The Chicago Bears announced their new stadium plans in a big, gleaming, star-spangled announcement on September 8. They would be following a well-worn NFL path of moving out of the city and into the suburbs, building their new home in Arlington Heights, just northwest of the city — bragging about the jobs it would bring, the potential to host a Super Bowl, and stunningly news that the stadium wouldn’t cost the public a cent.
In evaluating options for a new stadium, the focus of the McCaskey family has been clear: build a world-class stadium that requires zero money from the State of Illinois for its construction.
Less than a month later they’re using semantics to avoid the big lie: They’re asking for taxpayer money, a lot of it.
A report released by team consultants this week indicate that the Bears want $855M in funding to complete their stadium. Not for the construction of the building itself, but the infrastructure around the site — which includes roads, sewers, extension of rail systems, housing, retail, and office space. Naturally much of this new construction would be owned by the Chicago Bears, not the taxpayers — and that’s all part of the grift.
This has become the new-normal for NFL teams trying to secure massive swaths of stadium financing from taxpayers. They make the announcement that no public money will be needed for the stadium, then work deals with local politicians away from the limelight to fund their “infrastructure” demands. It’s a way for the team to seem like they have the community’s best interests at heart, while giving politicians plausible deniability when asked how much public money is going towards the construction of the stadium
Consultants for the Bears claim that this meager $855M ask will actually result in net revenue for state, county, and local government of $1.98B over 40 years — which may be true, but is based on some really, really fuzzy math. It firstly assumes that the Bears would not exist unless this ask was granted. As it stands the city of Chicago makes an estimated $55M a year from non-NFL events at Soldier Field, the team pays $6.48M a year to rent the stadium from the city — while also conveniently ignoring that taxpayers still have $734M remaining on bonds that were written for the Bears to renovate Soldier Field in 2001.
If the Bears stayed at Soldier Field taxpayers would make $259M in stadium rentals, which doesn’t include state and local taxes already paid by the team — which aren’t publicly available, but estimated to be around $6M a year, adding an additional $240M in revenue over the same 40 year span the team is quoting now.
Therefore, the Bears are intentionally ignoring that staying at Soldier Field generates upwards of $67M a year for taxpayers as-is — but bragging that their new plan will net the community $28M a year. In brass tacks: Taxpayers will lose money on the new deal, while also being forced to foot a new bill of $855M — taking the outstanding commitments to the Bears over $1B, factoring in the existing principle and interest owed on the 2001 remodels.
Everything the Bears are asking for now would be totally unnecessary if they stayed inside the city of Chicago proper and continued to use existing infrastructure, rather than construct it entirely in the suburbs — but the rub is that the Bears don’t own what they’re using right now, and that’s the entire point of this. The Chicago Bears want total ownership over what is being build for them. They don’t want to rent a stadium from the public, they want to keep the revenue non-NFL events would generate, they want to own the land around the stadium, the revenue from offices, and retail space around the Arlington Heights location.
In exchange for all this ownership they want $855M in public funding, while subtly noting that they’re expecting a corporate tax cut so the team only needs to pay 4.3% income tax, compared to 7% for the rest of Illinois businesses.
It’s a grift. It’s a scam. It’s part of the entire NFL ownership ethos of seeking to distribute more wealth from working people to the pockets of billionaire owners. The Bears’ next move is to lobby state legislature to allow for public funding to go towards the project as part of a vote on October 14. It’s clear this needs to be vetoed by state government, because while the state has previously said it would assist with infrastructure, the Bears’ comical $855M ask is totally unreasonable and another cash grab at the expense of taxpayers.
Owners will keep getting away with these schemes until someone stops them.
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