Category: Chicago Bears

Sportswriters alarmed as Bears again do not get $1B in tax money toward new stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

The Illinois legislature adjourned Friday without approving any Chicago Bears stadium bills, and people be reacting:

  • Phil Rogers, writing as a Forbes “contributor,” reports that “the wait goes on as the team tries to find the necessary funding for needed infrastructure upgrades and assurances on property taxes.” Inserting both “necessary” and “needed” is piling on the sports owner perspective a little thick, but probably on brand for a guy who once co-wrote a book with Bud Selig.
  • Gene Chamberlain, the Bears correspondent at Rogers’ old workplace, Sports Illustrated, complains that the the McCaskey family is only “looking for a frozen tax rate which has already been negotiated with surrounding taxing bodies, and about $855 million for infrastructure,” but Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker “falsely depicted the Bears as attempting to get the stadium built by public funds,” because infrastructure isn’t a stadium and tax breaks on a stadium aren’t … wait, let me start over.
  • Bloomberg News calls it a Bears “fumble,” because you know how non-sports news outlets especially always love the sports puns. Bloomberg also describes the Bears as “stuck with an outdated stadium and fans longing for a new football coliseum,” which 1) Soldier Field may be unloved, but it was just completely rebuilt in 2002 which isn’t all that long ago and 2) fans don’t especially seem to be longing for what the Bears owners want to build.
  • The Chicago Sun-Times reports that “Bears sources” say the team could start looking at stadium sites outside Cook County, writing that “numerous suburbs have courted the team,” though notably not by offering any of the money that the McCaskeys want. Also said Chicago suburbs are all in Illinois, which is the state whose legislature just declined to approve that billion dollars or so in tax money, so this may not be as promising an option as you think, Sun-Times.

So anyhoo, the McCaskeys did not succeed in getting around a billion dollars from the state of Illinois, will continue to seek ways to get around a billion dollars from the state of Illinois, stop the presses. This is pretty much the exact same set of stories that ran back in June when the state legislature adjourned then without giving the Bears owners a wad of cash. At least this time around the Sun-Times didn’t describe the session as expiring “without the Chicago Bears breaking the line of scrimmage in Springfield” after the failure of legislation that “could’ve thrown the team a block in their rush to the former Arlington International Racecourse” and Bears lobbyists being “left on the Capitol sideline” — though the paper’s headline did say that the owners’ last-minute offer of $25 million “doesn’t move ball forward in Springfield for new stadium,” it’s a sickness, I tell you.

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Friday roundup: Bears offer Illinois dimes on the dollar toward stadium, Browns considering $150k-a-seat PSLs

access_time personNeil deMause

Apologies for this week’s late roundup — I had to retrieve my now-repaired laptop from the shop and get settled back in before writing this. On the bright side (for you, the information-craving consumer of sports subsidy news, surely not for me, the lowly scribe of such reports), even more stuff happened while I was at the store, so you get to enjoy bonus material as a result!

