Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s bid to keep the Bears in Chicago by topping Soldier Field with a dome has the feel of desperation. It’s like the old hook-and-ladder play. Your team is 90 yards away from a touchdown with just a few seconds on the clock, and tries to lateral the ball from player to player, in hopes of a miracle moment.
Chicago finally got a glimpse of Lightfoot’s plan to overhaul Soldier Field and the Museum Campus that — for now, at least — serves as home to the NFL’s smallest capacity stadium. The mayor revealed options crafted both to reflect scenarios in which the Bears stay put, and where the Monsters of the Midway take the Jane Addams Expressway westward to a new home in Arlington Heights.
The carrot Lightfoot dangled in front of Halas Hall comes in the form of a domed Soldier Field that would expand seating capacity from 61,500 to 70,000. Time will tell whether it gets the Bears’ attention. City officials claim it would be $1 billion to $1.5 billion cheaper than building a stadium from scratch in the northwest suburbs, and it would for the first time give fans a climate-controlled, snowless experience in which to revel in the team’s triumphs — and of course, commiserate over their on-field implosions.
The mayor’s other two options for Soldier Field include building columns at each end zone to make the stadium “dome-ready” (a way to kick some of the costs down the road) and an option that acquiesces to the Bears’ departure — smart modifications to the stadium to make it better suited for soccer and major concerts.
Lightfoot has made it clear she wants the Bears to stay. But she also has to ready the city, and the Museum Campus, for a future in which the team no longer calls Chicago home. She’s proposing changes to the campus that, if approved, would happen regardless of the team’s plans. Those include turning Solidarity Drive into a year-round plaza, festooning the campus with large-scale public art and improving its mass transit access.
Ideally, the civic debate over Soldier Field would be taking place with its future use already set. This backward form of urban planning gives too much power to the Bears, especially since the franchise has shown reluctance in remaining a partner in the stadium’s future. So far, at least.
The more likely scenario is that the Bears follow through with their $197.2 million deal to buy Arlington International Racecourse with the intent of building a stadium there. If that happens, Soldier Field will still have utility as a venue for college football games, soccer, concerts, graduations and other large-scale events.
What should genuinely worry Chicagoans is not just the price tag for a domed Soldier Field, which Lightfoot’s team says would cost up to $2.2 billion, but the possibility that taxpayers could shoulder a major chunk of the cost.
Many taxpayers are haunted by the last Soldier Field renovation in 2002, and not just because of the hideous glass-and-steel saucer it placed atop the stadium’s iconic colonnades. Then Mayor Richard M. Daley had previously pledged to taxpayers that they were “not at risk for any part of this project,” only to later broadside Chicagoans with a $432 million bill.
At a news conference Monday announcing her plans, Lightfoot tiptoed around third-rail questions about taxpayer money for the project, saying only that “we’re going to have to invest some, of course, but the dollar amount depends on what the scenario is, and that’s going to be driven by who is the anchor tenant.”
Here’s the cold reality. City Hall’s budget is already too stretched to take on the cost of doming Soldier Field. And at a time when taxpayers struggle with rising inflation and growing potential for a recession, earmarking tax money to revamp Soldier Field would be fiscally irresponsible in the worst way.
Also at the news conference was developer Bob Dunn, who is part of the mayor’s working group shaping the proposed Museum Campus makeover. There is some logic to Dunn’s involvement, since he has expertise in remaking NFL stadiums.
But since 2019, he’s been pitching to City Hall and Springfield his Xanadu-like dream of a $20 billion megadevelopment called One Central just west of Soldier Field. The project would add 22.3 million square feet of buildings, some as high as 89 stories, and create in the South Loop a massive transit hub serving as a rail nexus for Amtrak, Metra and the CTA.
So far, city and state leaders have reacted to Dunn’s vision with a “meh.” If the Bears stay and Soldier Field gets revamped, Dunn’s chances of building One Central — and hitting the jackpot with it — vastly improve. While we weren’t surprised about his role in the working group, it’s important to keep in mind where his interests lie.
For their part, the Bears are sticking to their script. They reacted to Lightfoot’s announcement by reiterating what they said earlier this month: “The only potential project the Chicago Bears are exploring for a new stadium development is Arlington Park.” Nevertheless, there’s still a crack in the door, since the Bears are not slated to close on the deal with Churchill Downs Inc., which owns the racecourse property, until the end of the year at the earliest.
Ultimately, where the Bears land is up to the McCaskeys. They’re at the helm of a $4 billion dollar franchise according to Forbes magazine, with the wherewithal to shoulder the cost of a stadium revamp if that’s the direction they want to go. If they feel that a domed Soldier Field makes the most sense, Chicago certainly would welcome that decision — with a caveat for the mayor.
The Bears are a business, and don’t owe any allegiance to taxpayers. But Mayor Lightfoot does. And ahead of the 2023 mayoral election, voters will watch just how fiercely she puts up a goal-line stand in defense of Chicago’s citizens.
———
