Now it’s about to become very clear just how serious the Bears stadium bid from Indiana really is. 

Despite all-night political negotiations that ran into Monday morning, and weeks of preceding deliberations, the Illinois House of Representatives adjourned without taking up a Bears stadium bill. The state Senate approved that proposal—which would allow certain Cook County towns to create stadium authorities to help support a Bears venue—around 4:40 a.m. ET on Monday.

In the House, though, the depth and complexity of that bill proved to be too much to approach in a legislative session already running into overtime.

“The bill came over from the Senate after many of us had been up for 20 hours and it is not enough time to vet a really important bill,” said Democratic state Rep. Lindsey LaPointe. “Many of us are going to scrutinize anything that is potentially a tax giveaway to the super wealthy or big corporations.”

In the dramatically reworked Senate bill, the Bears would pay for the stadium, but the host town would own it, and the team would not pay property taxes. 

“I remain optimistic. We all share the same goal: finding a solution that works for the Bears, works for taxpayers, and earns the confidence of the General Assembly,” said state Rep. Kam Buckner, a key figure on the stadium negotiations. “[Monday] morning was the end of session. It was not the end of the conversation.”

What’s Next?

The current political reality in Illinois creates a very stark timeline surrounding the NFL team’s attempt to build a $5 billion domed stadium and mixed-use development. The Bears have been clear for months they want to make a final stadium choice by the early summer at the latest, and the team currently has only one fully approved offer on the table: the proposal from Hammond, Ind., that was ratified in February and would fund about 60% of the stadium cost.

In the three-plus months since that approval, there have been some continued whispers that the Hammond bid is merely a stalking horse for an eventual deal in Illinois. That agreement in the team’s current home state, however, still hasn’t happened, meaning three potential scenarios stand out:

• The Bears could adjust their timeline and delay their site decision, primarily to give Illinois more time. That’s a tough prospect given the team has already said the cost of the project likely rises by $10 million with every month of delays. The NFL would also like the Bears to join an accelerating stadium development boom that includes the Bills, Titans, Commanders, Browns, Chiefs, and Broncos. To that end, the Bears said early Monday that its deliberations “remain on the late spring/early summer timeline that we have previously communicated.”
• The Bears could accept the Hammond offer. Indiana Gov. Mike Braun has already been increasingly confident that will happen, saying even before the latest developments in Illinois that his state had a “65-35” chance of landing the Bears.
• Illinois legislators could find a way to ratify a Bears stadium bill outside of the normal legislative calendar, which doesn’t pick up again until the fall. House Speaker Chris Welch, however, said early Monday that calling a special session to revisit the Bears issue was not planned.

“I think our caucus is used to processes,” Welch said. “Our caucus is used to taking our time and doing it right. … So we’ll get it right. We’ll get it done.”

NFL insiders, however, don’t believe there is much time left, if any, for Illinois.

“Unless there’s a meaningful change in Illinois, and quick, the team is going to Indiana,” Marc Ganis, a Chicago-based sports consultant who works frequently with the NFL, tells Front Office Sports. “Not only is there disappointment by what’s happened, but there’s been a loss of credibility [in Illinois]. Sports fans in Illinois have now really seen, maybe for the first time, how dysfunctional Illinois government really is. The politicians wasted five months [during the spring session] and didn’t really talk to each other.”

The post Indiana’s Bears Stadium Bid Gets More Real After Illinois Misses Chance appeared first on Front Office Sports.

A legislative Hail Mary in Illinois ran out of time early Monday as the state House of Representatives did not take up a revised structure for a $5 billion Bears stadium project. 

After a frenetic all-night legislative session Sunday night, running into the pre-dawn hours of Monday morning, the state Senate approved at 4:40 a.m. ET a revised stadium structure that would help fund a Bears stadium, but about an hour later, the House of Representatives adjourned without taking up the bill.

The entirely new bill, part of a marathon session to close the state legislature’s spring session, was furiously developed and involved allowing certain municipalities in Cook County to set up their own stadium authorities. 

A chosen locale for a stadium would then own a stadium that the Bears would fund privately, but the NFL team would not pay property taxes, in turn giving it the tax certainty it has coveted throughout this long and winding political process. The Bears, however, would pay property taxes on a planned mixed-use development surrounding the stadium. 

