Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has continued pushing for the Bears to build a new stadium in the city, but the team may have strengthened his resolve.
In an interview with NBC Chicago’s Mary Ann Ahern, Illinois State Sen. Bill Cunningham, a cosponsor of the “PILOT” bill aimed at keeping the Bears in Illinois, said the team reached out to the city in recent weeks about a hypothetical reunion on a stadium project if their Arlington Heights site doesn’t work out.
Cunningham said the outreach from the Bears has strengthened the opposition of Chicago lawmakers to the bill that would relocate the team to Arlington Heights.
“One of the problems that we’ve run into is that some of the outreach the Bears have done to the city of Chicago as late as four weeks ago has breathed new life into the mayor’s opposition to the bill,” he said. “We learned that there was contact between the Bears and the city sometime in late April when they talked hypothetically about looking back at the lakefront if the Arlington Heights site did not work out. And that has given the mayor the opportunity to point to that as a hope that a lakefront stadium is still possible. And that increased opposition among Chicago members.”
Cunningham said the state has been experiencing “headwinds” in negotiations, and those obstacles have only been “strengthened” because of the outreach by the Bears.
“I think the city would like to be back in play. There is not a concrete proposal on the table, but the mayor has asked Chicago members to slow this process down,” he said.
Cunningham said the Bears said the talks were very informal.
“The Bears said it was simply representative of the Bears and a representative of the city going through hypothetical scenarios, and I’m sure that’s correct, but again, it gave something for the mayor to grab to as hope that the city isn’t out of this contest,” he said.
NBC Chicago has reached out to the Bears for comment on Cunningham’s assessment of the state of talks around the stadium project.
Publicly, the Bears and the NFL have said in recent days the only two sites the team is considering are in Arlington Heights and in nearby Hammond, Indiana, where Hoosier lawmakers have passed a bill offering up to $1 billion in incentives for the team to move across the border.
The PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) bill would lock in property tax rates for the Bears at the Arlington Heights site. The team is also seeking hundreds of millions in infrastructure funding around the site as well, but Cunningham echoed the concerns of some suburban mayors who say the team has not yet delivered on a traffic study that would help determine where those funds would be spent.
“They have made a substantial request for a commitment to fund infrastructure improvements around Arlington Heights. We can’t do that without a traffic study…and the Bears don’t have one yet,” he said. “The Bears are asking for $850 million in capital expenditures from the state. We can’t line those things out unless we have a traffic study and we know what those dollars are going to be spent on.”
Cunningham went so far as to say that there is a chance that the May 31 end of the legislative session may not yield a final answer on the Bears question.
“May 31 may come and go without a final answer on all of this. That’s a possibility,” he said.
