A new poll found that most Illinois residents think public funding for a new Chicago Bears stadium should be limited — and a lot of downstate residents don’t much care if the Bears leave the state.
Asked how the city and state should negotiate with the Bears, 37% said the government should let the team leave Soldier Field without any taxpayer funds to build a new stadium. Another 27% said officials should offer a deal equal to that made by Indiana, which has proposed spending $1 billion while the Bears would pay $2 billion to build an enclosed stadium in Hammond.
Another 13% said Illinois should offer more than Indiana to keep the team, while 22% said the Bears should be forced to stay in Soldier Field for the rest of their contract, which runs through 2033.
The survey of 1,000 Illinois residents released Tuesday was conducted in March by the University of Illinois Springfield Center for State Policy and Leadership, and first published by NPR Illinois. Respondents were representative of Illinois’ population based on characteristics such as gender, race, political affiliation and urban and rural residency.
Nearly 70% of respondents said new stadiums should be funded mostly or entirely with private dollars, including 37% who support fully private funding and 32% who prefer more private than public funding. About 16% supported an even split between public and private funding, while less than 15% favored relying more on tax dollars. Views on funding were consistent across political parties, with Democrats, Republicans and independents showing similar preferences.
“These findings show that while Illinois residents have mixed views on whether the Bears should remain in the state, there is broad agreement that taxpayer funding for new stadiums should be limited,” said Nicholas Waterbury, assistant research director for the UIS Center for State Policy and Leadership.
The findings also showed that passions for keeping the Bears in Illinois ran much higher in the Chicago area than downstate.
About 49% of respondents said it is important that the team remains in Illinois, including 29% who said it is “very important,” while 50.3% said it is only somewhat important or not important at all, including 30% who said it is “not important at all.”
Net importance — the percentage of residents that consider the Bears’ home state as an important issue, minus the percentage that do not think it is important at all — was 49% in Chicago, 28% in the collar counties, but negative 29% in the southern end of the state.
