Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2023   |   View in browser

My Thoughts on Ryan Field

Last night, after many months of discussion and consideration, the Evanston City Council voted to approve Northwestern University’s application to build a new football stadium, as well as a zoning change that will allow, among other things, six concerts a year at the new facility.

Throughout my time as mayor, I’ve been committed to doing what I believe is best for all of Evanston. Sometimes that’s very easy, and sometimes less so. This process was a difficult one for our whole community, with many people expressing strong views on both sides. I’ve had the privilege of hearing from hundreds of people through emails, phone calls, many conversations and meetings, and public comment both at Council meetings and the Land Use Commission. Thank you to all who’ve weighed in, shared opinions, and educated me on the many facets of this issue – I appreciate it tremendously.

Even though the back-and-forth was sometimes contentious, I was pleased and impressed with the seriousness with which the City Council took all perspectives into consideration. After all this input and lots of consideration, I decided to vote yes on this project, including the zoning changes, because I believe it will have a positive long-term impact on the City and its residents.

I want to take this opportunity to share my (admittedly very long) thoughts that led to this decision. I go into great detail below, but here are the key reasons I decided to support this project: 

• The project itself constitutes a massive $800 million investment from Northwestern that will create jobs, generate significant revenue for the City, and construct a world-class facility.

• The utilization of the stadium will bring more people into Evanston (meaning more jobs, more income for small businesses, and more revenue for the City coming from non-residents) while establishing guardrails to minimize impact on the neighborhood.

• Separately, Northwestern has committed to a historic agreement that will directly invest well over $100 million into our community – money for our schools, downtown revitalization, job training programs, affordable housing, climate action, and more.

A generational investment in a state-of-the-art facility

Simply put, no town of our size sees many $800 million investments like this. It will create jobs and generate significant tax and fee revenue for the City.

There’s been a lot of discussion about Northwestern’s commitment to working with minority- and women-owned businesses, but it bears repeating: their 35% target is game-changing, both as an opportunity for small- and medium-sized local businesses to establish themselves and grow and as a path to careers for Evanston residents.

Finally, let's remember there's already a football stadium at 1501 Central Street, and it's likely to remain there for a long time. What's currently standing is, well, let's just say it's not in great shape. Replacing it with a world-class facility is a benefit from every standpoint, including aesthetics as well as our ability to attract people to visit Evanston.  

We all benefit when a private institution decides to spend an enormous amount of money to dramatically improve one of the largest structures in town.

Concerts can be a good thing

The aspect of this project that attracted the most attention, discussion, and controversy was the zoning change to permit six concerts per year. Here’s why I think that proposal is a net positive for Evanston.

We’re still in a time of dramatic economic change for places like Evanston. Our pre-pandemic retail economy was reliant on a large daily population of office workers, and like all other business districts in that situation, we have not fully recovered. If the “recovery” we’re looking for means “return our economy to a pre-2020 reality,” that will only happen when in-person work goes back to pre-2020 levels, which I think is probably never.

The City recently commissioned a meticulous, detailed, and celebrated plan for business district recovery. While it’s long and nuanced and worth a complete read, I think its main thrust can be summarized simply: find ways unrelated to office work to attract people to Evanston through innovative programming, investment in public spaces, and leveraging of existing institutions and traditions. Or, to put it in three blunt words: have more events.

Opponents of the zoning change urged me to take with a grain of salt the economic impact studies that tried to put a number on the spillover economic effect of holding concerts at Ryan Field, and I think they’re right. I view those studies as speculative, and I don’t think we should rely heavily on the specific numbers they come up with. But what I don’t take with a grain of salt is the overwhelming preference expressed by Evanston small businesses who encouraged us to support this initiative. As they continue to navigate this challenging environment, they anticipate relying on increasing numbers of visitors (customers!) to Evanston.

But I don’t think the benefit of concerts begins and ends with economics. The concern raised by opponents of the change that I weighed most heavily throughout this process was the idea that concerts would change the character of the neighborhood, loosening social bonds and potentially decreasing property values. Ultimately, I believe that this will not be the case.

Having more events doesn’t just mean bringing more people into Evanston to spend their money here, enjoy a concert, and then leave again. Music is – throughout human history and across cultures and genres – a uniting force that brings people together. Enabling a limited number of concerts in a balanced way, with guardrails in place to minimize the negative impact, can strengthen, not weaken, connections in the neighborhood and beyond.

About those guardrails: I take concerns about neighborhood disruption seriously. That’s why the package I supported includes very significant fines if the concerts don’t end on time, don’t comply with noise limits, or don’t meet traffic standards.

When Northwestern saw these fines, they protested that they were out of line with fines at other similar venues around the country. With all due respect, that’s the point! Our goal is never to collect a dime from these fines – instead, we want them to be high enough to be a successful disincentive against pushing the boundaries.

I believe that Northwestern will meet these criteria, and the concerts will impose a manageable impact on the neighborhood – but remember that we also retain the right to increase and impose fees and restrictions if things don’t work out as well as hoped. With these tools in place, I am confident that we can ensure the concerts will be a net positive for the neighborhood as well as the broader community.

A historic package of community benefits

As a part of this project, Northwestern has agreed to a community benefits package that fundamentally rewrites its commitment to Evanston, representing a historic investment in our community.

Some highlights that I’m especially pleased with include:

• A 15-year commitment to pay into the City’s Good Neighbor Fund, starting with $3 million in the first year and growing with inflation. The mere existence of the Good Neighbor Fund dates back less than 15 years, and this agreement represents a tripling of its size as well as a huge increase in its duration. This will total $45 million, plus more for inflation.

