Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has made it no secret he wants the Bears to stay in the city, but Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker had strong criticism for the mayor this week.
The comments came after Johnson told Crain’s Chicago Business that he envisioned the city taking over the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority as part of a plan to keep the Bears in Chicago. Those comments, along with Johnson’s criticism of financing plans to move the Bears to Arlington Heights, led Pritzker to comment on the mayor’s actions during a press availability Monday.
“What might happen with the Bears? I would say I know the mayor has no plan,” he said. “He has come up with no plan at all about how the bears would end up in the city of Chicago. That’s problematic. I would love for them to be in the city, but we are three years in now and he still has no plan”
Pritzker went a step further in his critique, saying Johnson made “a bunch of demands” during the May legislative session that he could have made significantly sooner.
“This is kind of typical. The mayor has shown up every spring, at the end of session, to pronounce what he would like to happen,” he said. “We’ve seen almost nothing out of the mayoral administration. To show up in May and have a bunch of demands seems late in the game, and it’s unfortunate that’s happened most years.”
In recent months, Johnson has continued to insist that the Bears should remain in Chicago, pointing to a proposal his administration had crafted in 2024 that would see the team build a new stadium just to the south of the existing Soldier Field. Taxpayers would have had to spend $1.5 billion of the projected tab of $4.7 billion.
“We put forth a plan a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, Springfield did not care to look at that plan,” he said in a May interview with Telemundo Chicago. “Right now, there is no other plan that any other city has for the Bears outside of the city of Chicago. No other location has a plan. They have never presented one.”
In recent interviews, Johnson criticized the Bears for ruling out the city of Chicago.
“We had an entire press conference, with a proposal on the lakefront two years ago,” he said. “How do you have an entire proposal with the Bears, with the city of Chicago, with labor, with the notion that somehow the greatest, the most fruitful, economic viable prime real estate anywhere in the state, anywhere in the region is somehow not suited for world affairs?”
According to Front Office Sports in April, Johnson also had put forward again the idea of the Bears building a stadium on the site of the former Michael Reese Hospital, located in the Bronzeville neighborhood.
Last fall, Bears CEO and President Kevin Warren said the team was unable to strike a deal with the city of Chicago to build a new stadium on the lakefront, and he had also ruled out the Reese Hospital site.
“(Arlington Heights) is the only location in Cook County that works,” he said. “I mean we had discussions for over a year with individuals from the city of Chicago about the Museum Campus… we couldn’t resolve the open issues. The Michael Reese site doesn’t work, it’s too small. So, Arlington Heights is our main focus.”
Warren said in October the Bears were moving forward with Arlington Heights as their primary focus.
“Moving outside of the city of Chicago is not a decision we reached easily. This project does not represent us leaving, it represents us expanding,” he said at the time.
The addition of Indiana to the discussions added extra intrigue to the situation. In February, Indiana lawmakers passed a bill offering up to $1 billion in incentives to build a new stadium in Hammond.
The incentives would be financed by the state implementing a 1% food and beverage tax surcharge in Lake and Porter counties. Lake County’s hotel tax would also double from 5% to 10%, and the plan also called for a 12% surcharge on tickets purchased to games and other events at the stadium.
The Indiana deal led the Bears to announce that they were exploring stadium options both in northwest Indiana and in Arlington Heights, where they had purchased the site of the former Arlington International racecourse with the intent to build a 326-acre site that includes a stadium and an entertainment district.
In order to move forward on the project, the team has sought a so-called PILOT bill (payment in lieu of taxes) to lock in their property tax rates at the site, and the Illinois General Assembly has been mulling that measure, with the House passing it and the Senate debating it during the closing weeks of their session.
The Bears have said the legislation is key to their plans, but questions remain both about the amount of state money going toward infrastructure around the stadium site and about the repayment of more than $400 million in bonds still outstanding from the early 2000s renovation of Soldier Field.
Chicago lawmakers have also balked at the idea of incentivizing the Bears to leave for the suburbs, another level of concern that has caused some skepticism about a deal being reached, including from Johnson himself.
“There are proposals that are being debated for the Bears or other big corporations to receive tax breaks at a time in which affordability is the number one issue. And for me and for the people of Chicago, I believe that the opportunity to protect jobs, to grow our economy, the best place, the only plan right now is the city of Chicago,” he said.
Amid all of the intrigue, the Bears have said they hope to have a final stadium decision by late spring or early summer, with the goal of construction getting underway this year.
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from NBC Chicago https://ift.tt/wvFWo9B
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