CHICAGO — The Chicago Bears have played in this city for more than a century, and they spent Tuesday being courted like a free agent. In Springfield, Governor J.B. Pritzker told reporters he would be “happy to call a special session” to get a stadium deal done. A state line away, the mayor of Hammond, Indiana, was talking up a golf course he thinks the franchise might want to build on instead.
Pritzker’s comments were the closest Illinois has come to urgency since its legislature adjourned without passing the stadium measure the team wanted. There have been “incoming calls from the Bears, not just to me” but to legislative leaders as well, the governor said, according to NBC Sports. The condition he attached was pointed: “They’ve got to figure out how they can get the legislature, both sides, around the same bill, and I would be happy to call a special session.”
The day captured how completely the leverage has flipped. A week ago the Bears were the supplicant, watching their bill die on the General Assembly’s final day. Since then the team has turned its Indiana flirtation into the only language Springfield reliably hears, which is competition, and the result is a governor volunteering session time and Republican lawmakers drafting proposals nobody asked them for a month ago.
The Indiana option acquired specifics this week. Bears president Kevin Warren visited Hammond again and discussed properties with Mayor Tom McDermott, and ABC7 Chicago reported that the Lost Marsh Golf Course near Wolf Lake is among a small number of sites under consideration. McDermott did not bother hiding his enthusiasm, saying Warren “called me up the other day with a different thought, and I love it. I hope it works.” The mayor’s own arithmetic gives the courtship its scale: land he values at $25 million to $30 million, underneath a stadium project he puts at $5 billion to $6 billion.
Back in Illinois, the counteroffers are multiplying. Representative Martin McLaughlin is circulating a plan built around Arlington Heights that calls for roughly $2.5 billion in investment from the Bears with about $1.3 billion in state infrastructure spending behind it, and Representative Dan Ugaste has revived a measure allowing special payments in lieu of property taxes, with protections meant to keep local taxpayers from absorbing the difference, CBS News reported. One related measure passed the House before the session collapsed, which is the thread legislators are now trying to pick back up.
Pritzker is trying to hold two positions at once: dealmaker and guardian of the treasury. “I will continue to work with the Chicago Bears and anybody who wants to make sure that we provide them with what it is they need, that isn’t going to cost taxpayers money,” he said. The clause after the comma is the entire fight. Every version of the project that has died in Springfield died over who pays.
The governor also made clear he thinks the team authored some of its own predicament. The Bears, in his telling, never settled on a single location, never put a clear plan in front of lawmakers, and were not in the building on the session’s final day, when presence might have mattered. It is an unusual thing for a governor to say about a negotiating partner he is publicly wooing, and it doubled as a message: come back with one site and one bill.
None of the geography changes the hardest constraint. However warmly Hammond receives Warren, the Bears cannot leave Chicago without the approval of three-quarters of NFL owners, a threshold that has loomed over the Indiana scenario since the team’s board first advanced it. That math is why much of Springfield reads the Hammond tour as theater staged for an audience of legislators. The trouble with that reading is that McDermott keeps getting phone calls, and theater does not usually scout soil conditions.
Asked about all of it, the team said it had no updated information to share. Of course it did not. A franchise with two statehouses bidding against each other has nothing to gain from clarity, and the Bears have rarely held a stronger hand in a negotiation they spent years losing. What remains unknown is the only thing that matters: whether anyone in Illinois can get both chambers around the same bill before the team decides the answer is Indiana.
