Illinois Considering Publicly-Owned Bears Stadium In Chicago

The state of Illinois is not letting the Bears leave Chicago without a fight.

Earlier in May, the Bears released a statement explaining that they no longer saw a path to staying in the city and naming Chicago suburb Arlington Heights and Hammond, Indiana as the two finalists for the team’s new home. But the Illinois legislature is launching a last-gasp effort that would give municipalities in Cook County – which includes Chicago and Arlington Heights – to create a stadium authority to finance and lease a new arena to the Bears. The team would foot the bill for construction, but not property tax, as the stadium and the land it sits on would be owned by the municipality.

“They would essentially pay for the stadium, enter an agreement with the municipality — could be any municipality — and the municipality would open the building,” said state Sen. Bill Cunningham (via Mitchell Armentrout of the Chicago Sun-Times), who represents part of the South Side neighborhood of Chicago. He has led negotiations with the Bears and introduced this latest bill for a publicly-owned stadium in what he sees as a “common model” around the NFL.

Legislators are still working on hammering out the language of the bill, and time is of the essence. As in the NFL, June 1 is a key date in the Illinois Capital. Bills voted on after June 1 must be supported by 60% of the legislature if they take effect within a year. The Bears are looking to finalize their decision in the coming months, so the state must act quickly to approve this bill and give the team an alternate path to staying in Chicago.

This might be Chicago’s last chance to keep the Bears in the city. Arlington Heights will remain in play either way, but it is 30 miles northeast of Soldier Field, which is roughly the same distance from the proposed Hammond site in Indiana. If this bill can get approved by the legislature and signed into law by Governor J.B. Pritzker, Chicago would still to go through the prescribed process of creating a stadium authority and working out a deal for the Bears to build and occupy – but not own – a new stadium in the city.

It seems unthinkable that the Bears could be headquartered anywhere but Chicago. But the city has refused to offer public funds for a stadium, and a bill that would have offered substantial tax breaks passed the general assembly but not the state senate. Cunningham’s legislation offers a middle route in which the Bears pay for the stadium but face no tax bill since it will be publicly-owned.