Pritzker Was a Hard ‘No’ on Bears Stadium. Now Maybe Not

As the Bears are turning their attention back to suburban Arlington Heights as a site for a new domed stadium, there is reportedly more discussion happening with state officials about potential public funding than previously understood. 

Gov. J.B. Pritzker has previously and tersely said, “Right now, there’s no building any new stadiums” in Illinois. A new report in the Chicago Tribune, however, said Pritzker has spent $100,000 in public funds on an outside legal consultant to aid in discussions with the Bears. The team, meanwhile, has brought in an outside adviser with ties to the governor and other top Democratic state leaders. 

Whether that leads to any sort of actual legislation remains to be seen, particularly as the Bears have sought taxpayer help to pay for roughly half of a proposed $4.7 billion project, and political resistance in Illinois will likely mirror what’s happening in Missouri, where officials on both sides of the aisle oppose public funding for new Chiefs and Royals stadiums.

Dialogue, however, is happening.

The governor’s office tells Front Office Sports there’s been “no change” to Pritzker’s position on the matter. “Fiscal responsibility is core to Governor Pritzker’s leadership and he does not believe that the bottom line of any private business should come at the expense of taxpayers,” spokesperson Matt Hill said in a statement. “Our office retained outside counsel with deep knowledge and expertise in professional sports team finances and the regulations of national leagues to ensure we could independently analyze and understand any potential impacts on taxpayers and the state.”

Pritzker’s chief of staff, Anne Caprara, posted a lengthy social media thread where she said the Tribune “didn’t uncover some salacious info” and called the situation “absurd.”

“No one in the Gov’s office or in state government is an expert in NFL finances,” she said in one post. “We didn’t hire a consultant to ‘help with stadium planning.’ We hired a consultant to help us understand how a major corporate entity w/opaque business practices makes their $$ so that the state of IL could go to the bargaining table in the best possible negotiating position,” she wrote in another.

The Bears, meanwhile, issued a statement in mid-May saying the team has made “significant progress with the leaders in Arlington Heights,” and will continue working with both state and local officials. That announcement came after about a year of effort to finalize plans for a new lakefront stadium downtown, despite owning property in Arlington Heights. The team owns 326 acres of an old horseracing track in the northwest suburb, and in November finally reached a tentative agreement with the village to settle a tax property dispute. At the time of the deal, the team said it was still focused on building the downtown dome.