Word reached our ears a couple of weeks ago that the construction union guys in Indiana, who tend to know stuff, were telling the construction union guys in Illinois, no fools they, that it was a done deal: The Chicago Bears were moving to Hammond.
On Thursday, employing their characteristic weasel language after Indiana lawmakers in the state House Ways and Means Committee unanimously approved an amendment to Indiana State Bill 27 that would offer the sweetest of sweetheart deals for a Bears stadium in Hammond, the Bears still stuck to their line about a “meaningful step,” as if this was a moral quest, not the actual bare-knuckles power play it had already proved itself to be.
But the signs that the union guys were right were confirmed when the typically highly articulate JB Pritzker was reduced to a stutter when a reporter asked the governor of Illinois how things were progressing with negotiations with the Bears to build a stadium in Arlington Heights. Clearly, there was no ongoing progress in the Land of Lincoln. The second tell came when Illinois summarily canceled its own legislative session to discuss the Arlington Heights project. The third tell came Thursday morning from the jubilant atmosphere in Indianapolis. It was as if Mardi Gras had been transported 800-plus miles north and two days late to the Hoosier State capital.
Sure, lots of Illinoisans were in denial, including plenty in the media. But we’ll remind you that is the first stage of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief.
Anger is coming down the pike; the Bears are hoping things will move expeditiously toward acceptance.
Sure, the deal could still fall apart. That’s true of any unclosed deal of this magnitude. But we’ll say this, if the Bears leave their quickstep dance of seduction with Indiana with any other than the state who brung ’em, they’d better not ever go east of Calumet City.
They will have played Indiana for fools. And we think Indiana most likely was smarter than that.
We’ll restate loud and clear what we’ve said from the start. Pritzker was right not to build a stadium for the Chicago Bears, a private business with access to its own financing sources and the ability to bring in other investors, with taxpayer money. There was no appetite among Illinois taxpayers for that, given the fragile state of Illinois finances.
Significant Infrastructure help, sure. Flexibility, absolutely. Other incentives where the taxpayer benefit was detailed and clear, yes.
But Pritzker laid out that first principle, as did others in Springfield. If the governor had backtracked, he would have looked like a hypocrite. Had the Bears said they were committed to Chicago, we (and Pritzker) might have felt a little differently. But they did not. They pit Chicago against Arlington Heights. And then Arlington Heights against northwest Indiana.
There are multitudinous narrative threads here and we’ll have lots more to say in days and weeks to come. Obviously, this development is bad for Illinois, especially the northwest suburbs of Chicagoland, which loses tax revenue and fun action aplenty, and the optics of not closing the deal also reflects poorly on Pritzker and might well haunt his presidential bid. It also does not help his reelection campaign for governor of Illinois.
The ads saying Illinois can’t retain businesses now write themselves. All the Republicans have to do is add the Chicago Bears to the same list as Citadel and Caterpillar. Et al.
And Chicagoans love the Bears; they did not love Citadel, necessarily.
Obviously, this is good (mostly) for northwest Indiana. Investors in the Chicago Skyway (Chicago sold that off already, you may recall) will be happy, so will boosters of the South Shore Line (helpfully just double-tracked) and so will the Horseshoe Casino in Hammond, which will now become a Bears gambling mecca, if only thanks to proximity.
But this is the baiduhai Editorial Board, and we first want to weigh in on what this means for the city of Chicago.
We weigh in with irritation at the Bears, who could have found many good sites within city boundaries beyond the lakefront (we explored one possibility on our Opinion pages just last week), not to mention they could have put more financial skin in the game or just said, we’re the Chicago Bears, period. But they had moved on to Arlington Heights, which last time we checked was not in Chicago.
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Let’s start with the bad stuff. Chicago is in Illinois — indeed, dominates Illinois — and thus needs a healthy Land of Lincoln, economically and optically. Arlington Heights would have meant boom times on the I-90 corridor, which has its tracts of vacant land, and helped both Metra and O’Hare International Airport. Many Bears fans live on Chicago’s Northwest Side and in its northern suburbs and, for them, Arlington Heights would have been far more convenient than Indiana. Many of the construction workers would have been Chicagoans. Although New York City football fans are used to going to New Jersey, they’ve never had a dedicated NFL stadium within the boroughs; so, emotionally, it’s a different situation for Chicago with one picking up and leaving. On balance, it’s going to be emotionally harder for Chicagoans to cross the state line. We get that.
But also consider this. The proposed Hammond site is closer to Soldier Field than Arlington Heights. It is very proximate to Chicago’s South and Southeast sides, which for generations have seen disinvestment, as well as to the mostly Black suburbs where many Chicagoans have relocated and wanted to see economic progress only to find property tax hell instead. It is within what looks to most people like one giant brownfield site, depressing anyone arriving into Chicago by road or rail from the east. If this new stadium spurs surrounding economic development, not to mention environmental cleanup, there will be benefits for the entire region.
Northwest Indiana is on Central Standard Time and is part of the Chicago metropolitan area, just like Arlington Heights. Except northwest Indiana is a struggling part. If not this stadium, what exactly was ever coming to help?
We are not contributing to the crowing coming from Indiana — the schadenfreude that a Republican-led state in a healthier financial condition than Illinois could do something that Illinois could not. Indiana’s people should be careful that the political W does not blind them to the economic costs. More to come on that.
On balance, we’d have preferred the Bears in Illinois, too.
Chicago, Illinois.
As in the team’s name.
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