A Phil Hall Op-Ed: Last week, a pair of football teams were in the news for trying to lure taxpayer funding for their respective efforts to construct new domed stadiums.
Earlier this year, the Chicago Bears raised the specter of a new $4.6 billion domed stadium, with the team offering to pay more than $2 million for the project – over 70% of the total stadium cost. While Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson was supportive of the project, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and state legislators were noncommittal. A survey of Illinois voters commissioned by Crain’s Chicago Business found a two-to-one majority of Illinois voters were opposed to the stadium as proposed by the team, although 40% of respondents said they would be supportive of the project if the Super Bowl could be played at the proposed venue.
The Bears openly toyed with the idea of moving out of Chicago to a property they own in neighboring Arlington Heights, but last week team president Kevin Sears insisted the team was focused on getting its new stadium constructed on a site next to its longtime home at Soldier Field, along the Chicago lakefront.
“I’m confident in the political leadership, the business leadership, our fan base, that we’ll be able to figure this out,” insisted Sears in a news conference covered by the Associated Press. “It will become a crown jewel for the National Football League.”
Also last week, the Cleveland Browns unveiled plans to relocate to the neighboring city of Brook Park and build a $2.4 billion domed stadium. But whereas the Bears want to stick taxpayers with 30% of the cost of their stadiums, the Browns are expecting the public to foot the bill for half of their proposed venue.
The Browns, however, are trying to obfuscate the fact that they want public sector input to finance the project by insisting the 50% not covered by the team can be generated by a public sector entity issuing bonds to help fund the construction. According to the team’s website, “The over $2 billion private investment, together with the public investment, will create a major economic development project that will drive the activity necessary to pay the public bond debt service through future project-generated and Browns-generated revenue.”
Both teams insist that these domed stadium projects are economically altruistic offerings designed to benefit their respective localities. Karen Murphy, the Bears’ executive vice president of stadium development, lectured naysayers by declaring, “I will remind everyone that these infrastructure projects drive jobs, and they create economic impact.”
The Browns’ management went even further by claiming, “A solution like this will be transformative not only for Cleveland and Northeast Ohio, but also the entire state of Ohio from the resulting events, tourism, and job creation. Additionally, moving the current stadium will allow the city and region’s collective vision for the Cleveland lakefront to be optimally realized, and downtown will benefit from the major events the Brook Park dome brings to the region.”
As for their current homes, the teams falsely claim their stadiums can no longer accommodate their needs. Soldier Field opened in 1924 and was last renovated in 2003 – the Bears said they would continue to play at Soldier Field until the new stadium was completed. And the Bears’ Huntington Bank Field is only 25 years old and was last renovated 10 years ago – with Cleveland taxpayers covering one-quarter of the renovation costs.
Both Chicago and Cleveland have significant issues impacting their residents, including the evaporation of affordable housing, rising crime and the expense of dealing with waves of migrants dumped into their communities. Neither city can afford to dole out corporate welfare to football teams to build stadiums that will only serve to make their millionaire owners richer.
If the Bears and the Browns want new stadiums, let them pay for it. If they cannot afford it on their own, then they should be grateful they have homes and fans willing to pay a lot of money to see the teams play. The chutzpah of the teams to shake down taxpayers to cover their bills is emetic.
Phil Hall is editor of Weekly Real Estate News. He can be reached at [email protected].
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