Category: Chicago Fire

New soccer stadium somehow fails to rain riches on Philly suburb

access_time personNeil deMause

Hey, remember how a new soccer stadium in Chester, Pennsylvania was doing wonders for the local economy, according to a newspaper article that cited a single local union carpenter as its main source? How’s that working out two years later?

Four years ago, former social-sciences professor John Linder questioned why promoters wanted to “bring soccer to a basketball town.” As mayor since January, he’s been trying to make the $122 million PPL Park, financed mostly with county and state funds, generate enough money to meet the city’s costs.

[Linder] may levy parking and amusement fees on mostly out-of-town fans. He also wants Major League Soccer’s Philadelphia Union to make a $500,000 payment in lieu of taxes that it missed in 2010. The team says it’s negotiating the fee.

“What they’re paying us doesn’t cover our expenses,” Linder said in a telephone interview. “I have a mandate to my citizens that we persevere to get the best bang for our buck.” …

In Chester, 15 miles (24 kilometers) south of Philadelphia, public funds covered about 71 percent of the cost of the stadium for the Union, which is in ninth place in the league’s 10-team Eastern Conference. Related residential projects and a convention center haven’t been built, leaving the city of 34,000 in a program for distressed communities that it entered in 1995. Chester’s poverty rate is almost triple the state average.

There isn’t actually much in the way of economic impact details in this piece — maybe Bloomberg couldn’t find any carpenters to lend their expertise — but the overall picture is certainly less rosy. The best part, meanwhile, is that Union CEO Nick Sakiewicz says he hasn’t paid the back PILOTs he owes the city because nobody sent him a bill.

In related low-income-suburbs-who-thought-it-was-a-good-idea-to-build-soccer-stadiums news, meanwhile, residents of Bridgeview, Illinois, are really steamed about the $200 million in debt their town has racked up, in part by building a new stadium for the Chicago Fire. Best part of this article:

Mayor Steven Landek, who is also an appointed state senator running for election this fall, at first offered to meet privately in the homes of the handful of residents who complained.

But resident Julie Padilla told Landek that her husband was so angry he wouldn’t let Landek in their house, and then she and two other residents asked Landek to hold a public forum. Landek said he would, although no date has been set.

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Chicago Fire stadium leaves Bridgeview taxpayers “kicked in the teeth”

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s not very often that I get five readers emailing me about the same article — but then, it’s not very often that a major U.S. daily newspaper runs an article about a stadium deal with a headline that features the phrase “kicks taxpayers in the teeth”. From Saturday’s Chicago Tribune:

The hulking, red-brick Toyota Park rises impressively from the side of gritty Harlem Avenue, its canopies jutting into the sky. The village-owned stadium is not only home to the Chicago Fire, but also hosts major music shows.

And since opening in 2006, it has come up millions of dollars short of making its huge debt payments. The yearly shortfalls are sometimes as big as the town’s annual police budget, and they’ve helped sink the southwest suburb’s credit rating to among the Chicago area’s worst.

This for a deal that — initially, at least — looked like it might actually work out for the town of Bridgeview, since taxpayers’ $100 million in stadium bonds were supposed to be paid off by stadium revenues. Except that, according to the Tribune, “the final deal called for much of the revenue from soccer games to go to the Chicago Fire, leaving Bridgeview with as much as a $23 million budget hole over the stadium’s first five years — one that could ultimately have to be filled by raising property taxes.

This is why it’s so vitally important who’s on the hook for stadium costs if revenue projections don’t work out — and why it’s crucial in Seattle that prospective arena builder Chris Hansen is actually agreeing to increase rent payments to cover any shortfall in arena revenues.

Bridgeview, though, didn’t get the Fire owners to agree to such a provision, so now they’re getting, well, kicked in the teeth. Not so much, though, the Bridgeview elected officials who approved the deal, who’ve gotten to hand out millions of dollars worth of contracts to favored businesses, as well as use the stadium for fundraisers and enjoy a city-owned luxury suite for watching Jimmy Buffett concerts. If “enjoy” is the right word, that is.

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