  • The Chicago Bears owners responded to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s demand that before getting any state help with a new stadium, the team must pay off the state’s $350-500 million in remaining debt on Soldier Field: How about $25 million instead? The response from legislators has been mostly LOLBears: State Rep. Kam Buckner called the offer “inadequate” and “disrespectful,” while Pritzker deadpanned, “I’m not sure what it’s tied to, what they’re asking for in return for it. I think if they’re donating $25 million to support the people of Chicago or the people of Illinois, that’s always a good thing.”
  • Did the Cleveland Browns owners forget to mention that as part of their new stadium in Brook Park, they’re considering charging personal seat license fees of as much as $149,300? Must have slipped their mind, along with how much of those fees would apply to the Haslams’ share of stadium costs and how much to the public’s $600 million and up cost. (Pretty sure the answers are “all” and “none,” respectively, since that’s how it always works.)
  • Also on the Browns front, the Crain’s Cleveland Business editorial board writes that Mayor Justin Bibb’s proposed deal to get $80 million worth of payments in exchange for letting the team move to Brook Park “leaves a bit of a bitter taste” but may be the best Cleveland can get given that “team owners hold the leverage in an environment where cities are desperate to retain their teams.” Or, at least, they do when the state legislature hands out $600 million to the team to help it move from one part of the state to another. Fixed that for you!
  • The Seattle Sounders owners are seeking outside investors to buy a minority share of the team, with the proceeds possibly being used toward building a new soccer-only stadium, possibly at its Longacres training site in nearby Renton. That’s a lot of possiblys, for sure, but Sportico values the Sounders at $825 million and soccer-specific stadiums generally go for less than half that, so … possibly.
  • CT United F.C. will begin play in MLS NEXT Pro next year playing home games at venues scattered across Connecticut, while it waits for a new stadium to be built in Bridgeport — which is to say, while it waits for the state to decide to give it $127 million to build one. “On the merits of the actual math, the jobs, the housing, the economic impact and aligning with what the priorities have been stated for this administration, it aligns perfectly,” said CT United owner Andre Swanston, take his word for it, he’s just a disinterested hundred-millionaire.
  • “Will the College Football Playoff title game bring economic boost to the Tampa Bay area?” WTSP-TV actually looked at the results the last time it hosted the CFP championship in 2017, and nope: A promised $250-350 million economic impact turned out to be just $720,000 in added sales tax receipts, while hotel tax receipts actually went down. “If that were the case, why is every major city and community bidding on these major events?” asked Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan. Because you’re all idiots?
  • No, the “sky stadium” Saudi Arabia plans to build for the 2034 World Cup doesn’t look like this, it looks like this. The former is AI generated, the latter, honestly, is probably AI generated at well, but maybe AI generated on purpose by the people who actually plan to build it? With more than half of the internet now AI slop, it’s arguably bigger news when something isn’t a fake, no?
  • And finally, if you’ve worn out the entertainment value of the yule log, we now have the Athletics Las Vegas stadium construction camera. You’re welcome.
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Friday roundup: Pritzker endorses “infrastructure” spending for Bears, Royals could soon propose Kansas vaporstadium

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s Friday, which means I had to take valuable time away from reading about the Mafia luring rich people into playing in rigged poker games in order to hang out with NBA players who scored 6.6 points a game so that I could instead sum up the rest of this week’s stadium and arena news, for you, because I care.

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Friday roundup: Stochastic parrot edition

access_time personNeil deMause

Guys! The AI industry needs our help! Nobody wants AI, and AI has lots of AI, so AI is paying AI to make more AI and sell it to AI and making it up in stock price, and that can’t end well! Let’s help out by asking poor li’l ChatGPT to write this week’s Friday roundup, I’ll check in and see how it does:

Friday roundup: Bears still begging, Thunder still building, and Jaguars still staircasing

[Not terrible, not great. Really the headline should reference the top items, and also what the hell is “staircasing” supposed to mean?]

It’s Friday, which means it’s time once again to spin the roulette wheel of public cash and see which stadium and arena schemes landed on taxpayers this week:

[“Spin the roulette wheel of public cash” is a terrible turn of phrase. Also, to complete the metaphor, the wheel should be “landing on” various schemes, not the schemes landing on taxpayers.]

  • San Diego’s Midway Rising plan to replace Pechanga Arena with a new 16,000-seat venue and a pile of housing and retail is inching toward a December 5 planning commission deadline, with the city still wrangling over traffic impacts, affordable housing quotas, and who gets the upside from the $3.9 billion redevelopment. Because nothing says “revitalization” like betting on a 1970s arena site to turn into a housing solution via sports subsidies.

