The Chicago Bears Stadium Saga · Part one

A dome on slag, a tax bill on schools, and a team still called Chicago

Who wants the new Bears stadium, who pays for it, what is buried under the Hammond dirt, and who they will send in after it, same as they always have.

Chicago · Hammond · 15 September 2026

Standing brief · The Bears stadium deal

The @ChicagoBears stadium fight is not about football. It is about who controls the cash from a new building and the land around it, and who gets stuck with the bill. As of mid-September 2026 the team's public line is simple. Hammond, Indiana is the sole focus. Soil and environmental tests are underway at two spots near Wolf Lake. Talks with Illinois are "minimal." @NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell still says Illinois has not been ruled out. Nothing is signed. No shovel is in the ground. The team still plays at Soldier Field under a lease that runs through 2033.

That's the snapshot. Here's how we got here, who wants what, where the money actually goes. And why my people, who grew up along the Calumet and worked the mills that made that dirt what it is, look at the Hammond drawings and see something they already lived through once.

This is Part 1 of a series. There's a lot more under this than fits in one piece. Who profits off the bond paper itself, what happens to 326 acres in Arlington Heights if the Bears leave it behind, who's still paying off Soldier Field's last renovation no matter where the team plays, what the actual excavation contracts pay and who they go to, and just how much one governor's own hand is shaping which way this breaks. Those are coming. This one lays the table.

I. Who is in the room(s)

The McCaskey family. George McCaskey is chairman, and team president Kevin Warren runs the football and business side. They want a modern enclosed stadium they can fill 365 days a year with football, concerts, and other events, plus a mixed-use district of hotels, stores, and housing they control. That combination raises the value of the franchise and the cash that flows to the owners.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and legislative leaders do not want the team to leave the state. Pritzker has been more open to a deal in Arlington Heights than to a new lakefront stadium in Chicago. He will not write a state check for a privately owned building. That is his red line, and he has kept it. Publicly. Behind it, his staff has been in direct contact with the team's, advising them on how to draft a bill that could actually pass, and he's said he'll call a special session the moment the Bears hand him something clean enough to sign. That is not a governor standing on the sideline. That's a governor who has decided exactly how he wants this to look no matter which way it breaks. More on him in a later part. He's earned his own.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has pushed to keep the team in the city. The Bears say they have exhausted every city option. Johnson still talks as if the lakefront plan from 2024 is alive. That gap between what the team says and what City Hall says helped kill votes in Springfield.

Indiana Gov. Mike Braun, Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr., and Northwest Indiana lawmakers passed a bill in February 2026 that creates a public stadium authority and a package of new taxes. They want prestige, construction jobs, and visitor spending in a region that has spent a century paying for other people's industry.

Arlington Heights Mayor Jim Tinaglia and Village officials still hope. The Bears already own the 326-acre former Arlington Park racetrack. The Village has kept lobbyists on the payroll.

Left off the dais. Taxpayers in both states, school districts that live on the property-tax base, fans who will pay higher tickets and personal-seat licenses. And the construction crews who will actually cut the cap and stand in the hole. Nobody at that table does the digging. Everybody at that table decides what gets dug.

II. When and how it unfolded

2021: The Chicago Bears agree to buy the shuttered Arlington International Racecourse from Churchill Downs Inc. Last horse race that September. Purchase and Sale Agreement signed Sept. 29, 2021, at $197.2 million for 326 acres.

Feb. 15, 2023: The deal closes. Churchill Downs rolls the proceeds into other real estate under an IRS Section 1031 like-kind exchange and defers capital-gains tax. The Bears take title.

Then the tax trap springs. Before the sale, Cook County had the property assessed around $33 million. After the Bears paid $197.2 million, Assessor Fritz Kaegi set the market value at $197 million. The sale price. That is "sales chasing." Churchill Downs settled its last year at a $95 million value and about $7.8 million in tax. Starting 2023, the Bears were on the hook. They demolished the grandstand and argued the land was now vacant, worth $60–71 million. School districts wanted $160 million as commercial. It settled at $124.7 million. A $3.6 million annual bill through 2027. That fight is why "property tax certainty" became the team's central demand ever since. They closed the purchase before they locked a tax deal. Once they owned it, the assessor could treat the sale price as the new baseline. A developer who waits to close until the papers are signed keeps more power. The Bears took the land first and negotiated from inside the deed.

2024: After Kevin Warren is hired, the team pivots to a new dome on the lakefront next to Soldier Field. City Hall likes it. Springfield does not. Pritzker calls it a nonstarter. The plan dies.

