Illinois megaprojects bill is tax code in Bears clothing, threat to school funding

For the past five months, educators have gone to Springfield to fight for the resources Illinois promised its students and has yet to deliver. Instead, everyone in Springfield is treating one cause with sudden urgency: making the McCaskey family that owns the Bears and their billion-dollar corporation happy.

Finding a deal that keeps the Bears in Illinois is one thing — and as a fan I hope it happens — but what is actually in front of us is a megaproject bill that rewrites the tax code at the expense of our schools.

A University of Illinois Springfield survey found that most people outside of Chicago do not consider keeping the Bears a top priority, and nearly 70% said the team should fund its own stadium. The option that polled worst was offering a sweeter deal than Indiana. That is precisely what Springfield is pursuing.

What the House passed last month is a 377-page rewrite of how property taxes work in this state put inside a Bear costume.

It has very little to do with football, but it has everything to do with what will happen to our towns and our schools if mega-developers get gifted millions in tax dollars that would otherwise go to our already underfunded communities. The Chicago Bears are the reason lawmakers felt the urgency to move, but strip away the jersey and you have a bill that lets corporations negotiate their property tax bills for up to 40 years, while the rest of us keep paying whatever our assessors say we owe.

If you add a mother-in-law suite to your home your property gets reassessed and your tax bill goes up the following year. That is how the system works for regular people. But under this bill, a developer building a factory won’t see an increase for decades. The rule that applies to a family in Belleville does not apply to a billion-dollar corporation building in their backyard.

That double standard has consequences, and they fall hardest on our students.

Local property taxes make up about 63% of school district funding in Illinois. And Illinois is already behind on funding its students by more than $6 billion, including $5 billion for K-12 schools alone. Every dollar we invest in public education pays back multiples in tax revenue, reduced public costs, and stronger communities. This bill makes that investment harder to sustain.

I teach at Belleville West High School in a school district that is funded at just 68% of what the state says students there actually need. Illinois passed a law in 2017 promising every school would reach 90% adequacy by 2027. At the current pace we will not even get there until 2034, seven years late. This bill makes that timeline even harder to meet.

This is a statewide problem, and southwestern Illinois would feel it deeply.

Look at Granite City, just across the river from St. Louis, where the state recently awarded a $5 million grant to America’s Central Port, a public port authority, to purchase 350 acres of farmland for a planned rail-served industrial megasite. Private manufacturers or logistics companies who eventually build there could qualify for a giant tax break under the megaprojects bill that will fill their pockets but starve nearby schools. The school districts serving Granite City and Madison County could be looking at losing millions in much-needed funds for a generation.

Plug a $100 million project into the Illinois Megaproject - Mega Loss Calculator for Madison County, and schools alone stand to lose more than $1.2 billion over 25 years.

Supporters of the bill added a property tax relief provision to win votes. But an analysis conducted by Gov. Pritzker’s own office called that relief “negligible.” On a hypothetical $20 million development payment, the typical Illinois homeowner would only see $1.29 in relief. The denial of revenue to schools means that they’d likely see their property taxes hiked to make up the difference. What remains is a system where a homeowner faces full accountability for every dollar of assessed value on their property, while a major developer gets to cut a deal that the rest of us will be asked to pay for.

I understand the race-to-the-bottom competitive pressure Illinois is under. Indiana has been dangling more than a billion dollars in public subsidies to pull the Bears across the state line. But the answer cannot be rewriting the tax code in ways that shift the burden of funding our schools from the corporations building wealth in our communities onto families who already live there.

Illinois teachers see every day what happens when school funding falls short. Outdated materials. Unfilled positions. Programs cut. We do not need a law that makes that worse.

The owners of the Bears can work out their deal up in Chicago and its suburbs. But doing it in a way that harms working families and children’s schools across the state is a deal breaker.

Cyndi Oberle-Dahm is Executive Vice President of the Illinois Federation of Teachers, President of the Southwest Area Council (SWAC), and Inter-Organizational Liaison for the Belleville Federation of Teachers Local 434