At least in terms of Springfield, Chicago’s loyalty to the state of Illinois is just not what the Chicago Bears gambled it would be.
That’s one fascinating conclusion we draw from the weekend’s antics at the Capitol, where legislators put together a $55.9 billion budget, replete with over $800 million in tax increases, even as most of the assembled press corps was interested in just one topic. And it was not the fiscal fate of Illinois’ 12.7 million residents, oh, no, but a single private business that already rakes in oodles of cash.
One question dominated the weekend: Would there be a stadium deal involving a property tax incentive for Chicago’s storied NFL team, thus presumably preventing it from skedaddling to Hammond, Indiana?
There would not.
It became clear over the weekend that Chicago legislators were not about to support legislation, meaning a sweetheart deal involving so-called “property tax certainty” allowing the Bears to make defined, lower payments in lieu of those taxes that would incentivize the Chicago Bears to leave Chicago.
Mayor Brandon Johnson, who did not curtail his trip to visit the pope in Rome to argue for a blessing for Arlington Heights, LOL, was clearly of that mind, too. So if you are tracking the winners and losers here, you’d have to chalk up a rare but meaty W for Johnson and an L for Gov. JB Pritzker, who presumably is not relishing the idea of “losing” the Bears to red-state Indiana being part of his campaign for president of the United States. Johnson and the Chicago crew in Springfield clearly were not worrying especially about that.
Who can blame them, realistically?
Chicago Democrats decided that in all likelihood, Hammond would bring as many (if not more) economic benefits, such as they are, to the South Side of Chicago, and the nearby, mostly Black suburbs, than well-to-do Arlington Heights. Hammond, after all, is across the street from Chicago. Not from State and Madison streets, but from Chicago nonetheless. People tend to forget that.
Chicago has never had an especially close relationship with northwest Indiana, historically a region without a spiritual home, but it discovered the potential of one this weekend as those legislators made the calculation that explaining to the average Joe taxpayer, who enjoys zero property-tax certainty, why they should subsidize an NFL team with a local monopoly and gazillions of dollars in income to move to the northwest suburbs.
Sure, Chicago is in Illinois and the fiscal fate of the two is intertwined; this, all cooler heads know and understand, including our chill selves and the folks in the office of the governor. But here is what the Bears failed to see. Losing the Bears is an indignity to the city, period. And if that is to be the case, most Chicagoans do not give a damn whether the team goes to Arlington Heights or Hammond. Actually, Hammond at least offers some schadenfreude.
So this also is a big, fat L for the Bears, which overplayed its hand and mismanaged the entire process, squandering all kinds of good will in the process.
What will the team do now? If they plan to keep to their stated “spring/early summer” deadline, they have only one choice: Hammond.
If that was always just a leverage play and the Bears really, really don’t want to go to such an unsexy locale far from their big-money customers — as many suspect, even after this weekend — then they have to forgo that deadline and wait for the Hail Mary Illinois play that reportedly involves empowering all substantially sized municipalities to create their own authorities, with the details presumably to be ironed out at a special session this summer. Or perhaps even as late as the fall veto session.
In broad strokes, at least, Springfield Democrats basically looked at what Indiana offered the Bears ($1 billion in Indiana taxpayer-backed bonds for stadium construction and surrounding infrastructure, creating a stadium owned by a Northwest Indiana Stadium Authority but with an option allowing the Bears, initially a tenant, to buy the joint in 40 years for $1) and said, well, we should just regroup and try and match that. Presumably this was an option that was available the whole time.
But here’s the complication. Indiana Gov. Mike Braun pulled Indiana’s deal together in just a few short months with just one location on the table: Hammond. So in Indiana, it has always been Hammond versus Hammond with Hammond having the inside track.
Here in Illinois, the rhetoric this weekend was all about putting Chicago back in the game, whatever that means given that the Bears have made it perfectly clear that they are considering only Hammond and Arlington Heights.
Were the Bears telling the truth when they said that? Good question, given that Democratic state Sen. Bill Cunningham, who led the Bears’ negotiations in the upper chamber, said the Bears actually had been talking to the Johnson administration about stadium options over recent months, notwithstanding the team’s public posture. So why were they doing that if this is a search with only two finalists?
There are only two possible explanations. Either the Bears were lying when they said they’d dismissed Chicago as an option or Cunningham is misinformed.
Here at the cynical Tribune Editorial Board, we’re going with the former.
But where in Chicago would said new stadium, as now owned presumably by a Chicago Stadium Authority, or whatever, go? The 78? One Central? Next to Soldier Field? Inside Soldier Field? At the top of the Willis Tower? On an island in Lake Michigan? Your guess is as good as ours.
Are the Bears really going to start that debate all over again without knowing how long it would take? Are they really going to keep poor Arlington Heights, which has been feverishly trying to plant stories painting Hammond as some kind of toxic waste dump ready to rain down on unsuspecting Bears fans, on the hook while Chicago debates all of that all over again? The Bears are creating enemies in two different states.
So. Here we are. Pritzker did not push the megaproject deal over the finish line, probably because he was sensitive to the very issues that worried the Chicago cabal and wanted to stick to his stated position of not subsidizing a lucrative private business beyond reasonable infrastructure support, a position we have shared from the start. Of course, he also said he was open to a deal. We’ve had no problem with that this whole time and, for the record, we see the benefits for Illinois of Arlington Heights. But Chicago elected its officials and, well, they have apparently prevailed. Isn’t democracy wonderful?
As for the new Illinois plan? No one really can pass judgment on that without the details, which will have to include a firm location.
Good luck with your decision, Chicago Bears. At some point, you have to call an end to all of this chaos, much of it of your own creation.
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