Category: NFL

Friday roundup: Blazers threatened councilmembers’ careers if they didn’t subsidize arena, Rays stadium tax vote planned for April 1

access_time personNeil deMause

Would love to have a witty introduction for you here, but it’s late enough already and this week’s bullet points are far too juicy to wait any longer!

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Kansas bill would cap off $4.1B in stadium subsidies by letting Chiefs vote to approve own lease

access_time personNeil deMause

Sure, the state of Kansas already passed a bill to provide Kansas City Chiefs owner with $2.775 billion in state-backed STAR bonds and another $1.3 billion and change in additional tax money, and the city of Olathe and Wyandotte County voted to chip in their own tax revenues toward paying off that debt. But the state hasn’t actually created a sports authority yet to own the stadium so that the Chiefs can get out of paying property tax! (Yes, the linked Beacon News article says “income tax.” Why does it say that? Do I look like the king of the Beacon News here? Go do your own research!)

Where was I? Oh, right, new bill to create a sports authority. That’s straightforward enough, shouldn’t be any new wrinkles that—

The proposal appoints nine voting members, plus the mayors of Olathe and Kansas City, Kansas, in a non-voting capacity.

Non-voting capacity? That’s not great. Maybe the sponsor of the bill could be talked into—

State Rep. Sean Tarwater, R-Stilwell, is sponsoring the bill. He seemed open to giving KCK voting authority — on a condition.

He would like KCK to change a law it passed last month so that Kansas can collect increased sales tax dollars from more of Wyandotte County to pay off the stadium, instead of from a district around the stadium.

“The resolution in Kansas City probably needs to change because when they passed it, they limited [the state’s] district to the little teeny area that they drew for themselves,” Tarwater said.

Huh? No, that’s not what happened. Kansas City, Kansas, and Wyandotte County of which it is a part, only voted to limit its local sales tax district to the area just around the stadium. Kansas can still siphon off state sales taxes from 293 square miles of land, including all of Wyandotte, as originally planned. If Tarwater wants to hold KCK’s seat on the sports authority hostage in order to get more local tax money kicked into the stadium pot, that’s his right as an exortionist office holder, but at least try to get the details right, this isn’t the Beacon News here.

And anyway, how important is a sports authority seat, really? Even if KCK doesn’t get a spot at the table, the other members will surely have state residents’ best interests at—

The authority board includes “a representative of the professional sports team” using the facility as a voting member. This means the Chiefs would have a vote on such things as negotiating its lease, financing, and operations. Having the team oversee itself is a crazy conflict of interest and uncommon in other similar authorities if not absolutely unique, for obvious reasons.

The bill, according to the analysis by the Show Me Institute — which is based across the border in Missouri, so feel free to blame sour grapes if you like — also exempts the stadium project from oversight and competitive bidding rules, amid other sweetheart provisions. Kansas state senator Mike Thompson warns that this will set up “an unaccountable ‘Shadow Government,'” but you know, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. What other alternative is there, getting enough votes together to defeat the bill? HAHAHAHAHAHA BWA HA HA HA. HA. Ha.

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Judge blocks Ohio from giving unclaimed private funds to Browns and other sports teams until trial is complete

access_time personNeil deMause

All the Ohio sports teams angling for a cut of the state’s unclaimed private funds pool got a dose of cold water yesterday when a Franklin County judge issued a preliminary injunction against the money being disbursed, on the grounds that a lawsuit charging that state’s use of private money was unconstitutional is substantially likely to win. The injunction replaces a temporary restraining order the court issued in December, and will now be in place for the remainder of the trial.

To recap briefly: The unclaimed private funds first became an issue last June, when Ohio state senators announced they’d be using the pool of money — dormant bank accounts, uncashed checks, and other stuff that didn’t belong to the state but was sitting in its bank accounts — to temporarily fund a Cleveland Browns stadium while waiting for tax money from the development itself to roll in, after which that would be used to replenish the private funds. Then it turned out last July that the state actually planned to just raid the unclaimed cash fund and never replenish it, prompting the class action lawsuit from former Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann and former state Rep. Jeffrey Crossman on behalf of those whose money was being held by the state.

In issuing the injunction, Franklin County judge Jennifer Hunt pointed to two possible violations of the state constitution by the state’s use of the unclaimed funds. First, by failing to require that the state notify property owners that it was seizing their funds, lawmakers may have violated due process requirements. Second, and even more interestingly, Hunt warned that using the money specifically for sports stadiums could be an issue, as the benefits of private sports venues aren’t enough to satisfy state constitutional requirements that private funds can only be taken for “public use.”