That bill arrived after a “megaprojects” bill previously approved by the Illinois House of Representatives fizzled in the state Senate due to numerous political complications there.

The state Senate approved the bill by a 37-17 vote at 4:40 a.m. ET, but the House declined to take up the bill.

“There’s a lot of work still ahead of us,” said Illinois House Speaker Chris Welch. “We’ll continue discussions on a number of issues, including our approach to the Bears stadium question, this summer.”

Still, state Senators believe there is a new base from which to work, even if the legislature failed to have a fully passed bill by the end of the spring session. 

“I think what we’ve done here with the bill is establish a framework that would enable the Bears to build a stadium in the state of Illinois,” said state Senator Bill Cunningham, a key architect of the new bill. “This gives them property tax certainty … This is the exact same mechanism set up in Northwest Indiana.”

Notably, the new structure for the stadium could also allow Chicago to get back into the race to be the Bears’ long-term home. For months, the team, NFL, and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker have been insistent that the stadium choice is down to a suburban, team-owned parcel in Arlington Heights, Ill., or a competing proposal in Hammond, Ind. Chicago-area leaders, however, have refused to accept that, and played a key role in sinking the prior consideration around the megaprojects legislation. 

Because the votes are happening after the stated end of the spring session, the bill must either pass with a supermajority or not take effect until 2027, which is the intended timing of the legislation anyway. 

State Lines

The restructured Illinois framework will compete against already approved legislation in Indiana that would fund about 60% of a stadium in Hammond. The team has been consistent that it intends to make a final stadium site choice by early summer.  The ongoing deliberations in Illinois only complicate the timetable further.

“We will finalize our evaluation of both Arlington Heights and Hammond, and remain on the late spring/early summer timeline that we have previously communicated,” the Bears said Monday morning in a statement. “We will provide an update when we have a decision to share.”

The financial math for the team is unquestionably better in Indiana, but accepting it would be leaving their home state since starting as the Decatur Staleys in 1920. 

“I’d say [there’s a] 65-35,” chance of the Bears going to Indiana, said that state’s governor, Mike Braun, last week on Fox News, before the latest moves in Illinois. “I’ve done a lot of real estate deals in my time in the real world. They can go south for many reasons, but their legislature really hasn’t tailored anything that they’re interested in. We did it quickly. It impressed them, and they saw what Indiana would be like as a long-term business partner. I can guarantee you it’d be better than being [in Illinois].”

The post Illinois’ Last-Minute Push for Bears $5B Stadium Runs Out of Time appeared first on Front Office Sports.

SPRINGFIELD — Faced with the collapse of a yearslong tax relief plan aimed at encouraging a Chicago Bears move to Arlington Heights, state lawmakers spent Sunday, the last scheduled day of their spring session, scrambling for a Hail Mary plan that could get the votes to coerce the team to stay in Illinois.

For all of the Sundays that the Bears, one of the National Football League’s charter franchises, have competed in their 105 years — from Decatur’s Staley Field, then to Chicago’s Wrigley Field and Soldier Field — it was an off-season Sunday, far away from the gridiron, that could prove to be one of the most consequential in team history.

In the wings stood an offer from the state of Indiana, which late last year created an agency to construct a taxpayer-financed stadium and surrounding mixed-use entertainment district for the Bears in Hammond, near Wolf Lake, 20 miles southeast of Chicago.

Some of the dysfunction that plagued other legislation in this spring session also was on display with the Bears issue.

Rather than meeting together during the spring session, the Illinois House and Senate often convened on alternating weeks. The schedule effectively put each chamber into separate silos, leaving them unaware of what the other was doing and creating an atmosphere that made it hard to build momentum to move bills from one chamber to the other.

State Rep. Kam Buckner of Chicago led the House in passing a measure aimed at providing the Bears with the property tax certainty they sought for the 326-acre Arlington Heights location the team acquired for $197.2 million in 2023. Buckner’s bill would have allowed the team to have its property tax assessments frozen for 25 to 45 years in exchange for making payments to local taxing bodies in lieu of taxes, known as PILOT.

