The Chicago Bears held a news conference at Halas Hall on Thursday, and the message from team leadership was direct: the franchise remains focused on building a new stadium in northwest Indiana, not Illinois. Chairman George McCaskey and President/CEO Kevin Warren both used the word "minimal" to describe their communications with Illinois lawmakers over the past two and a half months.
Warren said due diligence on the Lost Marsh Golf Course site in Hammond is complete and the land is viable for construction. Work at the nearby Wolf Lake Terminals site is still ongoing. Warren also raised the possibility of merging the two sites into a single development.
The due diligence process covered topographical, geological and environmental analysis of both properties, Warren said. The team is also assembling what Warren called a "capital stack" to finance the $2 billion it has proposed to contribute toward the stadium and a surrounding multi-use development.
Warren addressed the collapse of Illinois negotiations without equivocation. "I don't know why it hit a dead end in Springfield," he said. "But we've been very clear the last couple years the things that we've always needed is property tax certainty, we need infrastructure certainty. That's what we've needed. So that has not changed."
The Bears' board of directors voted June 5 to proceed with plans for a stadium in Hammond. That vote came less than a week after the Illinois General Assembly adjourned for the summer on June 1 without resolving last-ditch legislative efforts to keep the team in the state.
Two separate proposals had been in play in Springfield before adjournment. The House passed a bill that would have let the Bears negotiate a special tax payment with local governments in the Arlington Heights area rather than pay standard property taxes. The Senate proposal would have created a public finance authority—a public-private partnership structure under which a sports team could build on publicly owned land and avoid property taxes on the facility.
Neither bill crossed the finish line. McCaskey, speaking publicly for the first time since those talks collapsed, said the team does not regret how it handled the Illinois process. "We felt we had presented a pretty compelling case that a stadium in Arlington would be beneficial not only for the village of Arlington Heights, but for the community and for the entire state really," McCaskey said. "Tremendous driver of economic activity. Job creation. Tax revenue. Sales revenue. Ultimately, that argument was unsuccessful."
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has said he is open to calling a special session of the General Assembly to keep the Bears in the state, and his office said Thursday it has been in contact with the team since the June 1 adjournment. But with two and a half months passed since adjournment and the Bears describing those contacts as minimal, the gap between the two sides appears wide.
Despite Thursday's firm language from Bears leadership, officials in Arlington Heights did not walk away discouraged. The Arlington Heights mayor said publicly after the news conference that the village remains hopeful the Bears will reverse course and return their attention to the northwest suburbs. That optimism puts Arlington Heights in the position of waiting on a franchise that has, at least for now, stopped waiting on Illinois.
The Bears' stadium situation has dragged on long enough that it now defines the franchise's near-term identity as much as anything happening on the field. The team has been without a permanent home of its own for decades, playing at Soldier Field under a lease arrangement. The Hammond focus represents the most concrete step the organization has taken toward a new facility, with site due diligence completed on at least one of the two properties under consideration.
The financial scale of the project makes the politics unavoidable. A $2 billion team contribution is a starting figure, not a ceiling—stadium projects of this type routinely require public infrastructure investment in roads, transit and utilities that runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars. That is precisely why property tax treatment and infrastructure commitments were the non-negotiable items Warren listed Thursday. Without certainty on both, the numbers on any site do not close.
For Hammond and northwest Indiana, landing the Bears would be a major economic event for a region that sits in the shadow of Chicago. For Arlington Heights, losing the Bears to Indiana after years of negotiation would leave a large planned development site without its anchor tenant. The village's continued public optimism after Thursday's news conference suggests local officials believe there is still a path back—but the Bears gave them nothing concrete to point to.