[I haven’t written much lately about Midway Rising, which would replace the former home of the San Diego Clippers, among others, with one of those mixed-use district that are all the rage now, including a new arena. The whole project would cost $3.9 billion, and if ChatGPT knew that it could look back at old articles to understand this week’s, it would have found Voice of San Diego’s explainer about how the project would get an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District, which is basically a TIF that would kick back property taxes around the site to the developers. How much in taxes? Voice of San Diego didn’t say, and ChatGPT didn’t email property tax economist Geoff Propheter to ask, and Geoff hasn’t gotten to my email yet, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The last line, meanwhile, is a decent attempt at FoS-style snark, but points off for it not meaning anything.]

  • Oklahoma City’s new $900 million Thunder arena is still on track for a 2028 opening, after voters okayed a 1% sales tax to fund most of it. The latest renderings feature lots of glass and “urban integration,” which probably means the public will be paying for a very expensive window. Construction could start in 2026, with the city touting it as a 21st-century civic monument and critics calling it a half-billion-dollar bribe to keep the team happy through 2050.

[Oh come on, you link to fresh vaportecture and don’t even run the images, let alone clown on the woman in the short-shorts who is about to jog right into a stair railing? Also, how is it a half-billion-dollar bribe when the public is spending $850 million? Zero stars!]

  • The Chicago Bears are back trying to convince Illinois taxpayers to help fund their new domed stadium in Arlington Heights, which team execs insist is the “only viable” site. They already own the land, but are still pushing for $855 million in public infrastructure money, because no NFL owner can resist a good subsidy play before kickoff. If they can pull this off, they say they’ll even be nice enough to bid for a Super Bowl in 2031.

[This is not news. Or rather, it was news last week, which is when we covered it.]

  • Penn State’s $700 million Beaver Stadium renovation keeps creeping forward, promising better luxury seating and a closer-to-the-field fan experience, though the main takeaway seems to be that even college football programs are now acting like pro franchises when it comes to stadium arms races. There’s also an Adidas sponsorship wrinkle, just to make sure the project stays as corporate as possible.

[College football programs have been acting like pro franchises for a long time, but they’re outside the scope of this site because life is short. If all it cost to cover college stadiums was consuming every last drop of water on the planet, I guess I might consider it.]

  • The Albany Firebirds’ Arena Football League announced an expansion team in Saginaw, Michigan — the Michigan Arsenal — which will play at the Dow Events Center. It’s minor-league stuff, but still one more example of how arena football owners keep testing the limits of how many taxpayer-subsidized arenas are lying around waiting for someone to fill a few dates on the calendar.

[The — what? First off, the arena football league is now called Arena Football One, and the Firebirds are just one of its nine teams. The Arsenal will indeed play in Saginaw, in a stadium built in 1972. I don’t see anything to complain about here, or even to care about, unless you are an arena football fan in central Michigan, in which case today’s your lucky day, I guess?]

  • Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium is getting a new 4,400-seat indoor concert venue next door, courtesy of Panthers owner David Tepper’s entertainment arm. The new hall will slot nicely into his plan to turn every patch of Uptown into “TepperWorld,” assuming the city doesn’t mind another dose of infrastructure subsidies wrapped in the language of “music tourism.”

[Nobody is calling it “TepperWorld.” And most of the $650 million in public money Tepper got for his stadium development wouldn’t be for “infrastructure subsidies.” And “music tourism” is an actual term (people traveling to go see music, I’m doing it myself soon), though not one that’s particularly in play in Charlotte.]

And that’s the week in stadium boondoggles: one new dome, one giant glass box, one mega-housing-sports mashup, and a staircase in Jacksonville that somehow counts as “progress.” Same time next Friday — unless one of these cities goes broke before then.

[Giant glass box? Staircase? Either ChatGPT is drunk or I am.]