So what happens now with the Browns stadium? Nothing immediately — preliminary excavation has already begun, even with the state funds having been blocked already by the restraining order. If Dann and Crossman win their suit, though, things start to get interesting: Eventually Browns owner Jimmy Haslam isn’t going to proceed with construction without that $600 million in state cash. Would Ohio go back to its old plan of redirecting state taxes from the stadium district? Would it dig around for some completely new revenue stream, like Minnesota had to do when its initial plan to fund a Vikings stadium with video tablet gambling at bars fell massively short of its goal? Is it possible it could go back to the drawing board entirely and reconsider whether giving $600 million to Haslam to move his team from one part of the state to a neighboring one is really such a great idea?

All the other team owners scrambling for a piece of the unclaimed private funds pie, meanwhile — which is pretty much every sports owner in Ohio — will need to cool their jets and wait for the lawsuit to play out. The Ohio attorney general’s office is “reviewing the decision and determining next steps,” spokesperson Bethany McCorkle told Cleveland.com. Stay tuned.

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Friday roundup: Bears battle drags on, Blazers subsidy heats up, 15 teams now angling for Ohio unclaimed funds cash

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s Friday! But because of other commitments, I’m writing this from Thursday evening! So if there’s any breaking Friday morning news, complain about it in comments, and we’ll get to it on Monday, which for me will probably be Sunday. You following all that? Doesn’t matter, just read your bullet points, they’re good for you:

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Hamilton County asks Ohio for $234m for Bengals stadium upgrades, just for kicks

access_time personNeil deMause

As mentioned on Friday, pretty much every pro sports team in Ohio is racing to grab a chunk of the state’s $1.7 billion unclaimed funds pool, which really everyone should have expected would happen as soon as the state made clear that it planned to use the money for sports projects instead of leaving it in place until the people whose money it really was could claim it. So far we have had the Cleveland Browns in for $600 million, the Guardians and Cavaliers seeking $105 million combined, and the Columbus Crew hoping for $100 million; now Hamilton County has put a price tag on its ask to the state for the Cincinnati Bengals, and it is $234 million:

In its application, the county estimated the cost of the project at $936.7 million. That’s different from the $830 million figure the county has floated as the cost of a complete renovation package. So far, the county is funding $350 million, while the Bengals are chipping in $120 million.

So that would be $350 million from the county, $234 million from the state, and $120 million from the team, which comes to $704 million — on a project costing $936.7 million. Huh. You’d think someone would notice a $232 million funding gap, but maybe they have big plans for a GoFundMe?

The most eyebrow-raising part of the county’s request to the state, meanwhile, is that the Bengals already signed an 11-year lease extension in exchange for the $350 million from the county. (The county also agreed to take on about $300 million in future stadium operating expenses, making it nearly $60 million per year that of the lease, which just might be the worst deal ever.) As the Cincinnati Business Journal deadpanned, “The county’s application to the state does not say anything about the Bengals extending their lease in exchange for an additional $234 million. … Typically, when the state makes a major outlay of taxpayer-funded incentives to companies that create jobs, it requires them to stay beyond the term of the incentive the firms will receive.” But not the Bengals, nuh-uh — which would make a state donation of $234 million in exchange for a zero-year lease extension be the single most expensive per-year stadium subsidy in history, at $∞/year.

Of course, if the state of Ohio doesn’t give the money to Bengals owner Mike Brown, the original owners might come claim it, so maybe they’ll just hand it over, no questions asked. (Using the money for some public use other than privately occupied sports venues doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone.) Also of course, there’s still a lawsuit pending against the use of the fund for sports purposes, and if that succeeds, a whole lot of holes could get blown in a lot of stadium budgets, including the Browns stadium project that is set to break ground today. Many, many ways this can end, pretty much none of them good, which would make it the most 2026 story of 2026, except for all the others.

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Friday roundup: Bears face choice which state’s $1B+ in cash to accept, Rays stadium plans face growing questions

access_time personNeil deMause

As expected, the Indiana state senate gave overwhelming (45-4) final approval to a Chicago Bears stadium subsidy package yesterday, and Gov. Mike Braun signed it into law less than an hour later. This is still a very preliminary plan — we don’t know, among other things, how big a stadium tax diversion district would be, which could go a long way toward determining if Bears owner George McCaskey would receive $400 million or $1 billion or $4 billion or what in taxpayer money. With the state government having signed off, though, that decision will now be left up to an unelected state sports authority and the city of Hammond, and neither of those is likely to have the best interests of Indiana taxpayers as a whole in mind. (Not that state legislators were necessarily thinking about that either, but at least they’re supposed to, if I’m reading the representative democracy FAQs correctly.)

