of government checks. So while the turn of phrase may seem innocuous, it ends up misleading those readers who are worried about the higher cost of living and struggling with their own taxes. And that’s before even considering that one of the bills previously considered would take sales and hotel taxes collected in a stadium district and use them to pay off stadium bonds, which isn’t a tax break at all, it’s just a government check.
As for where an Illinois stadium would go, the Bears-owned site in Arlington Heights is still the most likely target, though that isn’t stopping other communities from trying to get in on the bidding: In addition to the industrial suburb of McCook, state rep Curtis Tarver has proposed a site at 85th and Lake Shore Drive on the far South Side near the Indiana border, saying that he told Bears CEO about the idea and “he certainly did not tell me that’s the worst idea I’ve seen in my life.” Hope springs eternal, and summers eternal too, at least when a special session is on the table.