Chicago Bears: Illinois now making case for Indiana to get stadium

The Chicago Bears weren’t pleased with the results of the megaprojects bill that passed the Illinois House in April, and it looks like some local leaders in Cook County aren’t against the team moving across the board to Hammond, Indiana.

The Bears were told by the NFL stadium committee that only the sites in Arlington Heights and Hammond were viable at this point, putting to rest any rumors that Chicago was still in the mix, despite recent rumblings by Mayor Brandon Johnson.

The Senate is expected to vote on the megaprojects bill in the near future. The Bears wanted amendments added to the bill in the Senate, hoping for further investment in surrounding infrastructure and a property tax break in Arlington Heights.

Local leaders have become frustrated with the Bears in recent weeks, as the team flirted with Chicago amid having the megaprojects bill in the House. The team has not completed a traffic study for Arlington Heights.

A recently released report from Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas’ office is highly skeptical of the bill that the Bears want the Senate to pass. In fact, the report makes the case that Hammond would be good for Illinois’ economy while pushing the burden of the stadium’s price to Indiana taxpayers.

“[A] stadium in Hammond would still produce economic benefits for Chicago and the state of Illinois — with Indiana taxpayers picking up the $1 billion tab to subsidize the development,” the report states, via the Chicago Sun-Times.

“And the team would still be named the Chicago Bears, so bragging rights would still be intact for the Chicago area just as they are for New York City even though the New York Giants and New York Jets play in New Jersey.

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The Pappas’ report estimates the Bears would receive nearly $1.5 billion in tax breaks from the passage of the bill. And that would be a crude joke for local taxpayers.

“But property tax breaks for megaprojects would for decades severely limit one key goal of economic development: expansion of the property tax base that provides relief to other taxpayers who get no tax certainty,” the report states.

The truth is that stadium projects to aid in some economic development, but more often than not, the cost to the taxpayer is not worth the expansion.

If the cost was worth it to the Bears, they’d finance their own stadium and pay their fair share of taxes to support it.

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