At the same time, an Illinois house committee responded to events across the state border by moving forward a “megaproject” bill that Bears execs have said they require for any new stadium in Arlington Heights. The bill would allow localities to exempt any project costing over $500 million from local property taxes and instead allow it to pay a lower payment in lieu of taxes rate that developers would negotiate with the local government; for projects worth over $2 billion, like the Bears stadium, the negotiated tax rate would be allowed to be as low as zero. Property tax guru Geoff Propheter estimates the value to the Bears from this measure would be about $67 million a year, which would amount to just over $1 billion in present value. (CORRECTION: Propheter emails to say the $67 million a year was already translated into present value, so this could actually be a $2 billion tax break.)

If the bill succeeds — Chicago-area legislators are trying to block it, as they would, since there’s nothing in it for their constituents — it could also, notes Jon Styf at The Center Square, lead to data centers or battery farms demanding similar tax breaks. And because the value of those projects would count toward the local tax base without paying their usual share of local taxes, other property tax owners would end up getting soaked to cover the difference — something that should put in a slightly different light Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s comments yesterday that Indiana is setting itself up for “massive increases in taxes” while Illinois is having “really positive discussions” with the Bears.

This is going to be a difficult choice for Bears execs, given that there are lots of unknowns with both states’ offers — Illinois has also still yet to decide on how much in infrastructure money to provide to an Arlington Heights Bears project — plus the question of where the Bears owners actually think it would make more sense to play in terms of selling tickets. Fortunately for McCaskey, there’s no deadline to make a decision, so he can sit back and hope the bidding war continues to escalate. For a team owner whose options only a few months ago were a rock and a hard place, to be fielding multiple billion-dollar-plus offers is a pretty impressive an accomplishment, guess leverage really does work!

And this week in the rest of the sports extortion world:

  • Members of the Tampa Sports Authority have some questions about a proposed Rays stadium, namely how the authority will staff a stadium if Gov. Ron DeSantis goes ahead with slashing the property taxes that fund its budget, where the city of Tampa and Hillsborough County would come up with about $1 billion worth of stadium funding when the county has $1.5 billion in unmet transportation needs, and whether the planned Rays complex would include any much-needed affordable housing. Replies hazy, ask again later!
  • Meanwhile, Rays officials are planning public visioning sessions for their proposed Tampa stadium project, stock up on post-it notes!
  • The Franklin County Convention Facilities Authority has asked for $100 million in state unclaimed funds money to help pay for a $400 million Columbus Blue Jackets arena upgrade, joining the Cleveland Browns, Cleveland Guardians, Cleveland Cavaliers, and Cincinnati Bengals as teams lining up to tap that state slush fund, it’s like you can’t even put out a sign reading “FREE MONIEZ!!!” anymore without billionaires lining up to take it.
  • Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser told a local business and real estate conference, “We won a World Series, Stanley Cup, hosted an All Star game for MLB and MLS. We’re going to have the NFL Draft. And we will have the Super Bowl, so I think that qualifies as the sports capital.” The result was “a big ovation,” according to WTOP, though whether this is because business leaders don’t understand how sports works or will cheer anything that results in one of their number pocketing a $7 billion check is left as an exercise for the reader.
  • Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno determined that his team’s fans don’t care about winning by issuing a survey that didn’t including “winning” among the categories fans could pick as a priority, that’s one way to justify only signing players who are clinically dead.
  • Speaking of Jon Styf, he and I had a long talk about the proposed Bears subsidies this week in which I concluded, after seeing NFL owners’ standard stadium subsidy demands climb from $1 billion to $2-6 billion in the course of just a year, “It makes me wonder why teams don’t just ask for $10 billion or $1 trillion. Clearly it’s not like there’s any point at which legislators will start saying ‘No.’” Apologies in advance for giving them ideas.
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Bears owner set to get multibillion-dollar Indiana stadium offer, now will he take it?

access_time personNeil deMause

The Indiana bill to approve taxpayer funding of a new Chicago Bears stadium in Hammond passed the state house by a 95-4 vote yesterday, and it seems inevitable that it will pass the senate as well and be signed into law by Gov. Mike Braun by the end of the week. At which point … what, exactly?