Okay, let’s shrug off the italics and see what other actual news the robots chose to ignore:

  • The Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency has reassigned the Cleveland Browns‘ proposed road upgrade plan back to committee, with one county commissioner saying, “So many questions out there in my mind that I don’t know how we move forward at this point.” But Jimmy Haslam is hungry for his $70 million in road money nowwwww.
  • North Kansas City Mayor Jesse Smith said in a press statement yesterday that he’s engaged in “substantial” talks with the Kansas City Royals owners over a new stadium and remains “committed to transparency throughout this process” but also that talks will be confidential for now, which is a lot of mixed messages, frankly. North Kansas City has a population of 4,467, so it’s probably a fair bet that most of the talks are around how to get the county and state to foot the bill for this thing, even more than they already are.
  • The New England Revolution‘s attempts to build a stadium in Everett already drew complaints from Boston officials that they’d need to be consulted on traffic and other impacts, and now four other cities — Malden, Medford, Chelsea and Revere — want in on those talks too. This is maybe going to be a while.
  • Port St. Lucie is spending $27.5 million on a minor league soccer stadium, and WPTV asked two local barbers how it would it affect the economy.
  • Not to be left out, Denver7 examined how a new Broncos stadium would affect the local economy by talking to a coffee company owner and a personal trainer.

And that’s the week in stadium boondoggles: Some stochastic parrots, hallucinated staircases, and terrible journalism. The future, in other words! Same time next Friday — unless the robots have taken over and are talking to themselves by then, and we can go spend all our time on music tourism until the economy collapses.

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Illinois bill would require sports projects to include independent analysis, public hearings, repayment of lost tax revenue

access_time personNeil deMause

In the midst of all the Chicago Bears stadium drama, in which team owners are still requesting around $1 billion in infrastructure spending and tax breaks, Illinois state representative Kam Buckner has quietly introduced the Stadium Transparency and Responsible Spending (STARS) Act, which would require that any sports construction or renovation projects costing the public more than $25 million:

  • Have its subsidy agreement posted online for at least 30 days before it can be enacted.
  • Receive a “neutral cost-benefit analysis of the agreement” by the state Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability, with the cost footed by the sports franchise seeking the subsidy.
  • Hold at least two public hearings in the affected community.
  • Reimburse in full all public schools, public libraries, or public fire, police, or emergency service for any loss of property taxes as a result of the deal.
  • Contain a clawback provision where the sports franchise must repay all subsidies, plus 5% annual compounded interest, if it relocates or fails to meet its stated community or economic commitments.
  • Provide annual reports on the number of jobs created, tax revenue generated, and community benefits delivered.

Can it pass? Who knows! Front Office Sports reports that Buckner “intends for this to be at least the start of a broader conversation around the stadium financing,” which makes it sound like more like points to be haggled over than the likely final form of any legislation. But that’s still a start, especially given how often sports projects get rushed through the approval process without much public oversight. And there’s nothing stopping other states from modeling similar legislation on Buckner’s bill — hint, hint, legislators in other 49 states.

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Bears execs now likely demanding $1B+ from Arlington Heights for stadium project, fine print reveals

access_time personNeil deMause

Snuck into one of last week’s economic impact reports for a proposed Chicago Bears stadium in Arlington Heights was an eye-popping number: “To jumpstart the full redevelopment potential of the 326-acre Arlington Park site, the Bears are seeking public funding for $855 million needed for district infrastructure,” wrote consultants HR&A. Among the projects to be funded by the $855 million — the source of which remains unclear, though a tax increment financing district has been suggested — would be, according to the Chicago Tribune’s Robert McCoppin, “entrance and exit ramps from near Route 53 and changes to the adjacent Metra train line.”

Adding a nearly billion-dollar ask in the fine print of a consulting report is a choice, and it was notable enough to catch the attention of the Tribune editorial board, which weighed in today with an editorial asking the question, “Are the Bears’ high-priced demands for ‘infrastructure support’ just another form of subsidy?” Its verdict: Yeah, probably.

This page has supported the principle that government generally bears some responsibility to pay for legitimate infrastructure in order to support development sizable enough to generate a big number of jobs and major economic growth. But at some point, depending on the scale, that infrastructure tab begins to morph into subsidy. At $855 million — and let’s be honest, the cost likely will be higher — we think the Bears already are at that point.