• A 15-year annual guaranteed floor of $2.5 million in tax revenue to the City coming directly from the stadium (also growing with inflation). This is significant because it means that financial benefit to the City is not contingent on successful concerts – in other words, Northwestern, not Evanston, holds the risk associated with the concerts not working out. This will total $37.5 million, plus more for inflation.

• A 15-year commitment to make $3 million in various other annual donations to Evanston schools, nonprofits, racial equity work, workforce development efforts, downtown revitalization, and event programming. This will total $45 million.

Northwestern’s financial support of Evanston (or lack thereof) has been a point of contention for many decades. This agreement certainly doesn’t put that to rest. But it represents a new chapter in the financial relationship between our two institutions, with a commitment of, if my reading of history is correct, far more support than Northwestern has given Evanston throughout its existence.

Some will say they should do more. I agree! In my view, the way to achieve that is to combine hard-nosed negotiation with a spirit of partnership. We need to show that we’re prepared to stand firm and make appropriate demands on behalf of the City, while also demonstrating that when Northwestern steps up, we’re willing to move too. I think we’ve achieved that here, setting ourselves up both for this new and historic level of support right now and also for a collaborative relationship going forward, which can provide further benefits to our community.

Let me close this section with some words about the process that brought us to this package of benefits. Of course, I met with Northwestern representatives regularly and pushed them hard to offer more to Evanston. I'm proud of what I was able to achieve, but I want to be extremely clear that the credit is not mine alone.

In my advocacy, I represented my views about what the City needed, and of course, I brought to the table plenty of knowledge about the priorities of other Councilmembers. But I was not negotiating on behalf of the whole Council. Every member of the Council is a free agent and has the right (and responsibility!) to make up their own mind.

That made the situation a little chaotic. But it also granted every Councilmember a lot of power – especially because the ultimate passage happened without any votes to spare.

I’m pleased to say that Councilmembers took that power seriously and used it to Evanston’s benefit. Everyone who voted yes drove an extremely hard bargain before doing so, and the fact that Northwestern had to satisfy all the yes votes simultaneously wound up being enormously helpful to all Evanston residents and taxpayers.

Some factors that didn’t influence my decision

One thing that makes this issue complicated is that the broader discussion about Northwestern, the football stadium, and the future of higher education and athletics contains many features that are fascinating and important for society at large but may not be relevant to the City’s approval of this project. I’d like to name and explain a few of those aspects.

• Do I personally like the idea of spending $800 million on a football stadium, or what that expenditure says about the nexus of big money and elite higher education? I sure don’t! It makes me very sad. But that decision isn’t up to the City. We’re not spending a dime on this stadium. And if we voted it down, Northwestern’s donor wouldn’t redirect the gift to build a high-energy particle accelerator, or endow 200 chairs in philosophy, comparative literature, and history, or repeal tuition for a while, or do anything else that’s better aligned with my vision of what a university is supposed to be about – instead, the investment just wouldn’t happen. I’m the mayor, and my opinions about higher education are mostly irrelevant. But my opinions about the future of Evanston do matter, and I’m enthusiastic about facilitating investment, employment, cultural vibrancy, and fiscal stability in Evanston.

• Do I feel like it makes sense for a tax exemption granted to an educational institution to cover large concerts? I do not! But that exemption is in state law (with roots in the Illinois Constitution). Given that frustrating reality, what the City can do is push Northwestern hard to transform its financial commitments to our community, and I’m proud that we’ve done that. This new level of support represents a reset of our relationship that will benefit us for years and lay the foundation for even more progress down the road.

• Finally, Evanstonians have poked a lot of fun at Northwestern’s assertion that, notwithstanding their massive endowment and huge budget, they could not afford to maintain the new stadium unless the concerts were approved. Am I personally persuaded by their argument? Nope! But ultimately, that’s irrelevant. If I were convinced that they needed the concerts, but I thought the concerts were bad for our community, I’d vote no and oppose the whole project – we shouldn’t accept a bad idea simply because it’s financially necessary for Northwestern. By the same token, since I concluded that the concerts are a net benefit to Evanston, the right thing for me to do was to support them, irrespective of Northwestern’s views about their internal finances.

Zooming out: a closing note about my philosophy

This was obviously a tough call. Many very thoughtful and insistent people presented arguments on both sides of this issue throughout many months. And, of course, everyone’s view, including my own, is at least somewhat speculative: we’re doing our best to predict how this will go, and it will certainly be better than some of the opponents fear or worse than some of the proponents hope (or both). And so, at the end of this (very) long summary of my thoughts about some of the specifics, I wanted to close by saying a word about how I approach issues like this.

In my heart, I’m a progressive and an optimist. I’m temperamentally inclined to embrace change. I think of myself as a “YIMBY” (“yes in my backyard”). Furthermore, I think Evanston needs to be willing to embrace change right now. Our economic challenges won’t be solved by staying the same as we’ve always been or trying to return to 2019. Finally, our progressive values and ambition require funding to realize, and we won’t be able to access that funding without unfairly burdening those who can least afford to pay – unless we embrace growth and new ideas.

That doesn’t mean that we need to say yes to everything. We need to be willing to shoot down ideas we don’t believe in. And for tough calls like this one, we need to be prepared to drive a hard bargain. I wouldn’t have been willing to support this without the benefits Northwestern offered and the protections we demanded. And I entirely respect that reasonable people can and do disagree about whether the benefits and protections are adequate to justify my “yes” vote.

I hope as we move forward and continue to evaluate new opportunities in this community, we do so with an open-minded approach, envisioning a future that is not the same as, but rather better than our past. This is the future I've always strived for in my public service, and my commitment to you is that I’ll always continue to do that.

Sincerely,

Daniel Biss
Mayor, City of Evanston
dbiss@cityofevanston.org