* My weekly syndicated newspaper column…

Six days before the last day of the spring state legislative session, Sen. Bill Cunningham, D-Chicago, gave me two big reasons why it was so difficult to push a Bears stadium bill across the finish line. Cunningham, as you know, is the chief sponsor of the Senate’s Bears bill.

1) Every stadium-related legislation passed in Illinois included the Chicago mayor and the Illinois governor pulling in the same direction. This time, that didn’t happen.

2) Moving a stadium location within a state pits Illinois municipalities against each other, and you don’t want to do that “particularly when the municipality on the losing side has way more members than any other municipality in the state.” Cunningham told reporters more recently that stadiums which have moved within the same state didn’t involve their state legislatures. Instead, local governments picked up the tab.

Cunningham appeared on a WSCR radio program last week and said, “For most of the last few weeks, most senators wanted to do nothing.” But then, he said, “We thought it was important to pass something that would make it easier for the Bears to build a new stadium in Illinois,” so they started putting together a plan.

Reasons abounded for wanting to do nothing. For example, some senators didn’t want to help the Bears move to the suburbs, but some didn’t want to help billionaire team owners at all, and some didn’t like the original House plan and were ready to move on. And, as Cunningham said on the Senate floor, his constituents mostly wanted to keep the Bears here but didn’t want to give them a single taxpayer penny to do it.

But why, I asked Cunningham later, did he wait until May 30 — the day before the end of session — to pull the plug on the House-passed megaprojects bill? And what was the impetus for coming up with an alternative plan?

Cunningham first explained he’d held several meetings with caucus members after the House passed its own bill and tried out several versions of a slimmed-down proposal. None of those bills could pass.

“’Let’s do nothing’ probably had a plurality of senators behind it,” he said.

At the start of last week, Cunningham said, it became clear it just couldn’t be passed. So, by midweek, “I began floating the Municipal Stadium Authority concept to a handful of senators” to see if that could find support.

By then, however, the budget and lots of other hot topics became the center of discussion. The governor, by the way, specifically warned the Senate this could happen weeks ago when he said he wanted the legislation wrapped up well ahead of the end of session to avoid being caught in the last-minute session crunch.

“By Friday [May 29], I felt the concept had enough support to start drafting a bill,” Cunningham said. That bill didn’t surface until late Sunday night right before session was previously scheduled to adjourn.

“I regret that we got to it as late as we did, but we simply had bigger fish to fry,” Cunningham said about the budget and other topics. “And while I talked about the concept with [House Bears bill sponsor Rep. Kam Buckner] midweek, and he was generally supportive of giving it a shot, we got the bill to him too late for the House to take action.”

His timeline was generally confirmed by other insiders.

Asked why a backup plan hadn’t been formulated weeks before, Senate President Don Harmon’s spokesperson said the question would be “best addressed to the Bears.”

Cunningham and other legislators have been saying for a while that rumors about the football team having second thoughts about leaving Chicago damaged the legislative effort to help the Bears move to the suburbs.

And that was why Cunningham’s new proposal was designed to level the playing field for Arlington Heights and Chicago. The idea was to at least say the city would be on equal footing with the suburbs. But it just came way too late in the session.

And then Friday, the Bears issued a statement saying the team will “advance our stadium development project” in Hammond, Indiana, although no site was specified.

More importantly though, a Bears official spoke by phone with both Cunningham and Buckner before the announcement. Both of the legislators in charge of the Bears negotiations said they were told by team President/CEO Kevin Warren the Bears looked forward to continuing the discussion about keeping the team in Illinois.

It’s the saga that won’t die.