Senate Bill 27, as the Indiana stadium legislation is known, would create a sports authority with the power to sign an agreement with Bears ownership to provide a huge pile of public money — hotel and food and beverage tax surcharges, a ticket tax, and property, sales, and income and other tax money from an omni-TIF district of indeterminate size — toward the construction of a new stadium. (Economist Geoff Propheter has estimated the total public cost at more than $4 billion, but also says there’s no way to truly know the full number without knowing the size of the tax diversion district.) It would be up to Bears owner George McCaskey to then decide whether to actually sign such a deal with the state, which could happen at any point in the future, at the state stadium board’s discretion; the city of Hammond would then have to vote to create the stadium tax district and the ticket tax.

Why would McCaskey turn down such a lucrative offer? Lots of reasons: He might not actually want to move the Bears so far from their fan base in Chicago’s western suburbs. He might not want to have to put up the reported $2 billion he would have to for a Hammond dome (though it’s likely he’d recoup a bunch of that via the public tax money). Or he might think he can get a better deal in Illinois.

And “better” doesn’t necessarily have to mean involving more public cash. Don’t forget that in 1999, Robert Kraft announced he was moving the New England Patriots to Hartford, Connecticut before switching gears and remaining in Massachusetts. And while it has since been reported that this happened after Kraft discovered it would take longer than he’d hoped to demolish a steam plant on the proposed stadium site, it’s also true that in the meantime he’d used the threat of a move to Connecticut both to convince the state of Massachusetts to give him a somewhat increased subsidy, as well as to arm-twist the NFL into letting big-market teams use money they would otherwise have to share with the league to instead pay for stadiums that would them to stay put in their current markets. (The NFL’s initial version of its G-3 stadium program, in fact, covered the top six TV markets at a time when Boston was #6; it was created by a committee whose chair was Robert Kraft.)

If McCaskey is just leading Indiana on in hopes of winning a bigger dowry from Illinois, he’ll get his first evidence of whether it’s working when an Illinois state committee meets tomorrow to vote on letting Arlington Heights bestow property tax breaks on a Bears stadium pr0ject. That in itself is not likely to get a stadium there done — Bears execs have insisted they also need $855 million in state money for things like new roads and commuter rail changes — unless, of course, this is another Patriots situation where the NFL owner will be happy to grab whatever concessions he can get in the place he wants. If he’s even decided what he wants, of course, and there’s no rule saying he has to until it’s time to put pen to lease paper

That’s a very long-winded way of saying that this is likely only the start of the Bears stadium battle, not the end. Do try to keep that in mind when you read headlines late this week declaring that the team’s move to Indiana is complete; we’ve seen those before, and they don’t always work out the way everyone expected.

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Bears hedge on Illinois vs. Indiana decision as public cost of Hammond stadium remains moving target

access_time personNeil deMause

When the Illinois legislature canceled Thursday morning’s planned hearing on a property tax break bill for a Chicago Bears stadium in Arlington Heights, it turns out, it wasn’t just a bureaucratic scheduling glitch. Rather, the legislature did so at the request of Bears president Kevin Warren so that the bill could be revised — or, as Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker intimated, maybe just because “Indiana had asked them to say that they’re going to move forward with the negotiations in Indiana.” (Indiana officials had demanded some kind of commitment from the Bears before moving ahead with their own stadium financing package.) Either way, the Illinois bill is supposed to be resubmitted at a new hearing later this week.

Sports Mockery claims (citing no sources whatsoever) that Bears owner George McCaskey was “livid” with Warren for committing so heavily to Indiana, leading to the Bears president issuing a statement Saturday that “we continue to work with Illinois’ leadership and appreciate the progress being made.” All of which has led to even more speculation that McCaskey and Warren are mostly trying to play the two states off against each other to drive up the level of public subsidy, which of course they are, Chicago sports owners practically invented that game.

Indiana’s state Legislative Services Agency, meanwhile, issued a fiscal impact statement on Friday that starts to spell out how much each of the tax streams for a Bears stadium in Hammond, Indiana would cost state and local taxpayers:

  • The state would create a stadium tax district in Hammond that would divert all new property tax, income tax, and sales tax within the district above what’s currently collected there to paying off the stadium, for up to the next 35 years. Since no one knows how big the district would be or what would be built within it, there’s no way to know how much this redirected tax revenue would amount to; the fiscal note observes that other similar districts in the state divert as much as $10 million a year, but then immediately adds that “the amount of revenue deposited in the fund is
    indeterminable and will depend on the plan for the designated district,” which is legislativese for ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
  • A 1% food and beverage tax surcharge in Lake and Porter counties, on top of the state’s 7% level, would generate an estimated $12-18 million a year, or possibly more if a stadium district leads to more local food and beverage sales.
  • Doubling the Lake County hotel tax from 5% to 10% would generate “at least $5.4M annually,” again possibly more if hotel stays go up thanks to a stadium.
  • A 12% ticket tax would generate about $12 million a year.

