On the last day of April, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell stood at a dais and watched Browns owner Jimmy Haslam gush over the soon-to-be $2.6 billion Huntington Bank Field. The Browns’ next stadium is being built in Brook Park, Ohio, a suburb southwest of Cleveland, and is expected to open in 2029.
At the ceremonial groundbreaking, Haslam detailed the team’s journey — one that started in 2018 with his plan to renovate their 27-year-old lakeside stadium, was detoured by disputes with lawmakers and led to the owner deciding to bolt for a dome in the suburbs.
Sound familiar?
Haslam is still fighting some legal and funding challenges, but construction has begun. He and Goodell could smile about the project, though, even though the gates won’t open for three-and-a-half years.
“It will be here before we know it,” Goodell said.
The Bears can only dream.
The announcement Friday that their board of directors voted to advance their Hammond stadium project was far from the cataclysmic decision the Bears been teasing for months. While it inched the team closer to a deal in Indiana, the statement was more notable for what it didn’t say.
The Bears have a lot of work to do on the Hammond site, located about 25 miles from downtown, before they can finalize a deal. Sources stressed Illinois hasn’t been eliminated from contention if lawmakers can find the political will they’ve lacked for most of the team’s five-year search. Despite Mayor Brandon Johnson continuing to invoke a Lakefront plan that failed two years ago, both the Bears and the NFL both insist Arlington Heights, not downtown, is the only acceptable Cook County location.
The Bears’ saga drags on, then, with a gold shovel ceremony and commissioner visit far still far in the future.
So what’s next?
What to expect in Indiana
It’s telling that the Bears limited their announcement to a short statement posted on Twitter and no accompanying press conference. Friday’s development wasn’t cause for celebration or posed handshakes, but, rather, the latest step in a long process.
The Bears and Indiana still need to pick exactly which parcels of the Wolf Lake site they want to use for a stadium. Then they need to examine environmental reports — some have been completed and some are ongoing. The Bears have thus far been comfortable with the results. The site has a heavy industrial past, with Lost Marsh Golf Club, which could be replaced by the stadium, standing atop a slag heap.
The Bears still have dozens, if not hundreds, of boxes to check in Indiana ranging from big-picture finalizing details to the mundane traffic studies. It figures to take months.
Regardless of where they move, the Bears need approval from the NFL’s stadium and finance committees and the backing of league owners. The NFL would then issue a loan toward construction costs.
Indiana has made an alluring offer. In March, Indiana authorized a stadium authority backed by taxes on hotels, restaurants, tolls and admissions. The Bears would commit $2 billion to the project, keep all revenue and have the option to buy back the stadium in 40 years once Indiana taxpayers have paid off the bonds.
The Bears expect progress on the Indiana site to move faster than it had been now that the team has set its focus there. Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott said the city was ready for construction as early as this summer, but that’s thought to be overly aggressive. A more likely timeline would have the Bears break ground next spring and with hopes of opening their stadium in 2031.
What to expect in Illinois
On paper, Arlington Heights has always made more sense than Hammond. The Bears own 326 acres there. Back when they considered that location their main focus, the team boasted that more than half their season-ticket holders lived within 25 miles of the former Arlington International Racecourse. Many of those fans could use the Metra stop located just outside the proposed stadium.
The Bears, though, insist on a property tax break. They’ve spent years seeking legislative solutions, from PILOT legislation that died in Springfield last week to a last-minute lawmaker effort to put the stadium on public land to avoid property taxes altogether. The latter flopped when the House adjourned before sunrise Monday.
When the Bears fell short of a full commitment to Indiana on Friday, they sent a message that Illinois lawmakers have time to craft legislation to satisfy their property tax concerns. The big question is exactly how much time they have.
The Illinois General Assembly adjourned early Monday and won’t return until a veto session in late October. House Speaker Emmanuel “Chris” Welch ruled out a special summer session to consider any new Bears legislation. By the fall, will the Bears and Indiana be too far along to turn back?
It’s clear, though, that the Bears want to keep talking. Multiple Illinois lawmakers said Friday that Bears’ president/CEO Kevin Warren told them, after delivering the Indiana news, that he looked forward to continuing their conversations.
Warren is the same Bears executive who in December wrote an open letter announcing that the Bears would start looking at stadium sites in Indiana.
“This is not about leverage,” he wrote then.
The next few months will test exactly how true that is.