* The Sun-Times’ Fran Spielman and Mitchell Armentrout zoomed out…

“The Bears f—– it up by going with Johnson’s stupid thing without pulling Springfield in and having there be $2 billion in state funding required,” the source said, referring to their ballyhooed 2024 pitch for a lakefront dome south of Soldier Field. “The Bears own the first full year of failure. Then there was the second year of failure, which probably the governor owns a lot of because he didn’t get his head out of the sand until December, when Indiana became real.” […]

“They spent $200 million, which I believe is about $100 million more than the land was worth,” [State Rep. Kam Buckner, lead sponsor of a House megaprojects bill that never got a vote in the Illinois Senate] told the Sun-Times. “They negotiated against themselves to buy that land with no plan. After the fact, they decided, ‘Hey, we need to find a way to make this work.’ They did it backwards. […]

Unlike Warren, who appeared to have a budding political bromance with Johnson, the Bears’ lobbying team privately advised the politically naive Bears president that Johnson didn’t have the clout or the legislative know-how to get anything done, let alone a deal as controversial as this.[…]

Even after Indiana’s quickie approval of a sweetheart stadium deal for the Bears forced Pritzker off the sidelines, Illinois’ risk-averse governor remained at a safe distance from negotiations. […]

The tax incentives for Chicago could have been used to jump-start development at Michael Reese, The 78, a scaled-down version of the stalled One Central development across the street from Soldier Field and the South Loop Amtrak railyard being eyed by White Sox chairman-in-waiting Justin Ishbia. […]

“Johnson went hard against it. Davis Gates went hard against it. Toni was mute. Don Harmon was mute, and the version in the House … was too big to get done,” said a source close to negotiations. […]

“It really just shows you how dysfunctional things are in Illinois. The fact that they’ve been trying to get a stadium for three years, they pass a bill in the House, we wait weeks and weeks and weeks for the Senate to tell us what they think they’re going to do, and then the Senate files a bill at 11 o’clock at night? It wasn’t serious. They’re checking a box.”

Go read the whole thing.

* And USA Today really zoomed out…

September 29, 2021

The Bears announce their Purchase and Sale Agreement with Churchill Downs, Inc. for the site of the Arlington International Racecourse in Arlington Heights, Illinois – 32 miles away from Soldier Field.

July 2022

Then-Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot proposes adding a dome to Soldier Field in effort to encourage the Bears to remain in the city. However, the team rebuffs the proposal, doubling down on their intent to develop the site in Arlington Heights. […]

February 13, 2023

The sale of the Arlington Heights site goes final with a $197.2 million price tag. The Bears say at the time that their purchase of the site does not guarantee they’ll follow through with building their new stadium – and surrounding “entertainment district” – there. […]

June 2023

The Bears’ Arlington Heights development plan stalls. Chicago PBS station WTTW reports that the snag is a result of Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi’s valuation of the Arlington Heights property higher than the team anticipated, leading to a high property tax bill. […]

ESPN reports in March [of 2024] that the team’s new plan involves committing more than $2 billion toward building a new, publicly owned domed stadium. […]

In April [of 2024], the Bears reveal renderings of the proposed stadium project south of Soldier Field, estimated to cost $4.7 billion. While Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson openly championed the project, Illinois governor JB Pritzker was less enthused, given the expectation the Bears would request taxpayer funds to help build the stadium. […]

April 2, 2025

The Chicago Tribune reports that momentum has shifted back toward the Bears pursuing a stadium development project in Arlington Heights. […]

September 8, 2025

Warren pens an open letter to Bears fans declaring Arlington Heights “the only site within Cook County that meets that standard” in the team’s vision for a new stadium on the day of the team’s season-opening game […]

December 17, 2025

In another open letter to Bears fans, Warren announces that the team plans to explore an expanded search for a new stadium site after hitting a roadblock in negotiations with the state of Illinois over their current plan. The expanded search includes both the Arlington Heights site, but also “opportunities throughout the wider Chicagoland region,” Warren wrote, “including Northwest Indiana.” […]

May 21, 2026

The Bears declare that all plans to build a stadium within the Chicago city limits are done and that the team’s future stadium will be in either Arlington Heights or Hammond, Indiana. […]

June 5, 2026

Momentum continues toward a Bears move to Indiana. The team releases a statement saying it’s moving forward with the development plan in Hammond.