(In addition, that previously reported bit that “the stadium board will retain all revenues from operation of the capital mprovement” appears to actually mean all net tax revenues from the stadium (“all excise taxes and net income from operation of the capital improvements”), which is far less exciting than it sounded when it appeared Indiana might actually get a cut of stadium revenues.)

How much would all those redirected tax revenue streams add up to? Given all the unknowns it’s impossible to say, plus the fiscal note doesn’t indicate if and how these annual tax expenditures are expected to rise over time. Discounting the ticket tax because that mostly ends up being paid by teams, we have a baseline of around $27 million a year, which would come to around $440 million in present value; but, of course, those unknown subsidies from a stadium tax district could easily add hundreds of millions if not billions more if Indiana diverts taxes from a big enough area, as Kansas is planning on doing with its infamous 293-square-mile district for the Kansas City Chiefs.

All of this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is expected to be signed off on by the Indiana legislature this week, while Illinois considers if and how to respond. Getting some more certainty about, at the very least, how big Indiana’s stadium tax district would be before holding a vote seems like the absolute bare minimum of due diligence, but it’s unclear if anyone will attempt that in the five days left before the legislative session ends; blank checks are seldom a good way for public officials to go into a stadium negotiation, but it sure looks like where things are headed.

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Friday roundup: Breaking down taxpayer costs of the proposed Indiana Bears deal, plus other stadium news

access_time personNeil deMause

The Indiana legislature’s amended bill for a Chicago Bears stadium project is finally up, and we can start to get a slightly better sense of what it would entail in terms of public costs. Tax expenditures would include: a city of Hammond admissions tax, Lake County and Porter County food and beverage tax surcharges, a Hammond food and beverage tax surcharge, a Lake County hotel tax surcharge, what looks like local income and sales taxes from a stadium district, and state sales taxes from a stadium district. The stadium authority would also own the stadium and lease it to the Bears (terms very much TBD), so it would presumably be exempt from property taxes.

That is a ton of moving parts, needless to say. There being no fiscal analysis attached to the bill to project how much each of these taxes will raise, it’s impossible to determine what the total public price tag would be, though something upwards of $1 billion seems likely given all the revenue streams involved. (WGN calls it $1 billion exactly, not sure where that number comes from, though Indiana house speaker Todd Huston did throw that number around as an estimate yesterday.)

The bill also says that “the stadium board is responsible for the operation and maintenance of the capital improvement upon completion of construction,” which sounds bad, and then two paragraphs later that “the authority has no responsibility to fund the ongoing maintenance and operations of the capital improvement,” which sounds good but also contradictory. (It’s possible this is just dividing up responsibilities between two state agencies, I need to keep going through the bill language to be sure; if so, it’s bad for taxpayers because it could end up a grift that keeps on giving.) Also “the stadium board will retain all revenues from operation of the capital mprovement,” which sounds very good for Indiana but also not likely something the Bears ownership would agree to if it really meant what it sounds like it does. So lots of questions still up in the air, we get another public hearing on this before the full Indiana house and senate votes next week, right? Right? Anyone?

Meanwhile, in other news this week:

