SPRINGFIELD — The Illinois House adjourned early Monday without taking up a last-ditch Senate bill that would have allowed Arlington Heights or Chicago to form a public-private ownership deal with the Chicago Bears and given the team a path to build a new stadium without paying property taxes on the facility.
Mayor Brandon Johnson welcomes latest Bears proposal to keep team in Chicago
House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, in adjourning the chamber’s spring session, said conversations on the Bears stadium issue would continue over the summer. Welch’s comments came shortly after the Senate’s 37-17 vote, which occurred nearly four hours after the legislature’s scheduled midnight Sunday adjournment.
The failure to take up the bill, which several House lawmakers said was due to a lack of time to study the proposal, raises questions about the fate of the Bears, who have an offer from the state of Indiana to construct a taxpayer-financed stadium and surrounding mixed-use entertainment district in Hammond, near Wolf Lake, 20 miles southeast of Chicago.
In a statement from Bears ownership Monday morning, the team said it will “finalize our evaluation of both Arlington Heights and Hammond, and remain on the late spring/early summer timeline that we have previously communicated.”
“We will provide an update when we have a decision to share,” the statement concluded.
The House’s inaction followed a frenetic day of behind-the-scenes negotiations aimed at countering the Indiana offer and keeping the NFL charter franchise playing their home games in Illinois. Senators devised an entirely new framework for the team after a previous plan to cap the Bears’ property taxes died for lack of support.
But the Senate didn’t introduce the latest legislation until 11 p.m. Sunday, one hour before the session was scheduled to end. Both the House and Senate went into overtime after midnight to vote on the state budget, with the Senate also taking up the Bears’ bill in OT.
“The bill came over from the Senate after many of us had been up for 20 hours and it is not enough time to vet a really important bill, and many of us are very, what’s the word, many of us are going to scrutinize anything that is potentially a tax giveaway to the super wealthy or big corporations, especially in this moment where the bulk of us are dealing with affordability issues and dealing with the destruction that’s coming out of Washington,” said Democratic state Rep. Lindsey LaPointe of Chicago.
The dysfunction surrounding the Bears bill also reflected broader problems in this spring’s legislative session. Rather than meeting concurrently, the House and Senate often convened on alternating weeks, effectively siloing each chamber from the other and 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.
The sponsor of the Senate bill, state Sen. Bill Cunningham, a Democrat from Chicago who has spearheaded Bears stadium talks in the Senate, said he had shared details of the legislation with the Bears but said: “They have not told me whether or not they support it.”
Cunningham tried to sound optimistic about the bill as it was being debated on the Senate floor at 3:40 a.m. Monday, and he couldn’t help but make a sports reference before the votes were cast.
“The hour is late, but some of the best, most memorable, memorable victories happen in double or triple overtime,” he said. “That’s what we’re doing here tonight.”
What to know about the Chicago Bears’ possible move from Soldier Field
The stadium authority legislation represented a political Hail Mary alternative following the collapse a day earlier of a House-passed tax-relief plan aimed at encouraging the Bears to move to Arlington Heights. The plan was rejected by Senate Democrats from Chicago, who wanted an option for the city to continue hosting the team, and by progressives who balked at tax breaks for a multibillion-dollar professional sports franchise.
“This gives the Bears what they were asking for — in a different form than they proposed,” Cunningham said. “They put forward a proposal in which they would get a property tax break. Members of the Senate were not comfortable with that. So this is another way of giving the Bears exactly what they asked for.”
The new measure would have allowed Cook County cities with more than 70,000 residents, most notably Arlington Heights and Chicago, to create their own stadium finance authorities. The move would essentially have established a public-private partnership in which a sports team like the Bears could have built a stadium on land that would be, or would become, publicly owned to avoid property taxes on the facility.
Under the plan, the Bears would have had to privately finance the stadium construction — the team has said it would spend at least $2.5 billion of its own money — while the municipality’s stadium authority owning the facility and land would have meant the stadium would have been exempt from property taxes. The Bears’ current home at Soldier Field, which is owned by the Chicago Park District, does not generate property tax revenue.
“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 … So the setup would be, they would essentially pay for the stadium, enter (into) an agreement with the municipality. Could be any municipality.”
“I think all but three NFL stadiums are publicly owned right now, so it’s a pretty common model,” Cunningham added.
During the Senate debate, state Sen. Willie Preston, a Chicago Democrat, said he disliked the leveraging of a threat of a team move to Indiana to force lawmakers to act ““as if the Bears would somehow go there and that was not true.”
“What I fear is that this bill will take the Chicago Bears right over to Arlington (Heights) and they will leave Chicago,” he said. “I’m disappointed in, quite frankly, the owners of the Bears and their lackluster involvement and philanthropy throughout the city of Chicago and for all that we’ve done as a city to support this organization.”
Preston did not vote on the bill.
Republican Sen. Steve McClure of Springfield questioned, “How can any of us vote to support this without knowing whether or not the Bears are going to accept this proposal, particularly when we are going to be in recess from now until the fall?”
“This is our last opportunity to get this right, and to not know where the major players are on this issue is a significant problem,” he said.
But Republican Sen. Don DeWitte of St. Charles credited Cunningham for coming up with a “simple fix” to try to satisfy the Bears.