But weeks after the House sent the Senate the bill, state Sen. Bill Cunningham said Saturday evening that the PILOT proposal lacked enough votes for passage — a conclusion he reached after a lengthy closed-door meeting with majority Senate Democrats.

Cunningham, who has been spearheading Bears stadium talks in the Senate, said some senators opposed giving property-tax breaks to a professional sports franchise worth billions of dollars. He also said Chicago Democrats, opposed to allowing the team to move to a suburban location, wanted a city stadium site to be an option.

“I think there’s always been, from day one, there has always been a Chicago problem with the Bears proposal,” Cunningham said. “The Bears have had a proposal on the table for a couple of years that asks Chicago members of the legislature to vote for a tax credit that would encourage a business to leave Chicago. Legislators generally don’t do that. That’s always been an obstacle to passing this bill. That’s something we’re working on addressing with our proposal.”

Lawmakers, Cunningham said, “want to be comfortable with something that protects the taxpayers, something that their constituents can live with, whether or not the Bears are supportive of it, (which) is very much a secondary concern.”

Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker and the Bears had said publicly that the team’s choices to relocate from Soldier Field, its home since 1971, came down to the Arlington Heights property, the site of the former Arlington International Racecourse, and the site in Hammond.

Also upending the focus on Arlington Heights was Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s early May visit to Springfield, where he touted resurrecting a $4.7 billion lakefront stadium proposal south of Soldier Field from 2024 that Pritzker and top lawmakers rejected out of hand as too costly to taxpayers.

Cunningham contended on Saturday night that despite the team’s public pronouncements, “the Bears have met repeatedly with the city of Chicago over the last several months to talk about” a city stadium proposal.

“Obviously, the city has made it clear they would like to be considered for a new stadium,” he said on Saturday night. “We’d like to come up with some sort of proposal that would put them on an equal plane” as Arlington Heights.

By early Sunday evening, Cunningham said talks revolved around an alternative plan that would allow municipalities to create their own stadium finance authorities, establishing a public-private partnership in which the Bears would build a stadium on public land to avoid paying property taxes on the facility.

“We’re working on a public ownership model for the stadium. So it would be owned by a public municipality,” Cunningham said. “(But) privately financed. The Bears have said they’ll spend upwards of $2.5 billion of their money on (the) stadium. So the setup would be, they would essentially pay for the stadium, enter (into) an agreement with the municipality. Could be any municipality.”

Cunningham noted that Soldier Field is owned by the Chicago Park District and sits on publicly owned land, so it doesn’t pay property taxes.

“I think all but three NFL stadiums are publicly owned right now, so it’s a pretty common model,” he said.

While a municipal stadium owned by Arlington Heights or Chicago would allow the Bears to escape paying any property taxes on the new facility, the stadium authority could negotiate with the team on the distribution of revenues derived from the facility.

Such a stadium finance authority already exists on the state level under the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, or ISFA, which oversees the renovations and construction of sports stadiums in the state. ISFA is the owner of Rate Field, home of the Chicago White Sox, and financed the 2003 renovation of Soldier Field.

Still, by 7 p.m. Sunday, six hours before the session-ending deadline, no actual legislation had surfaced.

The last-minute plan left numerous questions about how such a plan would be carried out, let alone whether it would garner support in both the House and Senate. Crain’s Chicago Business was the first to report about the alternative plan. The absence of details left many questions, not the least of which is whether the Bears would accept an alternative proposal. There also were questions about how a local stadium authority would work or own a stadium site and how it would generate revenue.

Bears’ spokesman Scott Hagel did not respond to requests for comment about the status of negotiations on Sunday.

Also unresolved was the Bears’ request for roughly $855 million in infrastructure funding related to the Arlington Heights property.

Buckner said he did not know the specifics of Cunningham’s plan.

“The Senate has been very clear that they’re kicking around some new ideas with their caucus on what a last-ditch effort may look like. And so I’m looking forward to hearing what the response is in the Senate, and we’ll see what can happen before the end of the night,” Buckner told reporters.

“The language is what is going to drive the day when it comes to what happens here,” he said. “Details matter.”