The Chicago Bears have taken a decisive step toward leaving Illinois, with the team's board of directors voting to move forward with a plan to build a new stadium across the state line in Hammond, Indiana. The decision sets the stage for one of the most storied franchises in the National Football League to play its home games out of state for the first time in its 106-year history, a once unthinkable prospect for a team synonymous with the city of Chicago.
The board met on Thursday to advance the Indiana project, and according to reports it marked the first time the franchise's board had formally voted on any stadium site. The move turns what had been months of frustrated negotiations and public speculation into a concrete direction of travel, even as the team's long-term home remains the subject of intense political and civic wrangling on both sides of the state border.
The pivot toward Indiana grew out of a prolonged fight over property taxes in Illinois. The Bears had been trying to lower the tax burden on the 326-acre site of the former Arlington International Racecourse, and team president Kevin Warren signalled back in December that the franchise would widen its search to northwest Indiana if a workable arrangement could not be reached closer to home.
Central to the Illinois effort was so-called PILOT legislation, which would have allowed the Bears to negotiate payments in lieu of taxes with Arlington Heights and potentially save the team hundreds of millions of dollars over 40 years. That legislation died on Saturday night, leaving lawmakers scrambling to assemble a last-minute alternative that might keep the franchise in the state.
The fallback option would have allowed any Cook County municipality with at least 70,000 residents to create its own stadium financing authority, giving the Bears a path to avoid paying property taxes. The measure cleared the state Senate at around 3:39 in the morning, but the timing proved fatal, as the House adjourned without taking a vote on it roughly 45 minutes later.
Indiana, by contrast, had already laid out a far more attractive offer. Three months ago, state lawmakers there authorized a stadium authority backed by taxes on admissions, hotels, restaurants and tolls, creating a financing structure designed to draw the team across the border. The Bears have committed two billion dollars to the stadium project, signalling the scale of their ambitions for the new venue in Hammond.
Under the arrangement, the team would keep all of the revenue generated by the stadium and would have the option to buy the venue back in 40 years, once Indiana taxpayers have paid off the bonds used to finance it. The vote is far from the end of the saga, however, with Illinois lawmakers vowing to keep fighting to retain a franchise that has called the state home for more than a century.