As we have discussed here innumerable times, calculating the public cost of a development project is as much art as science, and one of the biggest judgment calls is on things like infrastructure. The best definition of a “subsidy” is a special dispensation that most people normally wouldn’t get: If you build a house, the local government often covers the cost of building the street out front, the sewer connections, etc. Though not always: In many cases developers will pay development impact fees to cover the public costs of infrastructure.

“Normally,” clearly, is doing a lot of work in that definition. (As is “legitimate” in the Tribune editorial.) Which is why sports developers, and developers in general, will often try to sneak in stuff that is not normal at all, like new highway exits or new train stations, arguing that it’s not really a subsidy because the public will get use out of it. Another way of looking at it, though, is that developers are looking to get land cheap because it has lousy transit access and then get the government to pay to improve it, providing a huge private windfall.

So determining whether something should be counted as a subsidy is less a matter of scale than of whether the Bears are trying to get taxpayers to cover something the team would normally be expected to. And that certainly looks to be the case here, though it would be nice to see an itemized list of the whole $855 million, something that team execs haven’t yet divulged.

And on top of that, of course, there’s the “tax certainty” that the Bears are trying to get as part of a state “megaproject” bill, which would allow them to lock in reduced property taxes on the entire stadium development site. How that would mesh with a TIF district to pay for the infrastructure is, once again, unclear — the whole point of a TIF is to kick back new property taxes from a development to the developer, but if property taxes are capped there won’t be much if anything to kick back — but on a multi-billion-dollar development it could be substantial. At the very least, it’s safe to say that Bears execs intend to ask for well over $1 billion in publicly provided stuff, which is a lot for a project that the team’s own extremely rosy projections say is expected to bring in $69 million a year in new state, county, and local tax revenues, a best-case scenario that would still leave the public losing money if the subsidy total tops $1.1 billion.

All of which was enough to get the Tribune editors to take a rare (for newspaper editorial boards) look into hidden tax subsidies for stadium projects, and props to them for doing so. Either the Trib’s hedge fund goon owners are singularly dedicated to robust economic analysis of development projects, or this is just what happens to media coverage when the local political establishment isn’t on board, you make the call.

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Bears stadium economic impact reports reveal that economic impact reports aren’t worth much

access_time personNeil deMause

Arlington Heights yesterday released not one but two economic impact reports on the village’s proposed Chicago Bears stadium: One commissioned by the team and carried out by consultants HR&A, and one commissioned by the village and carried out by consultants Hunden Partners. (There’s also a FAQ explaining the two reports.) Such reports do not have a glorious history, so how do these stack up?

HR&A’s Bears-commissioned report first:

  • “As part of this analysis, HR&A worked closely with CSL International, a feasibility, business planning, and consulting firm specializing in sports and entertainment, to estimate the impacts of a Super Bowl in Arlington Heights as well as understand the economic benefits realized from major non-recurring events that Chicagoland currently does not host.“ CSL’s brand isn’t exactly “understanding” things, so we’re off to a bad start already.
  • HR&A projects $10.9 billion in “one-time statewide economic impacts,” which just means that the project would involve building several billion dollars worth of stuff, plus a multiplier for when construction workers go and buy other stuff. Some of this spending would presumably involve things like steel that’s bought from out of state; HR&A doesn’t give any indication of how it calculated this number, though, so no way of knowing if this number is overblown or by how much.
  • After the initial construction outlay, HR&A projects “$1.3 billion in net annual statewide economic impact and close to 9,000 permanent jobs” from the ongoing operations of the stadium and its surrounding development, resulting in $69.1 million a year in net new tax revenues for the state, county, and city. “Net” implies that this is spending that wouldn’t take place without the project — but there’s no indication that HR&A subtracted out spending that would be shifted from elsewhere in the state to the Arlington Heights site. Unless Bears ownership plans on spontaneously generating new Illinoisans, at least some of the spending at the new project will inevitably be cannibalized from elsewhere in the state.
  • As for costs, “the Bears are seeking public funding for $855 million needed for district infrastructure,” notes HR&A, for such things as new highway ramps and moving a Metra commuter rail line. No funding source at all is given for this, but put next to those billions of dollars in projected revenues, $855 million is mere pocket change, right?
  • Hosting a Super Bowl, reports HR&A, “would generate an additional $570 million in statewide economic impact and support close to 3,800 permanent jobs” — that’s right, permanent jobs from a one-week, one-time event, sure would like a methodology footnote on that one, but sadly none is forthcoming.

