http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-field-0203-20120203,0,7305450.story
A Chicago Super Bowl! Oh ... wait ... sorry ...
Yet another example of how the Soldier Field fiasco cheated Chicagoans
February 3, 2012
The 10-day festival known as "sports' biggest party" thus far has been a rollicking success. Visitors bearing great wads of cash have boosted the local economy. Locals, too, have flocked into the downtown "Super Bowl Village" for 800-foot zip line rides — and for what looks like the world's greatest concentration of music events. Oh, and there'll also be an any-weather football game at a state-of-the-art stadium topped by a retractable roof.
Yes, we envy all the fun and profit now enjoyed by our neighbors in Indianapolis, which has a metro-area population of 1.75 million.
And we'd love to boast about the past and future Super Bowls right here in Chicago, which has a metro-area population of 9.46 million. You want a party? Chicago could throw a party.
If, that is, Chicago wasn't stuck with the shrimpiest stadium (capacity: 61,500) in the National Football League, a relentlessly open-air facility that, barring some NFL change of heart, is unfit for a February Super Bowl. Or an NCAA Final Four explosion of March Madness. Or huge indoor concerts between autumn and spring. Or, dare we raise a sore subject, weatherproof opening and closing ceremonies for some future Chicago Olympiad.
No, Chicago can't begin to compete with Indianapolis or other U.S. cities for these lavish and lucrative events. Why not? Because, a decade ago, Mayor Richard M. Daley and the private company that owns the Chicago Bears insisted on building the wrong stadium in the wrong place — with enormous help from taxpayers who were forbidden any chance to vote on their forced participation.
Now those taxpayers are stuck with a lakefront eyesore we've likened to a massive Ty-D-Bol clumsily jammed into a supposedly sacrosanct war monument to deceased American servicemen and women. When this retrofitted monstrosity opened in 2003, Tribune columnist Steve Chapman labeled it "the most jarring union of youth and age since Anna Nicole Smith married an 89-year-old billionaire."
What a lousy deal this Soldier Field fiasco was for Chicago. We wrote Dec. 9 about how the project's cost eventually swelled to about $660 million, the public debt burden to some $432 million. Backloaded principal and interest payments are leaping from $6.3 million in 2002 to $88.5 million in 2032. To make the financing work, revenues from a 2 percent hotel tax have to grow by 5.615 percent every year, for 30 years.
Are you surprised that revenues are falling short of that foolishly ambitious growth rate?
Are you surprised that, for the next two decades, Chicago taxpayers are stuck paying any and all shortfalls — something Daley flat-out guaranteed would not happen?
This was a colossal screw-up that didn't need to be. There was chatter about an indoor Chicago stadium even before Walter Payton first wore a Bears uniform in 1975. During the 1990s, politicians and civic leaders talked to death proposals for "McDome," a 75,000-seat, multi-use arena — sports, entertainment, exhibitions, conventions — to accompany a McCormick Place addition. Didn't happen.
In 2001, the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois — eager to pre-empt the desecration of Soldier Field — pushed a clever and much less expensive plan for an 80,000-seat domed stadium on 23 acres of public land across 35th Street from what's now U.S. Cellular Field. A survey by Market Shares Corp. found that citizens favored that location by a 2-1 ratio — and favored a facility with a retractable roof by a 5-1 ratio.
Daley, though, was in Full Stubborn — think Chicago Children's Museum to Grant Park. And the company that owns the Bears had a fervent but unarticulated phobia of proposed locations on the South or West sides. As the 35th Street proposal began to gain traction in public discourse, mouthpieces for the Bears owners and City Hall assured us that thorough "studies" had ruled out that site. We repeatedly asked to see those "studies." We're still waiting.
So Daley and the Bears owners got their way, taxpayers got shafted and Chicago got eliminated from competition for Super Bowls. Of the 45 games played thus far, three have been in Snowbelt stadiums, all with roofs: Pontiac, Mich., in 1982, Minneapolis in 1992 and Detroit in 2006. The 2014 game will be played in a new New York-area outdoor stadium; nervous NFL officials have hinted that that's a one-time exception to their First Commandment: Thou shalt not risk a winter-ravaged Super Bowl.
So who knows? Maybe the NFL someday will decide it wants many more Super Bowls played in cold outdoor climes.
Maybe, that is, this city someday will qualify for the mega-event Indianapolis is happily hosting now.
Or maybe Chicago's best hope is that bond payments conclude as scheduled in 2032 — after which wrecking balls can demolish Soldier Field's grotesque and impractical Ty-D-Bol.