A Lot of Blame to Go Around in Bears Mess
The proposed Bears stadium development in Arlington Heights.
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OPINION
Everyone involved seems to be playing a very Illinois-esque blame game over the long-running Chicago Bears stadium saga that consumed the spring legislative session without a resolution, prompting the Bears to claim they’re moving forward with a stadium site in Indiana, sort of.
Governor JB Pritzker is doing his best to shield himself from any blame, aiming his arrows at the Bears, Chicago’s hapless Mayor, Brandon Johnson, and the General Assembly for failure to get legislation across the finish line. The legislature is blaming the team and the Governor. And the team has deftly used social media and Chicago sports talk radio to turn its fan base into a very loud anti-government propaganda tool.
Let’s just stipulate something here: there are no heroes here. There is no “good guy.” There’s a giant pile of blame to go around for failure to get this done and seemingly push the Bears into the loving arms of Indiana taxpayers, who were bilked by the Governor and legislature there for a billion dollars and a pony.
To be fair, we’ve offered Governor Pritzker some fair praise for his positioning on the stadium debate. He said from the start he didn’t support the use of any taxpayer dollars to build a new football stadium. Cool. The public is with him there. But the Governor has continued to use that messaging even though the proposals from the Bears, for literally more than two years, haven’t included a dollar from taxpayers for stadium construction. It’s a populist deflection tool.
He has always, seemingly, been open to state supported infrastructure improvements around whatever eventual stadium site is chosen, within reason. The eventual ask around Arlington Park is going to be significantly easier to address than the silly $2 billion dollar ask on the lakefront in 2024 that included the state paying to knock down the existing Soldier Field and add an exit on Lake Shore Drive.
Pritzker’s position has evolved on the issue of property taxes. When the Bears first discussed property tax “certainty” around the Arlington Heights site in 2022, Pritzker’s response was essentially a shrug. His told the team to go talk to local taxing bodies and wiped his hands clean of the issue. It’s basically the same thing when my four-year-old asks for candy and I tell him to go ask his mother. It can be someone else’s problem.
Pritzker never got really serious about PILOT until the Bears went to Indiana officials late last year or early this year and asked them to put together a proposal. Indiana’s hayseed Governor, Mike Braun (who I first met when he was a State Representative in 2014), sprung into action and got a deal done in a couple of months. It was a bad deal, but they at least showed they cared.
Even when Pritzker’s office negotiated the original PILOT framework, it’s become clear that the Governor wasn’t willing to get his hands dirty. Our friends at Capitol News Illinois reported the Governor had only one meeting about Bears legislation on his official calendar this spring, and it wasn’t until May 30, the day before the end of the legislative session.
Sure, he’s a prolific texter (though, never to me) and I’m sure he made phone calls, but multiple lawmakers have confirmed to me that Pritzker was, in their words, “nowhere to be found” on the issue. That’s a failure in leadership.
The General Assembly has had four years to get its act together on this issue. Rep. Kam Buckner (D-Chicago) and Sen. Bill Cunningham (D-Chicago) clearly worked hard and competently to try to get legislation done this spring, but neither piece of legislation was perfect. Buckner’s Christmas tree House bill was too complicated for the Senate to pass, and Cunningham, who was stalled making progress in the final month of the legislative session for reasons unknown, had to scramble to put together a municipal stadium authority bill in about 24 hours. Everyone was left scrambling for no reason and neither bill could clear both chambers.
The Bears, and team President Kevin Warren, have spent the last couple of years burning up every bit of good will they had with Springfield, from shifting plans to unclear asks, to approaching Indiana, to going behind everyone’s back to seemingly try to cut an 11th hour deal with the city of Chicago when the team publicly ruled out the city for months. I asked Governor Pritzker in February and Deputy Governor Andy Manar last week if they trust Warren and, let’s just say, neither gave a declarative yes. That tells you everything you need to know about the situation.
If Governor Pritzker and the legislative leaders, Speaker Chris Welch and Senate President Don Harmon, really want to get this deal done, they can do it. But we’re seeing that, deep down, they don’t really want to use up any political capital to do it. And that makes zero sense to those of us that watch them in positions of unchecked power. These are three smart guys with law degrees and years of public policy experience who could hammer out a deal if they just locked themselves in a room together for 30 minutes. Then they could all do some Jim Thompson 1988 style arm twisting to get members on board, call them back to Springfield, and get it done.
But it won’t happen until someone starts to show the political will to get this whole damn thing behind us.
