The Chicago Bears have floundered through the process of building a new stadium for five years now. Everything started fine. They purchased the property in Arlington Heights. All they had to do was work through negotiations with Illinois to figure out property taxes and infrastructure costs. Yet team president Kevin Warren has continued to demonstrate a remarkable inability to handle that process, as he’s made constant pivots, issued ill-timed public statements, and shown an appalling lack of understanding of his responsibilities.
Never was that clearer than during the battle happening in the Illinois Senate. There is significant opposition to the PILOT Bill, otherwise known as the Megaprojects bill, which would give the Bears tax certainty and infrastructure help they need to start building. There is one gigantic problem. The team still hasn’t delivered a traffic study as part of the infrastructure plan, so there is no idea how that money will be spent. This is the biggest sticking point, and according to Illinois Senator Bill Cunningham, via NBC 5 Chicago, a co-sponsor of the bill, this could ruin any hope of getting a deal done in 2026.
That is how bad the Chicago Bears have messed this up
The PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) bill would lock in property tax rates for the Bears at the Arlington Heights site. The team is also seeking hundreds of millions in infrastructure funding around the site as well, but Cunningham echoed the concerns of some suburban mayors who say the team has not yet delivered on a traffic study that would help determine where those funds would be spent.
“They have made a substantial request for a commitment to fund infrastructure improvements around Arlington Heights. We can’t do that without a traffic study…and the Bears don’t have one yet,” he said. “The Bears are asking for $850 million in capital expenditures from the state. We can’t line those things out unless we have a traffic study and we know what those dollars are going to be spent on.”
Cunningham went so far as to say that there is a chance that the May 31 end of the legislative session may not yield a final answer on the Bears question.
“May 31 may come and go without a final answer on all of this. That’s a possibility,” he said.
One would think Kevin Warren would’ve known this.
Remember, he inherited the Bears’ stadium project from Ted Phillips in 2022. The entire reason the team hired him was due to his experience in the Minnesota Vikings front office. He was said to have been a primary contributor to the effort to build U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis. Time has shown that Warren’s influence on that process may have been overblown. Not only has he shown a gross lack of preparation for how challenging negotiations would be, but his inability to stick to a plan has only complicated matters further.
His lone tactic to this point has been constantly threatening to move the team elsewhere. Hammond, Indiana, has been the only threat that has worked to this point. Yet instead of capitalizing on the little momentum it brought by getting the bill across the finish line, his inability to do simple things, like a traffic study, has seen him resort to spamming the threat to move over and over, like a petulant child throwing a tantrum. Now, after promising shovels in the ground by the end of 2025, there is a real possibility it doesn’t happen in 2026 either.
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The Bears have ten days left.
As of writing this, it is May 21st. There are ten days remaining before the end of the spring session of the Illinois state legislature. That is how long the Chicago Bears have to fix this problem. Here’s the issue. Traffic studies typically take 3 to 6 months to complete when building a new stadium. There is data collection, analysis, modeling, review, and revision. That is how detailed it is, and this is before its submission. More time is required for public scrutiny. We have no idea whether the Bears have even started a traffic study.
If not, there is no chance they can start one, finish it, and get it past the Illinois Senate in 10 days. Translation: they’re pretty much screwed. Their only hope is that they can somehow convince voters on the bill that the money will be handled with proper care once the stadium construction begins. The political equivalent of “Trust me, bro.” The cold reality is starting to sink in.
Either the Bears will wait another year to get the bill passed, or they will finally decide to move to Hammond.
