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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.

The Cook County treasurer’s office released a report this morning on the fiscal impact of the proposed “megaprojects” tax break bill that Chicago Bears execs are pushing for, and concluding: “The benefits for the Bears and other megaproject developers are clear, while the benefits for Illinois residents are murky.” there are a bunch of interesting tidbits in it:

• As reported previously, the bill would be for far more than just a Bears project in Arlington Heights, with any development costing $100 million or more potentially being eligible to negotiate lower property tax payments as a condition of construction. (Technically property tax payments would be frozen at pre-construction levels; the developer would then negotiate an agreement with local government on how much extra to pay in payments in lieu of taxes, with the total being less than what they would have paid without the megaproject designation.) This could include a potential new White Sox stadium, as well as numerous other non-sports projects: The Chicago planning department, notes the report, “lists at least five projects with price tags of more than $100 million that were under construction in 2025 alone” just in Chicago’s Loop and Near West Side.
• The bill would also expand the use of Sales Tax and Revenue (STAR) bonds, kicking back sales taxes to pay for developments as well. “The bill is about far more than just PILOT,” treasurer’s office research director Hal Dardick told the Chicago Tribune. “It’s about creating a sales tax increment and a hotel tax increment to fund borrowing by these developers — they can get breaks on top of breaks.”
• Part of the PILOT payment would be sliced off to fund property tax relief, something that it was previously estimated would only provide about $1.29 per homeowner on average. If the money were instead targeted to just Arlington Heights, though, it could provide a tax break of about $280 per year — 3.3% of the village’s average tax bill — while the rest of Cook County homeowners got bupkis. Meanwhile, making Swiss cheese out of the state’s property tax base via tax breaks for developers would undercut the ability of local governments to reduce property tax rates more broadly.
• The legislation would allow a 9% amusement tax surcharge on megaprojects funded with STAR bonds — but not on a Bears stadium, which would be exempt. (If a Bears stadium even used STAR bonds, which is as yet unclear.)
• University of Colorado Denver property tax expert Geoffrey Propheter says the tax break on a Bears stadium alone would be about $39 million a year, or more than $1.5 billion over 40 years, a present value of just under $700 million in forgone property taxes. That’s less than the $2 billion figure Propheter previously estimated, but only because, as Propheter confirms by email, the earlier figure included forgone property tax revenues on the entire project, not just the stadium. (The report doesn’t estimate a figure for total tax losses from beyond that it could be in the “billions,” which seems pretty obvious if the Bears project alone could be $2 billion.)
• “Should the Illinois bill become law, one key question will remain: would the amount of property taxes the team and any other megaproject developers end up paying be enough to cover the increased costs of education and other local services made necessary by their projects?” Good question!
• There are plenty of other development projects that have more economic impact than an NFL stadium and which pay their full share of taxes: For example, “Old Orchard Mall in Skokie draws 13 million customers annually, generates more than $50
  million in state and local sales tax revenue – compared with $27 million projected by the Bears for the team’s development – and employs 2,500 people at a location that is open 363 days per year.” Building subsidized projects means the same land is no longer available for unsubsidized ones that, while potentially less sexy than football, could be just as good for the local economy.
• Even if the Bears might move to Hammond, Indiana without the megaprojects tax subsidy, that might not be so bad: Hammond is actually closer to Chicago than Arlington Heights, so the likelihood of Bears fans still spending money on food and hotels in Chicago means  “a stadium in Hammond would still produce economic benefits for Chicago and the state of Illinois — with Indiana taxpayers picking up the $1 billion tab to subsidize the development.”

That’s a whole lot of known unknowns and unknown unknowns, but the upshot is still: Allowing all big development projects to negotiate their own property tax bills, and allowing more of them to siphon off sales taxes as well, could come at an enormous cost to city, county, and Illinois state treasuries. Add in the $855 million in infrastructure money that the Bears still want as well — despite not yet spelling out exactly what they want to use it for — and the six days left for the Illinois legislature to get any of this done in addition to a state budget, and it’s maybe no surprise that Gov. JB Pritzker was left on Friday trying to assure everyone that the Arlington Heights stadium isn’t dead just yet:

“I’ve seen miracles happen every year. Every single year,” Pritzker said after an unrelated event in Joliet when asked about his assessment of the legislature passing a last-minute bill to incentivize the Bears in the state. “I feel confident that there will be a bill that gets brought up in the Senate, and then hopefully they’ll pass it and send it over to the House, and that bill will be about whether or not we’re keeping them in the state of Illinois or letting them go to Indiana.” …

Pritzker on Friday said he hasn’t personally lobbied members of the Chicago legislative delegation on the latest stadium issue.

“This week, I’m not like calling them into my office and talking to each one of them. We have a lot of things on our plate, as you might know, to get done this week,” Pritzker said.

Is that code for “We’ve talked behind the scenes and I know this will get done” or for “Oh well, I can say I tried, it’s Indiana’s funeral if they want to send a pile of moneybags to the Bears”? We’ll know by Friday, maybe.

Chicago Bears execs presented the NFL with a stadium update yesterday, and what did they say, commissioner Roger Goodell?

“There was a specific update on the Bears on the two sites that are viable in the Bears’ mind,” he said. “That process is going on.”…

“I’ve spoken to the governor [of Illinois] recently and there’s a focus on getting something done, and there will be two viable options for the Bears to choose from,” he said.

That is definitely a specific update on … something. The two sites Bears owner George McCaskey is considering, in Arlington Heights, Illinois and Hammond, Indiana, will continue to be two sites that are options! Options the Bears can choose from!

Back in the world of actual news reporting, there’s still no indication of what if anything the state senate and house will pass in terms of the megaprojects tax break bill that Bears officials want before agreeing to an Arlington Heights stadium. The Illinois legislative session wraps up next week, and it seems likely that something will pass, but there’s no telling whether it’ll be the same something that McCaskey wants — let alone the additional subsidies the Bears owner wants as well.

With that in mind, Goodell’s statement seems like an attempt at momentum building, or at least momentum not destroying: The stadium talks are going according to plan, all will work out, there’s definitely nothing that’s a crisis or anything. It’s very possible that no one really knows what the Illinois legislature will do, and that also no one knows what Bears ownership will do if they don’t get everything they’ve demanded — up and move to Indiana, or take what they can get in Illinois? Past stadium games of chicken have gone both ways, it’s tough to predict unless you live in George McCaskey’s brain, assuming even he’s decided at this point. Leverage is hard!