Bears owner set to get multibillion-dollar Indiana stadium offer, now will he take it? access_time February 25, 2026 person Neil deMause The Indiana bill to approve taxpayer funding of a new Chicago Bears stadium in Hammond passed the state house by a 95-4 vote yesterday, and it seems inevitable that it will pass the senate as well and be signed into law by Gov. Mike Braun by the end of the week. At which point … what, exactly? Senate Bill 27 , as the Indiana stadium legislation is known, would create a sports authority with the power to sign an agreement with Bears ownership to provide a huge pile of public money — hotel and food and beverage tax surcharges, a ticket tax, and property, sales, and income and other tax money from an omni-TIF district of indeterminate size — toward the construction of a new stadium. (Economist Geoff Propheter has estimated the total public cost at more than $4 billion , but also says there’s no way to truly know the full number without knowing the size of the tax diversion district.) It would be up to Bears owner George McCaskey to then decide whether to actually sign such a deal with the state, which could happen at any point in the future, at the state stadium board’s discretion; the city of Hammond would then have to vote to create the stadium tax district and the ticket tax. Why would McCaskey turn down such a lucrative offer? Lots of reasons: He might not actually want to move the Bears so far from their fan base in Chicago’s western suburbs. He might not want to have to put up the reported $2 billion he would have to for a Hammond dome (though it’s likely he’d recoup a bunch of that via the public tax money). Or he might think he can get a better deal in Illinois. And “better” doesn’t necessarily have to mean involving more public cash. Don’t forget that in 1999, Robert Kraft announced he was moving the New England Patriots to Hartford, Connecticut before switching gears and remaining in Massachusetts. And while it has since been reported that this happened after Kraft discovered it would take longer than he’d hoped to demolish a steam plant on the proposed stadium site , it’s also true that in the meantime he’d used the threat of a move to Connecticut both to convince the state of Massachusetts to give him a somewhat increased subsidy, as well as to arm-twist the NFL into letting big-market teams use money they would otherwise have to share with the league to instead pay for stadiums that would them to stay put in their current markets. (The NFL’s initial version of its G-3 stadium program, in fact, covered the top six TV markets at a time when Boston was #6; it was created by a committee whose chair was Robert Kraft.) If McCaskey is just leading Indiana on in hopes of winning a bigger dowry from Illinois, he’ll get his first evidence of whether it’s working when an Illinois state committee meets tomorrow to vote on letting Arlington Heights bestow property tax breaks on a Bears stadium pr0ject. That in itself is not likely to get a stadium there done — Bears execs have insisted they also need $855 million in state money for things like new roads and commuter rail changes — unless, of course, this is another Patriots situation where the NFL owner will be happy to grab whatever concessions he can get in the place he wants. If he’s even decided what he wants, of course, and there’s no rule saying he has to until it’s time to put pen to lease paper That’s a very long-winded way of saying that this is likely only the start of the Bears stadium battle, not the end. Do try to keep that in mind when you read headlines late this week declaring that the team’s move to Indiana is complete; we’ve seen those before , and they don’t always work out the way everyone expected . Share this post: folder Chicago Bears
Curated by Taleb Kabbara · Source: www.fieldofschemes.com