Six days before the last day of the spring state legislative session, Sen. Bill Cunningham, D-Chicago, gave me two big reasons why it was so difficult to push a Bears stadium bill across the finish line. Cunningham, as you know, is the chief sponsor of the Senate’s Bears bill.
- Every stadium-related legislation passed in Illinois included the Chicago mayor and the Illinois governor pulling in the same direction. This time, that didn’t happen;
- Moving a stadium location within a state pits Illinois municipalities against each other, and you don’t want to do that “particularly when the municipality on the losing side has way more members than any other municipality in the state.” Cunningham told reporters more recently that stadiums which have moved within the same state didn’t involve their state legislatures. Instead, local governments picked up the tab.
Cunningham appeared on a WSCR radio program last week and said, “for most of the last few weeks, most senators wanted to do nothing.” But then, he said, “we thought it was important to pass something that would make it easier for the Bears to build a new stadium in Illinois,” so they started putting together a plan.
Reasons abounded for wanting to do nothing. For example, some senators didn’t want to help the Bears move to the suburbs, but some didn’t want to help billionaire team owners at all, and some didn’t like the original House plan and were ready to move on. And, as Cunningham said on the Senate floor, his constituents mostly wanted to keep the Bears here, but didn’t want to give them a single taxpayer penny to do it.
But why, I asked Cunningham later, did he wait until May 30 — the day before the end of session — to pull the plug on the House-passed megaprojects bill? And what was the impetus for coming up with an alternative plan?
Cunningham first explained that he’d held several meetings with caucus members after the House passed its own bill and tried out several versions of a slimmed-down proposal. None of those bills could pass. “’Let’s do nothing’ probably had a plurality of senators behind it,” he said.
At the start of last week, Cunningham said, it became clear that it just couldn’t be passed. So, by mid-week, “I began floating the Municipal Stadium Authority concept to a handful of senators,” to see if that could find support.
By then, however, the budget and lots of other hot topics became the center of discussion. The governor, by the way, specifically warned the Senate this could happen weeks ago when he said he wanted the legislation wrapped up well ahead of the end of session to avoid being caught in the last-minute session crunch.
“By Friday [May 29], I felt the concept had enough support to start drafting a bill,” Cunningham said. That bill didn’t surface until late Sunday night right before session was previously scheduled to adjourn.
“I regret that we got to it as late as we did, but we simply had bigger fish to fry,” Cunningham said about the budget and other topics. “And while I talked about the concept with [House Bears bill sponsor Rep. Kam Buckner] midweek and he was generally supportive of giving it a shot, we got the bill to him too late for the House to take action.”
His timeline was generally confirmed by other insiders.
Asked why a backup plan hadn’t been formulated weeks before, Senate President Don Harmon’s spokesperson said the question would be “best addressed to the Bears.”
Cunningham and other legislators have been saying for a while that rumors about the football team having second thoughts about leaving Chicago damaged the legislative effort to help the Bears move to the suburbs.
And that was why Cunningham’s new proposal was designed to level the playing field for Arlington Heights and Chicago. The idea was to at least say that the city would be on equal footing with the suburbs. But it just came way too late in the session.
And then last Friday, the Bears issued a statement saying the team will “advance our stadium development project” in Hammond, Indiana, although no site was specified.
More importantly though, a Bears official spoke by phone with both Cunningham and Buckner before the announcement. Both of the legislators in charge of the Bears negotiations said they were told by team President/CEO Kevin Warren that the Bears looked forward to continuing the discussion about keeping the team in Illinois.
It’s the saga that won’t die.
Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter, and CapitolFax.com.