$8.9bn NFL team’s relocation from 100-year home into rival state edges closer after last-ditch bid fails

It is growing ever likely that the Chicago Bears will soon reside in Hammond, Indiana.

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 appear to be edging closer to a move 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.

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 door now appears to be wide open for the Bears to be 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 is winding down

Although it seems as though time has run out, Pritzker is of the belief that there is still time to find a deal to keep the Bears, valued at $8.9bn, in Illinois, providing that legislators find a consensus by the summer.

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

What Pritzker is certain about, though, is that the Bears are not bluffing over whether to move across to the Hoosier state, where there is a taxpayer-backed deal already approved.

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.

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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.”

While it may be too late to keep the Bears, with the historic NFL franchise setting their own timeline for their official relocation announcement being by “early summer,” Pritzker could be staring down a hole that will see his legacy tarnished by potentially losing one of Chicago’s most-prized assets.

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