Category: Chicago Bears

Indiana Gov. Mike Braun says he isn’t sweating Porter County leaders’ opposition to raising food and beverage taxes for a new Chicago Bears stadium the next county over, because really it’s Porter County that would be missing out on all the fun of taking part in shoveling money at the Bears owners:

Under the law, Porter County would have to approve a one-percent food and beverage tax to have representation on the stadium authority. The governor said if it doesn’t get approved, the biggest impact would be on Porter County itself.

“If they choose not to put any skin in the game, they’re not going to have any say-so for what happens from all the economic benefits we’re going to get from it,” Braun said.

Maybe you’re the one up a stump, Porter County! Does a county get a chance to fund a stadium deal every day?

The whole Porter County kerfuffle points up one of the weirder things about the Indiana Bears stadium deal: Though it was passed by the legislature back in February, it didn’t precisely spell out who would be spending what on a stadium, or even where exactly it would be. A newly created sports authority will be able to offer the Bears owners money from a whole bunch of taxes, only some of which actually exist yet:

• All new property tax, income tax, and sales tax for the next 35 years from an omni-TIF district encompassing the stadium and an undetermined number of square miles around it. This could certainly amount to billions of dollars, much of it potentially cannibalized from spending that has nothing to do with the Bears, but just as we saw in Kansas, it’s impossible to say exactly how much without knowing the size of the district.
• A doubling of the Lake County hotel tax from 5% to 10%, which would provide at least $90 million.
• Those 1% food and beverage tax surcharges in Lake and Porter counties, which would be worth about $250 million each, if approved.
• A 12% ticket tax, which would be worth about another $200 million, though as established ticket taxes are unlike other taxes in that they tend to come out of team owners’ revenues.

The best guess at the total public cost is “easily past $4 billion,” but that could go up or down depending on what gets approved in terms of that tax diversion district plus the new taxes. And a quarter-billion dollars from Porter County seems like a significant amount of money, though I suppose Braun is right in that if county leaders balk at that, the state could always compensate by running the omni-TIF district all the way to the Ohio border.

All this makes Indiana’s bid for the Bears a bit of a moving target in the state’s bidding war with Illinois, which is no doubt very much to Bears owner George McCaskey’s liking. (“You’re willing to give us $1.5 billion in property tax breaks and infrastructure money, you say? Well, what if I told you Indiana was offering a TIF district the size of the entire Local Group?”) Right now you have a three-way — or more, given the various Illinois factions — game of chicken going on, and nobody’s showing each other their cards, and … okay, maybe it’s too early in the day for me to be writing extended metaphors. If anyone says they know how much money Bears execs could get out of either Indiana or Illinois, they’re lying, that’s the upshot here.

Crain’s Chicago has another article quoting Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker as saying the ball is in the Chicago Bears owners’ court as far as coming up with a demand for an Illinois stadium bill, just like Pritzker already said last week. The governor went a bit further this time in saying that Bears execs are actually working on cobbling together a new bill — “I think they’re looking at both of the bills that passed — the one in the House, the one in the Senate — hoping to put the provisions of each of those together in a form that they think will pass” — and reiterated that he’s willing to call a special session of the legislature as soon as team officials have all their votes in a row.

That’s all old news, so instead I’d like to take the time to focus in on this paragraph from the Crain’s piece:

Even though the bill didn’t provide any public money for the stadium, many Illinois legislators were cool to the idea of providing property tax breaks to a privately owned football team at a time when constituents are worried about the higher cost of living and struggling with their own taxes.

Look, I get it. There are only so many minutes in the day to report and speed-type reports like these, though at least Crain’s writer John Pletz appears to have a more reasonable one-article-a-day workload. And journalism shorthand is an established thing, so wanting to say “public money” when you mean “direct cash subsidies” is sort of understandable.

