Can Bears Recover Stadium Fumbles?
Soldier Field in downtown Chicago.
While the Chicago Bears have enthralled the city with their play on the field, the efforts of front office staff and ownership to secure a new stadium has struggled to reach the end zone.
A former lawmaker has a new policy white paper out Tuesday outlining the way the Bears can get state officials and lawmakers to help the team secure funding for a new stadium.
Former Rep. Mark Batinick, who spent eight years in the General Assembly and is currently a policy advisor for the Illinois Policy Institute, argues the Bears have mishandled much of the stadium debate, but says a realistic path forward remains that protects taxpayers and can even leave them better off.
Batinick says building a new stadium in Cook County, like the proposed Arlington Heights site, is impossible given the county’s current tax structure.
“The Bears own the former racetrack property in Arlington Heights, a site long viewed as ideal for a stadium and surrounding mixed-use development,” Batinick writes. “Yet under Cook County’s 2 Tier commercial property tax system, the project faces an insurmountable obstacle.”
He said a $3 billion stadium project would face a yearly property tax bill of around $210 million. No other team pays more than $8 million per year on stadium property taxes, Batinick says.
He writes politics are a major hurdle for a new stadium.
“Publicly funded stadiums are increasingly unpopular nationwide. In Illinois, that skepticism is amplified by an uncomfortable fact: hundreds of millions of dollars are still owed on Soldier Field, a renovation that failed to deliver the flexibility or economic return originally promised,” he wrote. “That lingering debt makes any new stadium proposal politically sensitive before a single vote is counted.”
Batinick says the team needs to sell a stadium project as a win for taxpayers, even if they receive a tax break from the state.
“To succeed, the Bears must sell the project as a private investment with shared benefits that leaves every stakeholder better off than today,” Batinick writes. “Until the proposal is framed as win-win-win-win, the votes will never be there.”
Batinick’s white paper can be viewed here.
