The Chicago Bears are looking to piece together legislation in Illinois that might pass the General Assembly in Springfield, Gov. JB Pritzker said Tuesday, as the team continues to weigh whether to stay or move across the border to Indiana.
Pritzker said his office has been a player in the ongoing Illinois negotiations with the NFL franchise, which has been considering elements of two bills that each passed one chamber of the Illinois General Assembly this spring.
“They’ve asked for advice, and so our staff, as well as legislators, have offered them that,” Pritzker said, speaking to reporters Tuesday in Chicago. “They’re looking at both of the bills that passed, the one in the House and the one in the Senate, hoping to put the provisions of each of those together in a form that they think will pass.”
The governor’s comments came after Pritzker and others have called on the Bears to come to a deal before lawmakers may be brought back to Springfield as part of a potential special session. Lawmakers in the state House and state Senate each passed a bill this spring to pave the way for the Bears to stay in Illinois, but they couldn’t come to an overall agreement before the legislature adjourned on June 1.
The negotiations in Illinois stalled in the eleventh hour, four months after the Indiana legislature passed a bill establishing a framework to help the team build a stadium in Hammond, Indiana. Following the inaction in Springfield, the Bears said earlier this month they would proceed with plans for a stadium in Indiana.
Still, Pritzker affirmed Tuesday he was open to calling a special session of the General Assembly to keep the Bears in Illinois, but only “if they’re able to put everything together as we hope they will.”
Illinois House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, a Democrat from Hillside, and Senate President Don Harmon of Oak Park could also convene a special session. Welch said last week that there needs to be an agreement among the legislature, the governor’s office and the Bears before asking legislators to return to the state Capitol for a special vote.
A spokesperson for the Bears declined to comment Tuesday afternoon.
The state still needs the Bears to put together specific provisions of a bill, Pritzker said. Once the team is able to put together a proposal, he said, “they need to begin conversations with members of the legislature that they weren’t able to win over before, and again, we’ve been advising and trying to help out wherever we could.”
Individual lawmakers have floated a handful of proposals to incentivize the Bears to stay in-state, but only two passed in either chamber this spring.
The so-called megaproject legislation that previously passed in the Illinois House would have given what the Bears have described as property tax certainty through a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes, or PILOT, arrangement at the Arlington Heights site they purchased years ago. Pritzker and lawmakers have long said such legislation would help not only the Bears but also other big businesses seeking to develop large projects across Illinois.
The state Senate, for its part, passed a last-ditch bill that would have allowed Arlington Heights or Chicago to enter into a public-private ownership deal with the NFL franchise. Such legislation would have given the team a path to build a new stadium without paying property taxes on the facility, bill sponsors said.
The Bears purchased the site of the Arlington International Racecourse in 2023 and have since pursued plans to build a stadium there. But they’ve also appeared to seriously consider a number of other options in the intervening years, including a domed stadium on Chicago’s lakefront and, most concerningly for Illinois officials, across the border in Hammond.
As Indiana officials applauded the Bears’ announcement earlier this month that they planned to pursue building a stadium in their state — including in an opinion piece Tuesday in the Tribune from Republican Indiana House Speaker Todd Huston — Pritzker kept up the general line from Illinois leaders that it was far from a done deal and that Illinois remained in the hunt.
“We don’t want to raise taxes on the people of Illinois, and we have offered infrastructure support, which is actually most of what the Bears have been asking for, and so we think we’re actually as close as anybody to getting a stadium done here,” Pritzker said. “I don’t think Indiana is a whole heck of a lot closer than we are.”