Still: Saying the rejected megaprojects bill “didn’t provide any public money for the stadium” but did “provide property tax breaks” is just nonsense, and doesn’t belong in any self-respecting news outlet. Tax breaks are very much public money — they’re calculated as such in an annual “tax expenditure” report by the state comptroller, for one thing — and are equally valuable to team owners’ bottom line, as saving $700 million on your property tax bills is no different from getting $700 million worth of government checks. So while the turn of phrase may seem innocuous, it ends up misleading those readers who are worried about the higher cost of living and struggling with their own taxes. And that’s before even considering that one of the bills previously considered would take sales and hotel taxes collected in a stadium district and use them to pay off stadium bonds, which isn’t a tax break at all, it’s just a government check.

As for where an Illinois stadium would go, the Bears-owned site in Arlington Heights is still the most likely target, though that isn’t stopping other communities from trying to get in on the bidding: In addition to the industrial suburb of McCook, state rep Curtis Tarver has proposed a site at 85th and Lake Shore Drive on the far South Side near the Indiana border, saying that he told Bears CEO about the idea and “he certainly did not tell me that’s the worst idea I’ve seen in my life.” Hope springs eternal, and summers eternal too, at least when a special session is on the table.

The Chicago Bears‘ search for the city that will lavish it with the most public stadium dollars has officially re-entered the throwing-stuff-at-the-wall stage, with fresh suburbs entering the fray. Last week, McCook, Illinois Mayor Terrance Carr and four of his top officials hand-delivered a letter to Bears execs spelling out a stadium proposal in his village west of Chicago. And while Carr wouldn’t say what was in it — no spoilers for Bears execs before they’ve read it! — he did provide some hints:

The proposed site is at the southeast corner of 55th Street and East Avenue, filled in quarry land. … [Carr’s] proposal: The Bears or the village would buy the land. Then the Bears would build a domed, 80,000-seat stadium, which the team would give to the village. In return, Carr would charge the team $1 a year in rent. As a publicly owned stadium, it would be exempt from property taxes.

That would provide the “property tax certainty” that Bears officials say they want — at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to the McCook treasury, plus the cost of buying the land from its current owners for around $160 million. (Estimates of the cost of a tax break on a similar Arlington Heights stadium came to $700 million, and there the team would still be paying current property tax levels, while in McCook it would pay nothing.) “It’s not a waste of money for me to do this,” said Carr, while also saying, “This is prime real estate. If we don’t get the Bears, I’ll get some development there.” Wouldn’t that seem to indicate it would be a waste of money, if the mayor thinks he could get development without putting up $800-million-plus in subsidies? Unless Carr just means “somebody is eventually sure to snap up my get-out-of-property-taxes-free card,” in which case he’s only leaving out whether a football stadium operating ten days a year would be the best bang for $800 million in public bucks.

Random suburban officials delivering secretive manila envelopes to NFL teams wouldn’t normally be much of a news story, but all the other potential Bears stadium plans remain up in the air: Illinois officials are still in “tell us what we have to put in a tax break bill for you to commit to our state” mode, while officials in Porter County, Indiana continue to balk at a 1% restaurant tax surcharge to help pay for a stadium in Hammond, which is not actually in Porter County.

“I think there’s actually a negligible percentile of Porter County residents that support creating a food-and-beverage tax in our county and putting that money in an envelope and sending it off to Hammond,” [Porter County Commissioner Jim] Biggs told the Indiana Capital Chronicle. “We have our own issues here that need to be addressed.”

Outgoing Porter County Council president Andy Vasquez, who lost his primary for reelection this spring after supporting the Bears stadium tax, added, “Evidently people don’t want it because I’m no longer going to be here after December 31st. I’m not going to be here, so we’ll leave it to the next group.” It sounds increasingly like nothing is going to get decided until next spring, when Indiana’s bill to provide a somewhat hazy amount of money for a Bears stadium expires — if you were ever inclined to take sports team execs’ pronounced deadlines seriously, this might be a good reminder to quit.

If last Friday’s announcement that the Chicago Bears were “advancing” a stadium project in Hammond, Indiana was meant to end debate about where the team’s new home will be, it’s not working. If it was meant to stir up debate, by reigniting the bidding war that fizzled when the Illinois legislature declined to pass a big tax subsidy bill, it’s going gangbusters.

Among this week’s developments:

• Hammond Mayor Tom McDermott said Bears execs are still looking at multiple sites in Hammond, including the site of the current Lost Marsh Golf Course.
• Porter County Commissioner Jim Biggs said Indiana’s plan to raise food and beverage and hotel taxes in his county, which does not include Hammond, would face a tough road to approval by the county commission: “To collect millions of dollars here and send it across county lines for something like a sports stadium … why would we do that? We have our own problems to deal with.” In Lake County, meanwhile, which does include Hammond, the president of the county council — yes, there’s a council and a commission for each Indiana county, go look at the org charts if you dare — said while he’s in favor of raising taxes to fund the Bears, it likely won’t happen much before the June 2027 deadline set by the state authorizing legislation. (Combined the hotel and food/beverage tax hikes would generate about $20 million a year, which would be enough to pay off about $300 million worth of stadium costs.)
• Illinois State Rep. Dan Ugaste announced plans to introduce a new bill to provide property tax breaks and sales-tax-backed bonds for “megaprojects” costing over $500 million — just like the rejected bill did, so it’s unclear why he thinks this one has a better shot at passage. [CORRECTION: The original bill included any project over $100 million, so maybe that’s what Ugaste thinks will make the difference here; though the project size threshold wasn’t one of the things that torpedoed the last bill, so maybe not.]
• Illinois Gov JB Pritzker said he would consider calling a special session of the legislature to pass a Bears stadium bill, saying, “The Bears would like to see something happen, and we all do too.”

So the Indiana stadium plans still don’t have final legislative approval or an agreed-on site, while in Illinois … pretty much the same. (Indiana did pass a state bill in February, but it left a lot of the funding details as TBD.) I was interviewed on Illinois radio station WMBD yesterday, and the last question when we were running out of time was “Where do you think the Bears will end up?” I answered, “I’m not placing bets on anything, because this is honestly still very early in the whole process,” and I’m going to stick with that: It looks clearer than ever like the Bears owners are still in the tire-kicking phase of this stadium shakedown, and there are likely many more twists and turns to come.

Meanwhile, Greg Hinz of Crain’s Chicago Business claims that the Bears moving to Indiana could be good news for White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, since it would free up existing hotel tax money that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson wants to use for a new lakefront Bears stadium. Yes, “freeing up” money that is being targeted for a project nobody except the mayor wants to build is a kind of nebulous concept, and yes, Hinz is the same guy who previously gave Reinsdorf tons of runway to argue for public money for a new White Sox stadium. Still, it’s a reminder that any time an elected official mentions a potential pot of taxpayer funds, local business leaders will smell blood in the water and come running with their hands out.

(And yes, I know that sharks can’t run and don’t have hands. It’s been a hectic week, allow me my mixed metaphors.)

Friday news dumps may not work anymore in their original purpose of hiding bad news, but they can still be useful when someone wants to influence the social media discourse without risk of anyone in an official capacity picking up the phone until three days later. That looks to be what just happened with the Chicago Bears, whose execs announced on Friday that, in the wake of Illinois not passing tax subsidies for a stadium there, they plan to “advance our stadium development project in Hammond,” Indiana. “Advance” meaning what exactly? Sorry, our offices are closed now, please call back during business hours!

Even the NFL, though, immediately made clear that just because the Bears owners say they’re moving to Indiana doesn’t mean they’re moving to Indiana:

A league source cautioned the announcement didn’t eliminate Arlington Heights as an option, were the state to find a way to give the Bears property tax certainty on the 326-acre plot they own. In fact, the source said, there was “still a lot of ballgame left to play” for Illinois lawmakers. It’s unclear whether waiting until the Senate and House reconvene this fall would be too late for the Bears, though.

And if that’s not enough, here’s consummate NFL insider Mike Florio of NBC Sports:

Of course it’s a leverage play. If it wasn’t, a deal would already be done to build in Hammond.

Instead, the Bears keep talking to Illinois even as they supposedly focus on Indiana.

It makes sense for the Bears to try to persuade members of the media that Indiana isn’t a leverage play. (It doesn’t make sense for members of the media to swallow the hook, unless it’s a part of a broader quid pro quo for scoops and/or access.) For a leverage play to be effective, it has to be viewed as real. If it’s not viewed as real, the leverage won’t move the needle in Illinois.

Florio goes on like that for a while, talking about how a bluff only works if you don’t admit it’s a bluff, which, yes, we know.

The Indiana legislature has approved the outlines of a stadium deal that could provide billions of dollars in state subsidies, but there are lot of details left to be filled in, including: how big the omni-TIF tax diversion district within which property, sales, income and other taxes would be siphoned off for the Bears; whether a stadium would be built on a Hammond site described as being atop a “giant slag heap” or elsewhere; and whether Lake and Porter counties will vote to increase food and beverage taxes (by 1 percentage point) and hotel taxes (by 5 percentage points) to help fund the plan, which they would have to do by the end of June 2027. Both counties are holding elections this fall, so who takes office then could end up influencing how any potential stadium deal plays out.

That is, if the Bears owners even want to move to Indiana, which they don’t have to definitively decide for a while yet. Please tattoo this on your arms, state legislators of the nation: Stadium deadlines are for suckers.

The Chicago Bears stadium bill saga is all over (for now) but the shouting, and there is So. Much. Shouting. Take your pick of the takes: Illinois legislators are to blame for fumbling the ball into the Bears’ hands. The Bears leadership is to blame for toying with Chicago’s affections. It takes a big pony to pull a big wagon. Collect ’em all!

Or you can stick with the one take that matters:

People seem to be forgetting that the Bears can just continue to play in Soldier Field for as long as the team wants.

— J.C. Bradbury (@jcbradbury.com) 2026-06-02T00:56:36.235Z

Yuppppp. Arguing whether the failure of the legislature to pass subsidies for the Bears was a sign of an inept government or inept team management is missing the point: This was a crisis entirely of team ownership’s own making. It was Bears CEO Kevin Warren who set an end-of-May deadline — while simultaneously saying “we don’t have a set deadline” — in hopes that the threat of the team moving to Indiana would shake loose a couple billion dollars in tax breaks and transit upgrades. And if team execs now don’t like the choice of either Arlington Heights (stripped of the assurance of tax dollars) or Hammond, they can always just go back to what they’ve been doing the last few years and wait things out while playing in the stadium Chicago taxpayers paid to rebuild for them 23 years ago; they can even decide to stay there permanently, if the prospect of paying their tax bill in Arlington Heights is too pricey, and of moving to Indiana is too Indiana-y. (It’s happened before!) This wasn’t a fumble; it was an attempt at a cash grab, one that didn’t pay off, and now Bears owner George McCaskey needs to decide what cards to play next, as sports owners always do.

Of course, not everyone was apportioning blame; some were doling out credit, to themselves, as in the statement by Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker:

“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,” Pritzker said at his Capitol office, after a marathon overnight conclusion to the session.

“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,” Pritzker said.

That’s all very inspiring, or would be if not for the fact that Pritzker very much did try to foist billions of dollars of taxpayer money on a billionaire-owned team — plus billions more for other billionaire developers. I suppose it’s a sort of principle of treating all businesses the same, so long as you don’t count businesses that can’t afford to build $100 million–plus developments? Everybody loves a level playing field, so long as some fields are more level than others.