Category: NFL

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.

The clock ran out on the Illinois state legislative session last night at midnight, but the decision on whether to pass legislation for a Chicago Bears stadium remained alive until this morning, when the Illinois house finally stuck a fork in it by adjourning without a vote. After the collapse of the team’s preferred megaprojects tax break bill over the weekend (Chicago Daily Herald: “Bears property tax break bill sacked“), state senators had worked frantically to issue a new bill (Capitol News Illinois: “Hail Mary effort to keep Bears in Illinois”), which cleared the senate at nearly 4 am (Chicago Tribune: “Illinois Senate in overtime passes last-ditch public stadium legislation”) and headed to the state house, which decided to take its ball and go home.

Setting aside sports metaphors equating passing stadium subsidies with scoring a touchdown — please, please stop doing that, people — what the hell actually happened this weekend, and where do things stand now with the Bears and their possible future homes? Let’s recap:

• Late Saturday, after discussion of limiting legislation to only applying to the Bears to avoid handing tax breaks to billions of dollars of other projects, State Sen. Bill Cunningham declared the megaprojects bills dead, saying too many senate Democrats were opposed to the state subsidizing any Bears move out of Chicago to suburban Arlington Heights. Still, Cunningham said, he hoped to offer the Bears something by submitting legislation on Sunday that would put Chicago and Arlington Heights “on an equal plane.”
• On Sunday night at 11 pm, Cunningham introduced a bill to allow any municipality in Cook County with more than 70,000 residents to create a sports authority to own new stadiums. This would enable the Bears to get out of paying any property taxes on a stadium — though the bill specified that they would pay property taxes on any surrounding team-owned stadium district.
• Nearly four hours after the midnight deadline for a bill, the senate voted 37-17 to approve Cunningham’s sports authorities bill. Rather than fake an 11:59 pm time stamp as the Illinois legislature did for a White Sox stadium bill in 1988, this time the legislature used a different end run trick play gambit, evading a rule that bills passed after the session ends need a supermajority vote by putting no effective date on the bill, allowing it to go into effect next June, which would nullify the increased vote requirement.
• The bill then headed to the state house, which at 4:30 am adjourned without taking action on the sports authority bill.

While it’s kind of moot now, it’s worth taking a quick look at what Cunningham’s bill would have cost relative to previous proposals. Under a sports authority plan, Bears owner George McCaskey would have gotten a bigger tax break for a stadium owned by a sports authority, paying no taxes at all rather than a negotiated payments in lieu of taxes rate. Instead of saving an estimated $39 million a year, he would have saved an estimated $53 million a year, pushing the total present value of the stadium tax break from around $670 million to around $900 million. Making the surrounding property taxable, though, would have prevented McCaskey from getting more than a billion dollars in additional tax breaks for the rest of his planned development.

However, in a series of posts late last night, Center Square sports subsidy reporter Jon Styf noted that even though Cunningham said the Bears would pay for stadium construction, his bill would have allowed a stadium authority to sell bonds to pay for stadium infrastructure — and potentially pay it off by siphoning off sales tax revenues from a stadium district. It’s hard to guess how much this would have added to the total public cost, but it could have been hefty indeed if a stadium district were large enough.

Meanwhile, none of this would have actually authorized a stadium — it would just have authorized Arlington Heights, or Chicago, or Cicero or Schaumburg or Evanston, to create sports authorities to grant McCaskey his get-out-of-property-taxes-free card (and potential infrastructure bonds). With Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson having been vocal about wanting to offer team ownership a new stadium on the Chicago lakefront, it could easily have led to Chicago and Arlington Heights going toe to toe to win McCaskey’s heart, which could have gotten pricey for taxpayers.

None of that is happening now, though, at least not unless Bears execs decide to put off a stadium decision in hopes of a potential special session of the legislature later this summer. The team issued a brief statement this morning reading, “We will finalize our evaluation of both Arlington Heights and Hammond, and remain on the late spring/early summer timeline that we have previously communicated,” which manages to be a threat to move to Indiana without actually closing the door on Illinois, well played. Until we hear back from them, add the Bears mess to the Tampa Bay Rays mess as situations where we won’t know the final score (dammit!) for a while yet.

With four days left before the end of the Illinois legislative session, Crain’s Chicago Business reports (citing no specific sources) that state senators are “considering dramatically scaling back a sweeping megaproject incentive bill” to cut out everything except tax breaks for a Bears stadium in Arlington Heights. The idea here is to avoid debate on allowing property tax cuts for any development project over $100 million, something that could cost the state billions of dollars — plus expanded sales tax kickbacks and funneling some of the remaining payments in lieu of property taxes to broad property tax relief — and instead just carve out a single-use subsidy that would still cost the state billions of dollars, but fewer billions.

One problem is that a bunch of that stuff was added to the bill by the state house because legislators there didn’t want to be seen as just opening the state’s wallet for the Bears — though adding more goodies for other developers and handing out a few dollars apiece in tax rebates for all property owners would only make the bill more costly and could ultimately force more tax hikes elsewhere. (Interestingly, Crain’s notes that the Bears owners themselves opposed the tax relief provision, because it “would incentivize local taxing authorities to push for a higher annual payment” by the team in order to have something to dole out to homeowners.) A Bears-only bill “is more viable in the Senate than the House,” says Crain’s (citing “sources familiar with the talks”), leaving the possibility that the senate could revise the bill to gain passage there, but couldn’t win the support of the house in reconciliation talks.

Meanwhile, the bill’s chief house sponsor, Kam Buckner, lashed out at Cook County treasurer Maria Pappas’s office for its analysis of the megaprojects bill, calling it “field-of-dreams budgeting” and “fantasy accounting” because “you can’t count full tax revenue from a project that doesn’t exist. … The real choice is not ‘full taxes versus reduced taxes.’ The real choice is a negotiated payment on a real project, or full taxes on an empty lot. Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.”

This is a common argument for development subsidies — there’s nothing there now, so getting any taxes at all from the site is better than nothing — but it overlooks two massive issues. The first is that developments come not only with benefits but with costs — roads for its occupants to drive on, police and fire services to protect it, schools for its residents’ kids to go to — and that’s precisely what property taxes are meant to cover. If you allow a developer to erect a bunch of buildings and not pay for the associated costs, somebody else has to cover those, which means either increased taxes for other residents (bye-bye, tax relief) or cuts to other services.

The second issue is opportunity cost: One advantage of a vacant lot is you can still build something on it, whereas a developed site is as developed as it’s ever going to get. As the treasurer’s report noted, there are plenty of non-subsidized projects like shopping malls that generate economic activity while still paying their taxes, and every time you use up another lot on a tax-limited project, that’s one you can’t use on one that’ll pay its full weight. Buckner should know this: He represents a district in Chicago, which in the first decade of this century became the poster child for carving up its tax base into Swiss cheese to promote development, leaving gaping budget holes as a result.

And that’s where things stand right now, on Thursday morning. Though Capitol News Illinois editor Jerry Nowicki just chimed in with a video interview where he said his reporters talked to Gov. JB Pritzker and he “seemed optimistic” about passage of a bill, for whatever that’s worth. There’s also still the question of whether the Illinois legislature will provide $855 million in infrastructure funding, mostly for transit upgrades, before team execs have provided a traffic plan explaining why they need $855 million, something senate bill sponsor Bill Cunningham has said is unacceptable. I’ll update this post later today on the off chance we get any more clarity on what’s going on in Springfield; stay tuned, but don’t get your hopes up.