Mr. Mayor: Tell The Bears To Drop Dead
A rushed, multi-billion dollar deal with a sports team with negligible public benefit is bad politics and bad policy. From a progressive Mayor, its an insult.
It is not at all uncommon for cities and their mayors to subsidize their local sports teams. The thinking goes, a city needs a sports team for its “brand”, its public image, something to make its marks on the world. A sports team needs a city to host the games, to build rapport among the residents, and to establish their own brand loyalty. To do that, you need somewhere to house the team; you need a stadium, a very very big and expensive one, at that.
Now, a good Mayor would approach any sports CEO seeking public financing for a stadium with a list of demands; union jobs at high wages that employ community residents, affordable tickets for fans, affordable housing, publicly available green spaces, and what have you. In return, the city can scratch the team’s back; they can phase in some public taxpayer money over a designated period of time, coupled with some significant private investment, and win some decent gains on investment for the public. Everybody’s happy, and no one is pissed off.
I have to admit, dear readers, that I was initially sold on this idea. It didn’t seem all that bad to give a little and get a little, right?
Well, that feeling quickly dissipated when I learned that Mayor Brandon Johnson seemed to have skipped the whole “negotiate and demonstrate public benefits to the taxpayer” part of this equation and instead just decided to fork over a lump sum of $2 billion to the Chicago Bears, who’ve been mired in a years-long failed endeavor to leave the city for Arlington Heights.
The $2 billion check the Mayor wants to write is nearly half of the $4.7 billion stadium building plan the Bears released on Wednesday, which they say will be a huge benefit to the city via tax revenues and jobs.
The obvious problem with this idea, as alluring as it may seem to the fifth floor, is that the Bears don’t need it. The Chicago Bears Organization is partnered with a whole array of corporations, business leaders, philanthropic groups, celebrities you name it. Why in God’s name do they need the 2.6 million Chicago residents to pay for their new plaything on the Lakefront? What gives?
It can only be attributed to hubris, arrogance, and the soul-rotting elitism that comes with being wealthy in this capitalistic world, why a group of wealthy sports executives would ask residents of a city that distributes its wealth as unevenly as Chicago, for one nickel of their hard-earned money. This is something we, those of us who know the Windy City well, have come to expect of our corporate overlords. They’ve played this same nefarious game of corporate welfare lobbying since the Daley days. They’re soulless ghouls. That’s nothing new.
What is quite head-scratching, however, about this peculiar deal is why the Mayor, a progressive union organizer, has jumped on the bandwagon. What could a progressive case possibly be for a $2 billion tax-payer-funded sports stadium contribution when the CTA is falling apart, strapped for cash and labor, over 60,000 Chicagoans are unhoused, a migrant crisis continues with no end in sight, and the city is due to host the Democratic National Convention amidst a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and mounting protests that are likely to overwhelm the CPD and lead to excessive force.
The city has plenty of problems that need money and needs money fast. The Mayor has made some major policy commitments to underserved communities that are laudable and have the potential to be transformative, most notably his recent $1 billion bond deal for community development and affordable housing. That is what organizers spent months knocking on doors in the Chicago winter and writing articles (wink wink) for.
But these accomplishments continue to be overshadowed by terrible political instincts and sloppy on-the-fly policy-making on the Mayor’s part, both things that doomed his predecessor, Lori Lightfoot. The Mayor is continuously allowing himself to be sweet-talked into bad deals and public missteps by the people advising him. Is it any wonder his senior advisor, Jason Lee, who has been nothing but a walking public relations nightmare for the Mayor since his inauguration, is lockstep on board with this terrible deal?
Luckily for us, the deal appears to be dead in the water. Nobody in Springfield wants to wear the political jacket of greenlighting a cash giveaway when the state is already facing a budget deficit. But this begs an even more disturbing question, why did the Mayor make this grandiose announcement without consulting the people ultimately responsible for approving the funds in Springfield? Is his IGA office really that incompetent?
The way I see it, Mayor Johnson needs to rediscover his political acumen, his core, the bold progressive ideology that made him an attractive candidate for Chicagoans desperate for a sharp break from the neoliberal past. Why do we only get this version of Brandon Johnson ever so often or only after massive public pushback? Why isn’t the Mayor who stands up to corporations, even when it’s unpopular in elite circles, his default stance? The people who gave him the keys to the 5th floor of City Hall deserve to know, and if they aren’t satisfied with his answer, they’ll turf him out in 2027 and replace him with someone else.
Mayor Johnson, tell the Chicago Bears to drop dead. We’ve got bigger fish to fry, and you know it.