Late 2025: The team says Illinois is not treating the project as a priority and expands the search to Northwest Indiana.

February 2026: Indiana moves fast. In eight days flat, committee vote to signature, lawmakers pass and Gov. Braun signs Senate Bill 27, creating the Northwest Indiana Stadium Authority. Framework. Bears put up about $2 billion; public side about $1 billion, financed by new admissions, food-and-beverage, and hotel taxes. The Authority owns the stadium for the life of the bonds. The team leases it, keeps every dollar of stadium revenue, and can buy the building for one dollar once the debt is paid. Sooner if they pay it off early.

April 2026: The Illinois House passes its own version (the "megaprojects" bill, HB910) by 78-32, built around letting the Bears freeze their property tax assessment for up to 40 years in exchange for a negotiated payment in lieu of taxes. It clears Welch's unofficial rule that a bill needs 60 votes inside his own Democratic caucus before it moves. It stalls in the Senate.

May 26, 2026: Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas' office runs the math on what that freeze is actually worth. Assuming the Bears negotiate a $10 million PILOT on top of a roughly $4 million frozen bill, the tax break comes to more than $39 million a year. Over $1.5 billion across the 40-year term. For comparison, her office notes, Willis Tower's annual property tax bill alone is $50 million. The Bears' hypothetical stadium would owe less than a third of that on a property assessed a fraction of what a fair commercial valuation would produce.

May 31–June 1, 2026: Illinois' spring session ends without a deal. The Senate passed a last-minute bill 37-17 around 3:30 a.m. that would have let Chicago and Cook County suburbs create their own local stadium authorities. The House adjourned without a vote around 4:40 a.m. without ever taking it up. Speaker Emanuel "Chris" Welch defended the delay afterward.

"I think our caucus is used to processes. Our caucus is used to taking our time and doing it right."

House Democrats also live under Welch's unofficial 60-vote caucus rule. Dozens of those Democrats represent Chicago. Voting to help the Bears leave the city is a career vote.

June 5, 2026: Bears board of directors votes to "advance" the Hammond project. Exact site still not chosen.

Late June 2026: Pritzker tells reporters the Bears have asked his office and legislators for advice on merging the House and Senate bills into something that could actually pass, and that he'll call a special session if they deliver it. They don't, before the summer runs out.

August 2026: Warren says Hammond is the sole focus. Lost Marsh Golf Course is viable; they are testing Wolf Lake Terminal and weighing combining the two. Goodell says Illinois still has a chance. Pritzker says the Bears have not presented a bill.

September 2026: Testing continues. Hammond Mayor McDermott has started calling Wolf Lake Terminal (not Lost Marsh, the site that already has twenty years of remediation paperwork behind it) "the superior site." No announcement yet. Soldier Field is still home. The name, McCaskey says, stays Chicago Bears whether the building sits in Arlington or Hammond. Translation? FU Pay Me.

III. Where the three places actually sit

Soldier Field, Chicago lakefront. Oldest NFL stadium still in use. City-owned through the Chicago Park District. The Bears are tenants, not owners. Lease through 2033. Breaking it early triggers a penalty estimated at tens of millions up to $80–90 million. Small next to a multi-billion-dollar project. Remaining public debt on the 2003 renovation is still hundreds of millions. That is not the Bears' legal problem. It is Chicago's political problem. So who is holding the bag?

Arlington Heights, northwest suburb. 326 acres the team already owns. Room for tailgating, a METRA stop, a whole district. About 25–30 miles from downtown. Cleaner dirt than Hammond. Harder politics than Hammond.

Hammond, Indiana, near Wolf Lake. Roughly 15–25 miles from Soldier Field. Closer to the South Side than Arlington Heights is. Two spots under review. Lost Marsh Golf Course, built on a capped 100-acre slag dump, and Wolf Lake Terminal, an industrial peninsula of tank farms, former federal land, and wetlands with no cap at all yet. Mayor McDermott's now steering toward the site with less paper behind it, not more. That's the tell.

IV. Follow the money. The carry

In both states the owners keep the operating profits. The public side is either forgone taxes plus infrastructure (Illinois) or new taxes (Indiana). That is the NFL pattern. The team captures the upside; someone else carries the long-term public cost.

Pritzker's budget does not pay the PILOT. Local schools do. Johnson's city does not get the new district tax base if the team goes to Arlington. Indiana's new food, hotel, and ticket taxes pay their subsidy. The McCaskeys keep stadium revenue in either place. Overlooked. An NFL stadium loan (figures near $200 million have been floated) is league capital, not charity. Soldier Field concert revenue that now helps the Park District moves with the team. