The Chicago Bears have sought leverage in the stadium talks with Illinois for years. They finally found some when they began negotiating with the state of Indiana about possibly moving their operation to the northwest region. It made sense. That area of the state is woefully underdeveloped and in need of a revenue infusion. A brand-new sports stadium complex would be just the ticket, especially given the Bears’ premier franchise status. All that was needed was finding a site they liked.
Eventually, they settled on one in the suburb of Hammond. It has a property of 340 acres near Wolf Lake that offered the ideal spread of land to reshape however the Bears wanted. What they didn’t bother to mention publicly was why that land was available in the first place. According to Robert McCoppin of the Chicago Tribune, the Bears aren’t exactly looking at premium ground. It seems decent on the surface as a golf course, but it hides a dirty secret. Literally.
The Chicago Bears would be building on a literal pile of human crap.
“I would throw up the red caution flags immediately,” he told the Tribune. “I’ve worked on enough sites with gas stations or dry cleaners or some sort of hazardous material to know it contaminates the ground. I would be very concerned about selecting a site like that.”
Tinaglia is not the first to voice concerns about the site near Wolf Lake in Hammond. In the past, area residents fought to get the site cleaned up. The result was a golf course built on top of a mountain of slag — a rocky waste product from steel production — that was capped with bio-solids that are treated human waste.
The location also sits near several hazardous waste sites, across the street from an oil tank storage complex, and in the shadow of the Midwest’s largest oil refinery.
Now it makes sense why the Bears keep dithering.
They desperately want to get a deal done with Illinois so they can just build in Arlington Heights. That site is far more developed and far less hazardous to people. Hammond might be a big, wide-open expanse ready to be remade, but the cost and effort required are being glossed over. Just cleaning up the waste on a property that large could require anywhere from $100 million to over $270 million. It gets worse if there is groundwater contamination. The Bears would have to get all of that cleaned up before they can even start developing the property.
Indiana has pledged a willingness to help after recent legislation, but it’s still a financial headache the Chicago Bears seem reluctant to face. Going from building at the site of a former prestigious horse racing course to a literal human waste dump would be humiliating. No matter what team president Kevin Warren or owner George McCaskey says, their actions tell the entire story. If that site were so appealing, they would’ve already decided to move there.
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Will Illinois call their bluff?
Not much time is left in the spring session of the state legislature. If the megaprojects bill doesn’t get passed before the end of May, it likely won’t this year. That would basically mean the Bears have two choices. Either they wait another year, or they go to Hammond. Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker seemed confident a deal would be struck before the deadline. Making tweaks to the bill so it can pass the state senate is the final hurdle, and negotiations have been difficult. It is so close to finally being over.
Yet as we’ve seen for the past five years, nothing is ever easy when this team and government officials get involved. The Bears have put themselves in a position where they have to choose between dealing with Illinois politicians and a literal pile of human feces. With each day that passes, that pile looks a bit more enticing. One can only imagine how the Bears were sold on Hammond. Did they just look at which property was the biggest and decide that was the one they wanted? Given what we know about the organization, it’s likely they did minimal research before making such a decision.
