Mayor Richard Daley needn’t have pandered last week to the Bears with his $156 million offer to renovate Soldier Field.
He should have given a simple, succinct response to owner Michael McCaskey’s threats to move the Bears out of town unless a stadium is built or rebuilt for them:
Take a hike, Mike.
Take the Bears to Gary or Tipperary or the Canary Islands.
Have some shame. Don’t keep trying to blackmail the city into a Taj Michael it cannot afford on any level.
Those hundreds of millions of dollars McCaskey wants to extort from the city for a stadium would have a proportional benefit for the city’s or region’s populace so minuscule it is laughable.
The beneficiaries of such largesse, should the Bears choose to accept it, would be Mr. McCaskey, his family ownership of the team and its 60,000-odd season-ticket holders.
And all for eight regular-season games a year.
For the other 7 million Chicagoland residents, getting tickets to these games would be even harder than it is now, what with the expense of private seat licenses and all the other moneymaking gimmicks owners concoct that expand their wallets and limit their audience. The NFL isn’t like baseball, where the average Joe or Jane can walk up to the box office and buy a ticket for virtually any of the 81 regular season home games. Football is a private club for which the public coffers need not be emptied.
Since most of us watch the Bears on television, what difference is there if the games are beamed from Gary or Garmisch-Partenkirchen?
Oh, someone is going to cry Chicago’s civic pride would be wounded by losing the Bears.
Wouldn’t the city do itself a lot prouder by finding ways to spend $156 million on its schools and its children, including sports programs that could help thousands of kids instead of just one pro football owner and his four dozen players?
Now Mike, slick businessman that he is, undoubtedly will stand behind the old chestnut that building a stadium would provide tremendous financial benefits for the city and region. That shell game has snookered mayors and governors worldwide.
The city instead should listen to a more rational voice on the subject.
“Increased government investment in sports teams and stadiums seems to have spawned an economic myth about professional sports,” said Dr. Robert Baade of Lake Forest College, an authority on the relation between sports investment and economic stimulus, “that the presence of sports teams and stadiums has a significant and unique impact on an area’s economic growth.”
In fact, as Stanford University economist Roger Noll has said many times, an industrial park will create many more jobs than a new stadium.
“A pro sports team,” Baade added, “has no more economic impact than a single, medium-size department store.”
The jobs created by stadiums or franchises tend to be low-paying and seasonal. Yet cities continue to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on stadiums and other financial incentives for sport rather than on industrial parks to provide jobs or social programs to help their poorest citizens.
In a study that analyzed 48 cities and the regions surrounding them over a 30-year period from 1958 through 1987, Baade found the presence of professional sports teams or a new stadium had no impact on per-capita personal income growth or level of employment.
Yet the few voices of dissent to such construction usually are drowned out by the cheers of the economically advantaged, who see nothing wrong in building one family’s football team a new house while thousands of people living in the same city are homeless.
Politicians confounded by the massive scope of urban ills are inclined to follow the social programs of the declining Roman Empire, dispensing spectacles and the occasional bite of food-bread and circuses-to appease the public.
“Those who support subsidies for pro sports teams say that doesn’t force painful tradeoffs with schools and services because the sport generates revenues to pay for the other things,” Baade said. “But that isn’t what happens. The other areas are shortchanged.”
Some would argue the city’s latest offer to the Bears is not supposed to put a burden on the taxpayers or divert money from other areas because it will be paid for by a bond issue. That presumes the deal will come in anywhere near the announced $156 million, highly unlikely, given the history of such projects in big cities.
And there are limits to civic bond issues, so a big deal for the Bears may prevent Chicago from issuing other bonds for less cavalier purposes. Of course, fun and games seem to take priority in the distorted value system of our Alice-in-Wonderland world.
Economic arguments, as well as those of civic pride, were used to persuade Jacksonville, Fla., citizens to agree to virtual extortion in their successful attempt to lure an NFL expansion franchise.
Jacksonville’s stadium renovation was projected to cost $121 million but already has risen to $138 million. Of that total, local government is paying $125 million.
It has signed a lease allowing the football team to defer its minuscule rent for the first five years ($250,000 per year in that span); pay no utility costs for 30 years; and keep all revenues from tickets, luxury boxes, parking and concessions (save a $2.50 ticket surcharge). The city will pay nearly all operational costs, including wages of the concessionaires and ticket takers.
Meanwhile, a $53 million expansion of the Port of Jacksonville remains on hold. Longshoremen at the port earn about $20 an hour, far better wages than those earned by concession stand workers or parking lot attendants at stadiums.
The money spent by the well-heeled on pro football produces returns for players and owners and the league that largely is spent or invested outside Jacksonville. Those entertainment dollars going to football likely are taken from other local businesses, such as bowling alleys or movie theaters or restaurants or driving ranges.
“The NFL owners played us like a Stradivarius,” former Jacksonville City Council member John Draper has said.
Ten NFL teams and five Pleasure Domes won’t make Jacksonville into Xanadu or Chicago. Neither will the loss of a franchise turn Chicago into Jacksonville.
Both NFL teams have left the Los Angeles area, but the L.A. County Art Museum and the Hollywood Bowl and UCLA (and the Dodgers and Angels and Kings and Mighty Ducks and Lakers and Clippers) still are there.
Baltimore has become, perhaps coincidentally, a much more attractive city in the decade since the NFL’s Colts skipped town for Indianapolis, which still is India-no-place.
The wildly successful Monet exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, which has put no new financial burden on the city, has done a zillion times more for the city’s image as a place to visit or live than all the woofing over the 1986 Super Bowl victory. It also has brought in tens of millions of tourist dollars, spread among hoteliers and cabdrivers and waiters.
Bears fans go to Soldier Field, spend some money there and go back to their homes in the area.
The Bears bring in money that goes almost exclusively to the Mikeys and Nikes of the world.
Let them take their ball and go away.
