With Bears stadium plans, Springfield should just slam on the brakes

Chicago Bears

The Chicago Bears and Mayor Brandon Johnson held an elaborate show-and-tell this past week in an attempt to sell the public on their new $4.7 billion lakefront stadium plan.

But next comes a complicated two-step as the Bears and the city attempt to persuade Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Springfield's top legislative leaders to approve $325 million in initial infrastructure funding for the stadium. The Bears and Johnson will try to persuade lawmakers and the governor to give the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority permission to raise $900 million toward the stadium's construction.

The current legislative session ends May 24. But with all the important priorities the state has to tackle, why should Springfield rush to help the billionaire McCaskey family build a football stadium?

The answer: They shouldn't. Ramming such a complex deal through the Legislature in a short time frame is absolutely the wrong approach.

That neither Pritzker nor legislative leaders were at the Bears announcement is telling. The governor is already on the record saying the state has bigger fish to fry. Illinois House Speaker Emanuel "Chris" Welch told reporters he was invited to the unveiling but instead attended an event where he discussed the recently passed Healthcare Protection Act.

"You know, those are the things that, you know, I think we need to be focused on right now," Welch said.

Especially since, as Sun-Times reporters Fran Spielman and Mitchell Armentrout explain in their latest story, the final price tag could be considerably higher: $5.9 billion.

No gift to the public

The Bears say they will pay $2 billion toward the stadium and then hand it over to the public, but the $325 million the team seeks from Springfield shows the gift is hardly free. Indeed, the Bears want to request just over $1 billion dollars more down the road to convert Soldier Field into ball fields and green space, plus other planned infrastructure improvements.

The team even wants to grab the stadium revenue from non-Bears events. "You know, if there’s a Beyoncé concert, they want all of that revenue, too, and everything else that might happen there," as Pritzker told reporters.

The effrontery. Of course, the Bears did not mention this at their announcement. That request strikes us as nothing more than a back-door attempt to help the Bears recoup some of that $2 billion — and not in direct cash — that they're promising.

How would this be a public stadium, in any real sense of the word, if a private entity gets the lion's share of the benefit?

The answer is: It's not.

Bears President and CEO Kevin Warren sat down with the Sun-Times editorial board on Thursday, a day after publicly unveiling the team's plan. Warren acknowledges Pritzker is not on board. And the governor needs to be if the Bears have any shot at public funding.

"We’ve communicated with his staff," Warren said. "We’re looking forward to getting together with him soon. He said what he said. We respect him. He’s a great leader.”

State officials will likely have the same central question we do about using public money — that could be spent on rebuilding public schools, shoring up public transit or myriad other pressing needs — to help build a $4.7 billion football stadium on public land.

Unconvincing arguments for a ‘hard project’

We agree with the Bears that the stadium project would provide jobs. That's a benefit.

But we want to see more proof to back up the Bears' claim of creating 43,000 construction jobs. By comparison, New York City's massive $25 billion new Hudson Yards development — a 28-acre neighborhood of skyscrapers, a shopping mall, a school and open space — promised only about 23,000 construction jobs.

Warren and his team also talked about buckets of state and federal infrastructure funds from which they could draw but didn't specify which buckets, provide an actual plan for accessing them or make a good case for diverting that money from other vital projects.

The project's phasing is also a problem. It's a recipe for disaster for the Bears to build and open the stadium before lining up funds for the promised park space — which includes the Soldier Field deconversion — and the remaining roads and infrastructure needed to service the entire site.

Imagine if the funding is slow to come or never comes at all. The city would be stuck with a new stadium and current Soldier Field staring at each other, surrounded by unfinished acreage — an insult to Museum Campus, the lakefront and Chicagoans. Those ugly parking lots south of Soldier Field certainly need to go, but not for a potential scenario that's similarly awful.

As for those ISFA bonds, if the hotel tax revenue needed to pay them off falls short, taxpayers could easily get stuck with the bill — and have been several times in the past. Extending those bonds for another 40 years, as the plan calls for, is another 40 years of risk. Meanwhile, the White Sox and Red Stars are eyeing those bonds for new stadium projects, too.

None of this accounts for the fact that Friends of the Parks could very well file a lawsuit to stop this project in its tracks, under the city's Lakefront Protection Ordinance.

"This is not an easy project," Warren said. Which seems to us a good reason for Springfield to put on the brakes.

The closer you look, the more it all seems to benefit the Bears, not the public.

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