“If you believe in the concept of local government, I believe that is exactly what this proposal does. It takes away the property-tax certainty issue and forces that issue onto the establishment of this new sports authority act in any of these communities that wish to take on the initiative,” DeWitte said.
DeWitte was one of two Republicans who joined with 35 Democrats in favor of the bill. Democratic state Sen. Mike Simmons of Chicago joined 16 Republicans who voted against.
Although a municipal stadium owned by Arlington Heights or Chicago would allow the Bears to avoid paying property taxes on the new facility, the stadium authority could have negotiated with the team over the distribution of the facility’s revenues.
In addition, while the stadium itself would avoid taxes under the plan, the Bears would have had to pay property taxes on any adjoining mixed-use entertainment district. The team has envisioned such an entertainment district for the remaining acres of the former Arlington International Racecourse property in Arlington Heights, which the team acquired for $197.2 million in 2023.
Because the Bears already own the Arlington Heights land, for the legislation to work there, Cunningham said, the team would “essentially turn that property over to the stadium authority. It would become publicly owned.”
Under the plan, each stadium authority would be governed by a five-member board appointed by the mayor of the creating municipality and empowered to issue revenue bonds — not general obligation bonds backed by state credit — to finance construction or capital improvements. Those bonds could have been retired through stadium rent payments and municipal taxes. No bonds could be issued unless the authority had entered into a 35-year lease with a professional sports team, approved by the municipality, according to the legislation.
The bill also would have allowed for the creation of a special STAR bond district within one mile of the stadium complex, enabling the project to draw on bonds secured by growth in state sales tax revenues in the district. The measure additionally requires a traffic study covering a 15-mile radius around any proposed site — and separately authorizes a study of traffic flow around Soldier Field, which has long snarled Lake Shore Drive.
The measure, according to Cunningham, would have provided a similar framework to what the Bears have been offered as part of the Hammond stadium deal.
The bill included no direct public money for stadium construction, though it did not preclude separate spending arrangements between a team and a stadium authority. The Bears had previously sought $855 million in public infrastructure funds for the Arlington Heights project; Cunningham said road and utility work could have been addressed later through separate arrangements with a stadium finance authority.
“We are putting forward something that we think protects the taxpayers,” Cunningham said. “If a stadium is built under this kind of structure where the Bears put up the money, this will be one of the most favorable stadium deals from a taxpayer perspective that has ever been put in place.”
Cunningham acknowledged the legislation was an offer the team may reject.
“We’re less concerned about what exactly the Bears want than we are concerned about what senators can live with, what senators think protects the taxpayers,” he said. “This is essentially an offer to the Bears. I think it’s a pretty good one. I think it aligns with their goals. And they may not take it. But that’s up to them.”
Cunningham also said he believed Gov. JB Pritzker backed the effort.
“The governor told me that he is supportive of this process and we’ve worked with him throughout it, gotten a lot of good guidance from him and his people throughout the process,” he said.
A statement from the governor’s office suggested the governor was taking a more wait-and-see approach.
“Governor Pritzker is a responsible steward of taxpayer dollars who has always wanted the Bears to remain in Illinois and been open to a sensible deal, so the Governor’s Office needs to carefully review this new bill that was recently made public overnight,” according to Pritzker’s office.
The last-minute push came after the Saturday news that there wasn’t enough support for the so-called megaprojects legislation that would have given the Bears property tax certainty through a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes, or PILOT, arrangement at the Arlington Heights site.
The House had passed a bill, sponsored by state Rep. Kam Buckner of Chicago, that would have frozen the team’s property tax assessments for 25 to 45 years in exchange for payments to local taxing bodies. But Cunningham acknowledged Saturday night that Senate Democrats did not have enough votes.
While progressive Democrats opposed tax breaks for the Bears, Chicago Democrats reiterated their concerns about any efforts that would help push the team to the suburbs without any path for the city.
“I think there’s always been, from day one, 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.”
The new framework attempted to address that concern by opening the door for municipalities, including Chicago, to pitch their own stadium deal to the Bears. In 2024, Chicago and the team floated a new domed stadium near Soldier Field, but the $4.7 billion plan — which required $2.5 billion in public financing — was rejected out of hand by Pritzker and legislative leaders as too costly to taxpayers.
Pritzker and the Bears had said publicly that the team’s choices to relocate from Soldier Field, its home since 1971, came down to just two spots — the Arlington Heights property and the site in Hammond.
But Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson rekindled the Chicago stadium idea during a May visit to Springfield, a move that complicated Senate negotiations and further delayed action on the PILOT bill.
“We are creating these paths for the Bears. It’s up to them to choose which path to go down,” Cunningham said of the team. “As a Chicagoan, I hope they choose Chicago. I think that’s the best place for a stadium.”
A similar model to the proposed municipal stadium authority already exists at the state level: the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, which owns Rate Field, home of the Chicago White Sox, and financed the 2003 renovation of Soldier Field. Crain’s Chicago Business first reported the stadium authority plan.
Regardless of the stadium’s ultimate outcome, the legislative rejection of the PILOT legislation marked a personal defeat for Pritzker, who is seeking a third term. Pritzker had championed the so-called megaprojects legislation beyond the Bears to entice large-scale business development statewide.
