Frankly, it doesn’t come as a huge surprise that the White Sox and Bears might well be preparing to double-team public officials to try and get hefty public subsidies to build two new sports stadiums at once.
Nothing would shock us anymore in Chicago’s stadium saga when it comes to sheer moxie for making big asks of taxpayers. Sports teams, and some public officials, will call it “thinking big” for the city’s future. Nothing wrong with big thinking. We just want to be sure the public doesn’t get fleeced in the process.
We’re still far, very far, from convinced that a new Sox ballpark at The 78 in the South Loop makes sense from a taxpayers’ perspective. Adding on another huge gimme for a new Bears lakefront stadium — after Arlington Heights schools held firm against that team’s effort to keep taxes low on its proposed suburban stadium site — makes us even more skeptical.
All of this is still up in the air, but Related Midwest, the developer overseeing The 78 site, is actively trying to put together a “financing partnership” between the two teams to make the case for subsidies, as the Sun-Times’ Fran Spielman reports. Meanwhile, it turns out the Bears are showing new renderings of their proposed domed lakefront stadium, to be built south of Soldier Field, to lawmakers in Springfield, Spielman reported.
The Bears and Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office wouldn’t comment to Spielman. Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s office is sticking with what Pritzker said last week: That he’s “reluctant” to provide public subsidies for sports stadiums without assurance of public benefit. We urge the governor to stand firm.
But now Chicagoans at least know more about what they’re potentially dealing with here. There are plenty of questions still to be answered, chief among them still being: How reliable are the numbers on $7.5 billion in private investment that a new Sox stadium would supposedly spark?
We’re also curious about the cost of infrastructure improvements at The 78. Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf says $900million; Related Midwest President Curt Bailey says $450 million. Might that morph again over time? Who knows?
Another eyebrow-raising point: Those Bears renderings supposedly making the rounds around Springfield supposedly show a stadium “possibly surrounded by a hotel and entertainment district accessible to public transit.” That sounds suspiciously akin to One Central, the mixed-use hotel/entertainment/transit hub that Landmark Development President Bob Dunn has touted for the area around Soldier Field. Dunn angled for public subsidies for One Central too, and it wouldn’t surprise us if somehow, some way, some version of his plan ends up being shoehorned into a Bears stadium proposal or a potential Sox-Bears proposal.
These and other questions are still to be answered, and the public will need more than picture-perfect renderings to do it.
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