But let's ask the school board a couple of questions and walk through a few facts
1) The Bears submitted a bid for the property on June 17, 2021. That bid, we would later find out, was roughly $190M
2) A week later, the Village of Arlington Heights updated the zoning to allow a stadium to go on that site. This did not include county approval
3) Bears sign purchase agreement for Arlington Park with Churchill Downs in September 2021
4) In September of 2021, the last horse race takes place at Arlington Park (I was there). The process of dismantling the place begins immediately (my neighbors bought furniture and other stuff from the park. Most of us refrained from purchasing any souvenirs). I mention this because as of that date, or more closely, the day after, that property was not equipped or able to host another horse race again.
5) Churchill Downs was on the hook for the assessed property tax value of $33M. Of note, this was a commercially viable race track, with a known purchase value of approximately 190M (all of the bids were north of $150M and while the Bears were chosen with a bid close to $190M, everyone, the schools included, agreed with a $33M valuation on a property everyone knew was selling for close to $190M)
6) More zoning talks begin with all partiers in October of 2021
These are all undisputed facts. The school district and others valued the property at $33M following a publicly available and known purchase price being announced.
Fast forward to 2022/2023. We know the Bears are buying the property, the transaction is expected to close in late 2022/early 2023. Churchill Downs negotiates a valuation of the property for tax purposes of ~$80M for 2022, with the schools, knowing the purchase price and that the Bears intend to put a stadium there. More than doubling the previous year's valuation.
Somehow, between then and now, the school districts valuation doubled (their opening bid was $160M, and has come down to $125M).
As everyone in Illinois knows, constitutionally you cannot sales chase when it comes to property values.
So now to the question to the schools. What has changed materially from the time you agreed with Churchill Downs that the value of the property was $80M to your current offers of $160 and $125M. The answer is nothing. The track isn't functioning (it was torn down throughout 2023 and again, the last race was in September of 2021). The school boards should have to answer the question of why they were willing to assess the value at $80M when it was Churchill Downs and $160M when it was the Bears. Every data point around the sale was already known when that $80M assessment was agreed to, so why the magic jump? What changed?
I would love for KByrnes to weigh in here, and explain property valuation, and how it's fluxuated so much for this property depending on who was being negotiated with.
So yes, the Bears haven't shown all their cards to the districts, because the districts are full of shit. I hope the Bears sell the parcel to Amazon to turn into a giant warehouse, and run Amazon trucks up and down Euclid and all through Palatine and f's up traffic for all of those schools in perpetuity, while they all get much much less in property value from that land than what they would have gotten.
The schools are greedy and want to front load payments when there won't be a single person living on that land or attending that school for years. And by the way, all of us that live around there have seen increased assessments that are currently funding said schools, because the Bears were coming. That's going to go back down too, and they are going to lose out on that money as well.
Everyone of those dipshits on each of the school boards should be run out on a rail.
And I'm still pissed at the AH HS district for what they did to my daughter's soccer club. The HS was happy to take money from the club to build an artificial turf field, in exchange for use by the club, until that wasn't what they wanted, so they kicked the club out and didn't pay them back for the field that the club paid to install for them. They are a bunch of smug assholes, and they will get what's coming to them soon enough. The whole area would print money, and every condo and townhouse that would go up on that property (most of whom probably won't have school age kids) will be paying property taxes to the schools well above and beyond where things stand today. The money would come, but the schools wanted it prepaid and up front and wouldn't budge.