SPRINGFIELD — Faced with the collapse of a yearslong tax relief plan aimed at encouraging a Chicago Bears move to Arlington Heights, state lawmakers spent Sunday, the last scheduled day of their spring session, scrambling for a Hail Mary plan that could get the votes to coerce the team to stay in Illinois.
For all of the Sundays that the Bears, one of the National Football League’s charter franchises, have competed in their 105 years — from Decatur’s Staley Field, then to Chicago’s Wrigley Field and Soldier Field — it was an off-season Sunday, far away from the gridiron, that could prove to be one of the most consequential in team history.
In the wings stood an offer from the state of Indiana, which late last year created an agency to construct a taxpayer-financed stadium and surrounding mixed-use entertainment district for the Bears in Hammond, near Wolf Lake, 20 miles southeast of Chicago.
Some of the dysfunction that plagued other legislation in this spring session also was on display with the Bears issue.
Rather than meeting together during the spring session, the Illinois House and Senate often convened on alternating weeks. The schedule effectively put each chamber into separate silos, leaving them unaware of what the other was doing and creating an atmosphere that made it hard to build momentum to move bills from one chamber to the other.
State Rep. Kam Buckner of Chicago led the House in passing a measure aimed at providing the Bears with the property tax certainty they sought for the 326-acre Arlington Heights location the team acquired for $197.2 million in 2023. Buckner’s bill would have allowed the team to have its property tax assessments frozen for 25 to 45 years in exchange for making payments to local taxing bodies in lieu of taxes, known as PILOT.
But weeks after the House sent the Senate the bill, state Sen. Bill Cunningham said Saturday evening that the PILOT proposal lacked enough votes for passage — a conclusion he reached after a lengthy closed-door meeting with majority Senate Democrats.
Cunningham, who has been spearheading Bears stadium talks in the Senate, said some senators opposed giving property-tax breaks to a professional sports franchise worth billions of dollars. He also said Chicago Democrats, opposed to allowing the team to move to a suburban location, wanted a city stadium site to be an option.
“I think there’s always been, from day one, there has always been a Chicago problem with the Bears proposal,” Cunningham said. “The Bears have had a proposal on the table for a couple of years that asks Chicago members of the legislature to vote for a tax credit that would encourage a business to leave Chicago. Legislators generally don’t do that. That’s always been an obstacle to passing this bill. That’s something we’re working on addressing with our proposal.”
Lawmakers, Cunningham said, “want to be comfortable with something that protects the taxpayers, something that their constituents can live with, whether or not the Bears are supportive of it, (which) is very much a secondary concern.”
Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker and the Bears had said publicly that the team’s choices to relocate from Soldier Field, its home since 1971, came down to the Arlington Heights property, the site of the former Arlington International Racecourse, and the site in Hammond.
Also upending the focus on Arlington Heights was Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s early May visit to Springfield, where he touted resurrecting a $4.7 billion lakefront stadium proposal south of Soldier Field from 2024 that Pritzker and top lawmakers rejected out of hand as too costly to taxpayers.
Cunningham contended on Saturday night that despite the team’s public pronouncements, “the Bears have met repeatedly with the city of Chicago over the last several months to talk about” a city stadium proposal.
“Obviously, the city has made it clear they would like to be considered for a new stadium,” he said on Saturday night. “We’d like to come up with some sort of proposal that would put them on an equal plane” as Arlington Heights.
By early Sunday evening, Cunningham said talks revolved around an alternative plan that would allow municipalities to create their own stadium finance authorities, establishing a public-private partnership in which the Bears would build a stadium on public land to avoid paying property taxes on the facility.
“We’re working on a public ownership model for the stadium. So it would be owned by a public municipality,” Cunningham said. “(But) privately financed. The Bears have said they’ll spend upwards of $2.5 billion of their money on (the) stadium. So the setup would be, they would essentially pay for the stadium, enter (into) an agreement with the municipality. Could be any municipality.”
Cunningham noted that Soldier Field is owned by the Chicago Park District and sits on publicly owned land, so it doesn’t pay property taxes.
“I think all but three NFL stadiums are publicly owned right now, so it’s a pretty common model,” he said.
While a municipal stadium owned by Arlington Heights or Chicago would allow the Bears to escape paying any property taxes on the new facility, the stadium authority could negotiate with the team on the distribution of revenues derived from the facility.
Such a stadium finance authority already exists on the state level under the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, or ISFA, which oversees the renovations and construction of sports stadiums in the state. ISFA is the owner of Rate Field, home of the Chicago White Sox, and financed the 2003 renovation of Soldier Field.
Still, by 7 p.m. Sunday, six hours before the session-ending deadline, no actual legislation had surfaced.
The last-minute plan left numerous questions about how such a plan would be carried out, let alone whether it would garner support in both the House and Senate. Crain’s Chicago Business was the first to report about the alternative plan. The absence of details left many questions, not the least of which is whether the Bears would accept an alternative proposal. There also were questions about how a local stadium authority would work or own a stadium site and how it would generate revenue.
Bears’ spokesman Scott Hagel did not respond to requests for comment about the status of negotiations on Sunday.
Also unresolved was the Bears’ request for roughly $855 million in infrastructure funding related to the Arlington Heights property.
Buckner said he did not know the specifics of Cunningham’s plan.
“The Senate has been very clear that they’re kicking around some new ideas with their caucus on what a last-ditch effort may look like. And so I’m looking forward to hearing what the response is in the Senate, and we’ll see what can happen before the end of the night,” Buckner told reporters.
“The language is what is going to drive the day when it comes to what happens here,” he said. “Details matter.”
