Taxpayers would pick up half the tab for Bears' lakefront stadium, sources say

Then there is the question of whether the Bears can legally build on the site. The city’s lakefront protection ordinance calls for public use of the lakefront, and the team has called for public ownership of the stadium.

The nonprofit Friends of the Parks opposes building a stadium for a privately owned team on the lakefront. The group successfully drove “Star Wars” creator George Lucas away from plans to build a movie art museum on the same site, now used for parking lots.

Whatever the Bears propose, they will have to win over skeptics, including Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who a spokesperson said Tuesday had not been briefed by the team about the stadium plans. The governor had previously called the Bears’ proposed investment “a good first step,” and said he’s willing to listen to their proposal, but said it shouldn’t be a priority for the state.

Joe Ferguson, president of the Civic Federation, a fiscal watchdog group, told the Tribune in a recent interview that the Bears and Sox need to show vetted cost and revenue projections.

“Everybody wants to keep the teams (in the city) — the question is, on what terms?” he said. “There’s not a lot of information necessary to say one of these (plans) actually is viable, or whether it’s a way to take us to the cleaners when we’re already carrying hundreds of millions of dollars of debt for the last time we did something like this.”

The city recently went through a similar scenario, he said, when it chose the Bally’s casino for development, only to find the project is already being scaled back and has funding issues.

“I think Gov. Pritzker has spoken to this exactly right, with a real wariness about public funding of sports stadiums,” Ferguson said. “We need to see reliable, thorough revenue projections for this before we can even open the conversation.”

Making the situation more precarious, Ferguson said, is that all levels of government are facing financial cliffs in multiple areas — pensions, transit and Chicago Public Schools —with the end of billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 pandemic money.

Sports economist J.C. Bradbury, voicing a common concern among economists, said whatever public money is earmarked for the stadium would be better spent on other public projects, or returned to taxpayers.

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” Bradbury said. “The Bears aren’t going to leave one of the most iconic football markets in the country. Tell the Bears to pay for their own damn stadium, and if they don’t like it, to go jump in Lake Michigan.”

...continued

swipe to next page