The Indiana legislature passed a bill this week to attract the NFL’s Chicago Bears to the state with a new government stadium authority. The best-case scenario is that this move is elaborate interstate trolling that will amount to nothing. If things get out of hand and taxpayer money starts to flow, Indiana would be making a mistake.
Mere speculation that the Bears — who began playing their home games in Chicago in 1921 — will move across the border into Indiana is an embarrassment to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D), a potential presidential candidate. Indiana Republicans love to razz Illinois about its poor business climate, and this is an opportunity.
It’s unlikely that the Bears will actually leave Chicago, unless Indiana makes them an offer of taxpayer money that’s too good to refuse. There are no numbers yet from Indiana, but the Bears have told Illinois they want $850 million in public funding. Turning this decision into a corporate welfare bidding war would be a game both states would lose.
Indiana knows better. In 2005, then-Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) abolished the state’s Department of Commerce, which had become a sprawling bureaucracy for corporate welfare. He replaced it with a public-private partnership with a small staff to promote Indiana to business leaders.
Daniels then balanced Indiana’s budget, cut taxes across the board, passed right-to-work and modernized administrative agencies. That made the state attractive to business without special giveaways. Research from the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University in 2013 found that Daniels’s approach worked better than what came before, at lower cost.
If economic development is the goal, then maintaining a better business climate than Illinois — not too difficult a task — is far more effective than bribing the Bears to build a stadium.
The Bears franchise is worth over $8 billion. It can afford to build its own stadium. Football stadiums seem like huge economic hubs because most people only see them when they’re full of cheering fans. But that only happens at most nine days a year for an NFL team. A stadium might get a few concerts or other one-off events on top of that, but it sits empty most days. There are better uses for public funds.
Indiana already has the NFL’s Colts. Indianapolis fans might be disappointed by their five-season playoff drought, but the Colts’ 2006 Super Bowl victory (in which they beat the Bears) is 21 years more recent than the Bears’ last championship.
Shelling out the better part of a billion dollars to attract a team that won’t even be associated with Indiana would be a foolish use of taxpayer money. Indiana leaders would be better off touting that businesses can move there without having to shake down the state government.
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