That’s all pretty sad, but also pretty par for the course for what a consultant like HR&A will typically put together for a client like the Bears: Add up all the money that may change hands at a stadium project, slap on a multiplier, and print impressively large numbers in impressively large type. But what about the village’s hired hands, did they do any better?

  • Hunden’s report is just a three-page summary, so its findings are even more abbreviated than HR&A’s: The stadium project would “support” 5,400+ full-time equivalent jobs and $510.1 million in “net new tax impact” ($15.1m per year) over 40 years. Once again, there’s no indication of whether these numbers account for spending that would substitute for other spending that would take place without the stadium project — not to mention the opportunity cost of losing out on any spending that might take place if the old Arlington Park racetrack were redeveloped for something else.
  • Then there’s this amazing chart on projected uses for a stadium, which starts with the remarkable claim that an NFL stadium would host 370 “events” a year, then wayyyyy at the bottom specifies what most of those events would actually consist of:

The FAQ, meanwhile, adds even more caveats:

  • What about the added costs that would come with providing schools, police, fire, roads, and all the other stuff that a whole new mini-city would require? “Does this report include the impacts on Village services and infrastructure costs? No, it does not. Additional studies will consider the cost of Village services and infrastructure.”
  • Likewise, the reports don’t attempt to estimate the cost of “megaproject” property tax breaks that the Bears are demanding from a so-far-uninterested state legislature, but don’t worry, that isn’t real money: “A Megaproject Bill does not exempt large-scale developers from paying taxes, give State money to private business, nor cost the State government any money.” While all this is technically true — the Bears developers wouldn’t be completely exempt from paying taxes, they would just get a large break on their tax bill, and the public money provided would come out of the village’s and county’s treasuries, not the state’s — the implication that this would present no cost to taxpayers is false.

All of these funny numbers matter a whole lot, and not just for PR purposes: The FAQ specifies that “The Village has always stated that it will not approve the project unless there is a net fiscal benefit — meaning the Village’s new revenues must exceed new expenses,” so how the costs and benefits of the project are calculated is hugely important. Unfortunately, the two consulting reports are pretty much useless for that: Asked for comment after looking them over, sports economist J.C. Bradbury called them “an incomprehensible mess of motivated nonsense.” If it’s the kind of nonsense that will potentially land them more than a billion dollars in new transportation infrastructure and tax breaks, though, the Bears owners will no doubt consider it consulting fees well spent.

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Friday roundup: Pritzker demands Bears pay off $534m Soldier Field debt before approving stadium tax break, it’s on!

access_time personNeil deMause

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!
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Bears to announce Arlington Heights stadium plan in coming months, isn’t this where we came in?

access_time personNeil deMause

The Chicago Tribune reports this morning that Bears management is expected to “publicly present their latest plans for a new stadium” in Arlington Heights sometime between now and November, according to Arlington Heights Mayor Jim Tinaglia. How will this differ from the last set of plans team execs issued (with nightmarish giant bear sculptures) in early 2023, or from their demands for property tax breaks on the site plus possible “billions” in additional infrastructure funding? We’ll just have to wait and see!

