$8.9bn NFL team confirms relocation from 100-year home into rival state after last-ditch bid fails

The Chicago Bears will soon reside in Hammond, Indiana, barring a late change of heart.

Having spent their entire 100-plus year history in the state of Illinois, first playing at Wrigley Field before moving into Soldier Field in 1971, the Bears are moving across the border.

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Despite lawmakers’ best efforts to keep the team in Chicago with the ‘megaprojects’ bill – a property tax-incentive proposal – the necessary dominos just haven’t aligned.

The team confirmed on Friday that the board of directors had voted to advance the project in Hammond, with an exact site to be selected. While not a done deal yet, Illinois now appears to have lost its beloved tea.

Governor J.B. Pritzker, who has been at the heart of the Bears’ stadium saga that has been drawn out for the past five years or so, also stood pat on his principles that the taxpayers shouldn’t have to fork out the cost of building a new stadium, expected to cost upwards of $4 billion.

“The reality is that I wasn’t willing to give up billions of dollars of taxpayer money in order to give it to a billionaire-owned family, or team, and believe very much that the incentives that we provide for businesses are to be similar to the incentives we provide to this type of business,” Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker said Monday.

“As much of an emotional connection as many of us have to the Bears, and to keeping them in the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois, [the] No. 1 principle is we’re not going to foist this on the taxpayers of the state of Illinois.”

Despite having two proposed sites on the table, with one 25 miles northwest of Soldier Field in the suburb of Arlington Heights – their preferred option – and the other in Hammond, the team has had enough of talks and headed to the latter.

An eleventh-hour legislative proposal sponsored by state Senator Bill Cunningham, which initially cleared the Illinois Senate, failed to be voted on by the House before it went out of session for the summer, and ultimately collapsed.

That bill proposed the idea that municipalities would be able to create stadium financing authorities, which in turn, could enter negotiations with sports franchises who were interested in building a stadium within Cook County cities which have a population of 70,000 people or more.

This would have seen Chicago brought back into the thick of it, with the stadium and its surrounding land being owned by the municipality, while the team would not pay any property taxes in exchange for paying for the construction costs of the stadium.

“The question, I don’t think, is how this came together last night, but that we did anything,” Illinois Senate President Don Harmon, who voted for Cunningham’s bill, said. “There was an enormous undercurrent in our caucus to not do anything.

“People were worried about their neighbors being thrown off of food stamps. … There was no appetite at all to provide public dollars to a $10 billion sports franchise, as much as we love the Bears.”

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“All of us in our neighborhoods and communities heard basically the same thing: Do whatever you need to do to keep the Bears here, but not one nickel.”

Time up for Indiana

Pritzker was of the belief that there was time to find a deal to keep the Bears, valued at $8.9bn, in Illinois, right up to the decision.

“There is a bill that was proposed by the Senate, passed by the Senate, and a bill that was passed by the House,” he added.

“I think that those conversations will be ongoing among the legislators. I’ve set out my principles for everybody. We’ll see whether they get followed.”

Regardless of what happens to the Bears, Pritzker wants the megaprojects bill/payments in lieu of taxes (PILOT) concept – the idea that big companies could go on to negotiate big property tax breaks when investing in huge developments – revisited at a later date.

Chicago Bears / Manica

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“We still need that, by the way,” Pritzker continued. “Thirty-eight states have a PILOT megaprojects law. … We are literally behind the curve.

“All we’re doing is organizing the way that they negotiate — they’ve always been negotiating about property taxes all across the country. It’s just in Illinois where we’ve had a disorganized, dysfunctional endeavor forever.”

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