  • The proposed Tampa Bay Rays stadium development at Hillsborough College’s Dale Mabry Campus would include relocating a middle school and some county offices to … somewhere, while the college’s buildings would be rebuilt in a compressed corner of the campus … somehow. The new Tampa Bay Times reporters on this story, one of whom was just promoted from intern and the other just graduated from college last summer, don’t appear to have actually asked anyone with the Rays or with Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office about how this is all expected to work, sure do miss Colleen Wright’s reporting on the Rays stadium saga.
  • The Cleveland Guardians and Cavaliers would like some of that sweet state unclaimed funds money that the Browns are using for their new stadium, please, to use for upgrades to their current homes. The state can get right on that just as soon as that little matter of the restraining order against the state using the funds at all is cleared up.
  • The estimated $750 million cost of renovations to the Arizona Diamondbacks stadium — which only cost $354 million to build in the first place in 1998, about $700 million in today’s dollars — is now expected to be “much higher,” according to team CEO Derrick Hall. Hall didn’t say exactly how much higher, or whether it will all fall on the state to increase its planned $500 million cut of the costs, or when the D-backs will get around to actually signing a new lease in exchange for the renovations.
  • Athletics team execs say $300 million has now been spent on construction of John Fisher’s Las Vegas stadium and $989 million contracted for, out of a total price tag of still figuring that out. This is either the biggest bluff in sports history or the biggest dog-catching-the-car-and-having-to-figure-out-what-to-do-with-it, honestly looking forward to the inevitable cataclysmic denouement either way.
  • The waiting to see if the state of Connecticut will provide $127 million to build and MLS Next Pro soccer stadium in Bridgeport is over, and the answer is: Nope, go kick rocks. State Economic Development Commissioner Daniel O’Keefe cited the need to reduce state spending and what the Connecticut Post termed the “mercurial nature of the sports industry,” noting that the Connecticut Sun may be about to move to Houston and the Bridgeport Islanders may be about to move to Hamilton, fool me three times, shame on me. Developers plan to instead use the planned stadium site for a project involving youth sports indoor and outdoor fields, which apparently don’t require hundreds of millions of dollars of state subsidies like pro sports do.
  • The video of my interview yesterday on whether Los Angeles should try to renegotiate its 2028 Olympics hosting deal is now up at Alissa Walker’s Torched site, go check it out if you like. Chris Tyler of Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, which commissioned me to do my Olympics report, joined as well, and the three of us spent a solid hour discussing what went wrong and options for trying to fix it — suffice to say that if former L.A. mayor Eric Garcetti’s ears are burning today, this is why.
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Indiana offers multiple piles of tax money for Bears stadium in Hammond, total price tag TBD

access_time personNeil deMause

The Indiana state house ways and means committee approved a bill for a Chicago Bears stadium this morning after what was surely minutes of discussion, and while it still needs approval from the full house — and the latest changes from the full senate — it reportedly now has somewhat more detail than the “form a sports authority and figure it out later” bill previously passed by the senate:

  • The site of a new stadium would be in Hammond, not Gary or Portage. Sorry, guy who thought he could build an entire $5 billion stadium with “non-football revenue”!
  • According to NWI.com, “Senate Bill 27 also now details on how a Hammond stadium would be financed, including tax revenues from a special stadium district in Hammond, a 12% ticket tax on all stadium events, potential countywide 1% food and beverage taxes in Lake and Porter counties, doubling Lake County’s innkeeper’s tax, and a variety of other funding mechanisms.” That’s different from the SB27 approved by the senate last month, which only said that a sports authority could use “proceeds of local excise taxes” and “applicable proceeds of food and beverage tax and innkeepers tax.”
  • There’s no total price tag provided for all those taxes, though Indiana speaker of the house Todd Huston reportedly says it would be “similar to Lucas Oil Stadium,” which received $620 million in public money toward its $720 million construction cost.

Bears management has responded with a statement that this represents “the most meaningful step forward in our stadium planning efforts to date” and they “look forward to continuing to build our working relationship” with Indiana. We’ll see if that’s enough of a commitment for house members approve the bill at a final vote a week from tomorrow, as they’ve previously demanded “sign off” from the Bears before okaying the money, so as not to be used as mere leverage against Illinois.

As all the articles say, this is a developing story, so I’ll be updating later today if anything else happens, including over at the Illinois legislature where a hearing is being held today on allowing property tax breaks for a potential Bears stadium in Arlington Heights. Much still to be determined, but if Bears CEO Kevin Warren wants at least the appearance of a bidding war, he seems to have got one.

UPDATE 10:50 am ET: The Illinois committee hearing scheduled for this morning was canceled before the Indiana house committee even met (thanks, commenter Sam Smith!), so one half of the erstwhile bidding war will have to wait a bit, at least.

UPDATE 2:20 pm ET: A Bears spokesperson has released a statement: “Hammond is the site we are focused on. Work to be done.” That is somewhat short of a commitment, but maybe it’ll be enough for Indiana legislators to start making out a wedding registry.

UPDATE 6:02 pm ET: “Indiana House Speaker Todd Huston said the state’s proposed package involves about $1 billion in public funding” — nope, no source on that or methodology about what that includes, the Indiana Capital Chronicle didn’t even have time to put a period at the end of the sentence, this is that fast-breaking a story!

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