It’s a weird article overall, mentioning early on that “more than 130 studies have come to the consensus that the economic benefits of new stadiums fall far short of the public investment” but then insisting that this one is different, because “the Bears have decided to finance their stadium themselves, which is rare.” It’s also not at all true: The whole reason the Arlington Heights plan has been sitting around for years now is that the Bears owners have been holding out for what they’re calling “tax certainty,” which means a guarantee that property taxes on the former Arlington Park racetrack won’t rise even after they build a multi-billion-dollar stadium development on it. To a sports team owner, property tax breaks are every bit as good as a government check, which is why we don’t (or at least shouldn’t) say that the owners of Madison Square Garden have “financed renovations themselves” when it’s now received about a billion dollars in city tax breaks since the 1980s.

The Tribune could have found someone to explain that concept had it interviewed any of the authors of those more than 130 studies, but instead it chose to limit its quotes to:

  • Tinaglia, who called the project he himself is negotiating “a win-win for everybody, including Chicago.”
  • Marc Ganis, identified as a “sports business consultant” but actually someone who’s worked for so many NFL teams he’s been dubbed “the 33rd owner,” calling it “an outright gift of epic proportions” by the Bears to taxpayers.
  • An unnamed team official, saying “our plan to finance a new state-of-the-art stadium requires zero state dollars for its construction.”
  • State Rep. Mary Beth Canty, sponsor of a state bill to allow tax breaks for “megaprojects,” saying it “creates real opportunities.”

That’s four pro-subsidy sources, though Canty did say “We want to focus on getting it right, not getting it fast,” which I suppose makes her a relative skeptic in this context. How much would a freeze on the Bears’ property taxes, plus any added infrastructure expense, cost Illinois taxpayers? What do economists say about whether funding stadiums through tax breaks pays off any better than funding them through up-front public spending? What is the likelihood of Canty’s bill passing, and would it then automatically allow Bears execs to get the property tax kickbacks they seek? Sorry, the Tribune has fewer than 80 newsroom staffers left in the wake of its takeover first by leveraged buyout goons and then by hedge fund goons, the reporter on this story has to cover the entirety of “news and trends in Chicago’s suburbs” as his beat, he doesn’t have time for actual reporting, you’ve clearly watched too much Lou Grant.

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Illinois governor opposes “propping up” Bears’ profits with tax breaks

access_time personNeil deMause

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has weighed in on Chicago Bears execs’ demand for property tax breaks, and his response was yeah nope:

“I’d like the Bears to stay in the City of Chicago, if they could,” Pritzker said. “They’re a private business. They can choose to do what they like with their business. I do not think that the taxpayers of the State of Illinois should be propping up what now is an $8.5 billion-valued business. They seem to be doing OK for themselves.”

It’s not entirely clear if Pritzker is entirely opposed to the entire “megadevelopment” tax break bill or only to applying it to a Bears stadium; he said “we’re still evaluating the legislation” and “it’s something we’re considering.” If the legislature were to pass the bill but the state denied tax breaks to the Bears, team officials could always wait until Pritzker goes off to be president or something and then try their luck with a subsequent governor.

That still seems like a longshot: Though one supporter of the megadevelopment tax breaks, suburban Chicago-area Democratic Rep. Mary Beth Canty, said a bill was “super close and just ran out of time” in the spring, nothing was actually introduced that got close to a vote, and any passage this fall would require a three-fifths majority. It’s not an impossible route to stadium subsidies, though, so if the Bears owners can be patient, it might be their best bet to get taxpayer funding for a stadium project.

And taxpayer funding is clearly at the top of their mind, as described in the Axios article “Why the Bears’ dream stadium may be doomed without a tax break,” which has a funny way of defining “why”:

If it doesn’t happen, the Bears will have to decide if they want to move forward with a heavier tax burden or go back to the drawing board to find another location, possibly outside of Cook County.

Well, yeah, those are indeed the options. But Bears execs have been trying to find either tax money for a Chicago-area stadium or an option further afield for more than four years now and haven’t gotten anywhere beyond a lot of alarming renderings of giant bears. Clearly team president Kevin Warren and his bosses really don’t want to build a new stadium unless it comes with sacks of public cash; whether they couldn’t make it work without taxpayer help and would have to settle for staying put at Soldier Field, only they and their investment bankers know for sure.

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