“If the Bears were to break the lease five years from now, in 2026, the team would have to pay $84 million in damages to the city. … An $84 million fine might sound like a lot of money, but in the high-priced world of the NFL it represents just 3% of the $2.2 billion average cost of the league’s seven newest stadiums. The Bears franchise is valued at $3.5 billion, even though the team does not own a stadium.”
— Chicago Tribune, July 4, 2021
Maybe Mayor Lori Lightfoot is right to scorn a potential Chicago Bears move to Arlington Heights as just a ploy for leverage with her City Hall. But as the Tribune’s Bill Ruthhart reports, the corporation that owns the team could escape Soldier Field by giving taxpayers a relative pittance.
So before City Hall or the Illinois General Assembly makes any attempt to placate the Bears owners, let’s recall how the franchise last intimidated timid public officials to get their way.
Let’s also recall that whatever the drawbacks of their undomed and too-small stadium, the current situation is exactly what the Bears owners demanded of politicians and taxpayers. About the only privilege they didn’t get was the ability to sell corporate naming rights to, yes, a publicly owned war memorial. Thus the owners have no one to blame but themselves. And while they’re free to relocate to a sports palace or a cow pasture, they alone should bear all the costs.
The story of City Hall’s surrender to the Bears is a humiliating saga told before in this space. We’re revisiting it so that, if the owners again play pressure politics, every local and state official will know Chicago’s history of capitulation to a wealthy NFL franchise:
Friday, Sept. 28, 2001. Standing on turf near an end zone, Mayor Richard M. Daley defies critics of reconstructing Soldier Field to benefit the Bears owners. Daley says the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority will proceed to issue nearly $400 million in bonds to help finance the then-$606 million project. He repeats his frequent assurance to Chicagoans, words that will haunt his successor: “I remain absolutely confident that taxpayers are not at risk for any part of this project. If I had any doubts, I would not proceed.”
Much attention that autumn day 20 years ago focused on military veterans’ opposition to the proposed project’s grotesque design. After Daley’s news conference, several elderly vets who had been recruited to stand as props alongside the mayor told reporters the massive new seating bowl would overwhelm a memorial to American soldiers killed in World War I. Sports Illustrated later would ridicule the architectural collision as “Acropolis meets Apocalypse.”
Daley’s promise to taxpayers provoked other doubts. The project’s cost eventually would swell to about $660 million, the public debt burden to some $432 million. Even as Daley spoke, Chicago aldermen and legislators who had voted for the project under intense pressure from his underlings were frightened: To make the financing work, revenues from a 2% hotel tax would have to grow by 5.615% every year — for 30 years. Imagine the risk of taking out a home mortgage you can afford to pay off only if your income rises by 5.615% annually, without fail, for three decades.
Many lawmakers in Springfield had chafed at that assumption. So when City Hall officials and Bears corporate execs had sought state approval for the bonding scheme late in 2000, Downstate legislators outsmarted the city slickers: The Downstaters insisted that if ever the hotel tax couldn’t pay off the stadium bonds, Chicago taxpayers — not other Illinoisans — would be stuck making up the shortfalls.
A decade later, that obligation confronted Chicagoans and then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel: In addition to an annual $5 million subsidy the city provided, Chicago had to pay $185,000 because the hotel tax revenues fell short. Emanuel, frustrated by the gouge, fumed, “I don’t want the taxpayers of the city of Chicago to be treated as if they’re just an ATM machine. They’re not.”
Nobody had pitied taxpayers back when the Bears and City Hall jammed this expensive project down Chicago’s throat:
* The Chicago Plan Commission rode roughshod over 23 of 27 criteria before approving it … after paltry discussion … at the end of an eight-hour meeting orchestrated to exhaust opponents.
* Aldermen next approved the project, 35-7. One solon fumed that Daley’s aides “expect a rubber stamp with no discussion.”
* Chicago Park District officials listened to veterans complain about the proposed trashing of the city’s major war memorial, but didn’t ask their own staff or Bears representatives a single question. When a Tribune reporter inquired why, officials grew defensive. They had no answers as to why they had no questions. Then Park District board members — with no discussion, and after forbidding dozens of opponents to speak during, ahem, a scheduled public comment period — voted to fast-track the stadium plan.
* And when the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois proposed a location near the White Sox stadium, spokesmen for the Bears and City Hall sniffed that “studies” — not team owners’ wariness of the South Side — ruled out that site. We persistently asked to see those “studies.” Twenty years later, we’re still waiting.
* Do you remember the public referendum on the project? No, you don’t, because City Hall went to court to block a proposed referendum. Bears exec Ted Phillips voiced the most honest analysis of how his company and the city put taxpayers in so much jeopardy: “We’re moving forward. We’ve gotten the positive votes from the people we need the votes from.”
So Chicago has a lakefront eyesore and the Bears have an inadequate stadium. Chicagoans? They have the financial risk Daley promised they wouldn’t have.
Mayor Lightfoot and Chicago aldermen, don’t repeat your predecessors’ cave. If team owners want to be the Arlington Heights Bears, they have that right. You might, though, ask that they dismantle and take with them the seating bowl they insisted be built to appease them.
Chicago’s beleaguered taxpayers then would have what they previously had: a stadium that is comfortably sized for soccer and many other events — and that honors American soldiers.
Get our latest editorials, commentaries and columns delivered twice a week in our newsletter. Sign up here.
Join the discussion on Twitter @chitribopinions and on Facebook.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.
