A ton of things need to happen before the Bears’ quest for a new stadium reaches the end zone in Arlington Heights and, until it does, there’s at least a glimmer of hope for Chicago, according to Mayor Brandon Johnson’s chief negotiator.
Senior mayoral adviser Jason Lee openly acknowledged that, for the foreseeable future, Arlington Heights has the ball and Chicago isn’t even on the field playing defense. Johnson isn’t on the sidelines either. He’s more like a spectator watching from the stands.
But so much needs to happen to deliver the massive, mixed-use development anchored by a domed stadium on the Bears-owned site that once housed the Arlington International Racecourse, and it will take the legislative and political equivalent of a 99-yard touchdown drive, Lee said.
“You’ve got to solve a lot of stuff. … You’ve got to get a term sheet executed. There’s … legislation they’re hoping to get out of Springfield that would give deeper tax incentives throughout the life of the project,” Lee told the Chicago Sun-Times.
“There’s no development deal done, or even in formation. You’ve got 365 acres. There are significant, significant infrastructure needs. And it’s not clear that the local community is actually invested in the type of development they would want to do … to make that site economically feasible. There’s not support for public infrastructure at that site,” he said.
Until the last few weeks, state Sen. Mark Walker, D-Arlington Heights, said he thought the Bears were destined to stay in their namesake city.
“But it’s become apparent for them that no one has got any money for them, and the only way they get any break is from local school districts and municipalities,” Walker said.
Walker filed one of a few bills that has emerged in Springfield this session that would freeze property tax assessments for designated “megaprojects” and allow owners to negotiate payments with local taxing bodies, which would give the team the property tax certainty it says it needs for decades to come.
None of the bills has gained traction as the clock winds down on the spring legislative session ending May 31.
Gov. JB Pritzker, Illinois House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch and state Senate President Don Harmon have all consistently thrown cold water on the idea of giving any help to the team.
Even if the Bears get their bill in Springfield, they would still have to find other sources to bankroll billions of dollars in building roads, sewers and other infrastructure to make the old track site viable, not to mention traffic upgrades to get almost 100,000 fans in and out of a stadium campus every game day.
TIF likely needed for suburban stadium
Most of that funding would likely have to come from a tax increment financing district, Walker said, kicking off another political scrum at the local level.
“The best thing that could happen for them is someone comes along and gives them a billion dollars, or the NFL steps up with more money. They’re getting zero from the city of Chicago, and they’re getting zero from the state,” Walker said from Springfield, where lawmakers are wrangling with one of the toughest budget years in recent memory due to uncertainty in federal funding under the Trump administration. “The money is not coming from here.”
Already the NFL has agreed to contribute at least $300 million, with the Bears’ contribution pegged at $2 billion.
Newly elected Arlington Heights Mayor Jim Tinaglia said he’s open to a TIF district for infrastructure needs, “but it’s not something we’ll discuss until there’s a real commitment from the team.”
“We’re optimistic. Their shift in focus is a very gentle, polite way of saying that they’re leaning this way — but they’re not giving up on anything else just yet,” Tinaglia said.
Late last week, the Bears alienated their biggest cheerleader in Springfield — and left their Chicago partner almost resigned to their departure — by signaling that the team may be giving up on Chicago in favor of building a domed stadium in Arlington Heights.
A statement released by the Bears simply confirmed the obvious: that the team has made “significant progress” with the new political leadership in Arlington Heights and looks forward to continuing to “work with state and local leaders on making a transformative economic development project for the region a reality.”
But the Bears’ failure to even mention the possibility of remaining in Chicago — coupled with what they told Johnson — moved the ball closer to the racecourse site in Arlington Heights that the team spent $197.2 million to purchase four years ago.
During a series of private conversations in recent weeks, the Bears told Johnson they need to “shift their focus and energy toward Arlington because they think they have more site control and more economic control there,” Lee said.
“Time is money. We understand that. But things can change. We’ll see what happens,” Lee said.
A deal that went nowhere
The potentially devastating blow to Chicago’s civic pride comes just over a year after Johnson and Bears President Kevin Warren stood together at Soldier Field to unveil their shared vision for a lakefront dome on a parking lot adjacent to Soldier Field.
That deal has gone nowhere in Springfield, in large part because it would require more than $2 billion in taxpayer subsidies for stadium financing and surrounding infrastructure.
The Illinois Sports Facilities Authority would need to issue bonds retired by an extension of the same 2% increase in the Chicago hotel tax that bankrolled a $660 million renovation of Soldier Field that won’t be fully repaid until 2032.
Lee made no apologies for Johnson’s decision to forge ahead — without Pritzker and Democratic legislative leaders in attendance — with the mission for a lakefront stadium site that faced a potentially costly and lengthy legal challenge from Friends of the Parks similar to the one that cost Chicago the Lucas Museum under former Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
“There was only one viable site in the city for them. Any other sites that came up were never viable,” Lee said in an obvious reference to the old Michael Reese Hospital site in Bronzeville that the Bears have dismissed as too narrow and too close for comfort to railroad tracks that bisect the 48.6-acre property.
For 50 years, the Bears have been trying to build, own and control the domed stadium needed to solidify the long-term future of the family-owned franchise in today’s NFL.
That unrequited quest is at least part of the reason why the landlord-tenant relationship between the Bears and the Chicago Park District at Soldier Field has been so contentious.
Johnson wants to avoid being forever known as the Chicago mayor who lost the beloved Bears.
But if it so happens that the formidable financial, political and legislative hurdles in Arlington Heights can be cleared, Lee has already crafted Johnson’s postgame spiel.
The rookie mayor will essentially say that he inherited the ball deep in his own territory and drove to within scoring distance before the drive stalled.
“They had already spent a couple hundred million dollars at Arlington when they made the decision to spend $20 million or so on the lakefront. You don’t spend that kind of money on a lark. It was a serious, serious endeavor,” Lee said.
“We got elected at a time when the Bears were already gone,” Lee added. “Nobody even thought there was a chance they would even consider the city. All we did was get them to spend millions of dollars in the hope of Chicago to validate the idea that Chicago is a place to be. It may not work out because multiple pieces needed to align. But having the Bears say definitively that Chicago is the place they want to be — that’s good for Chicago.”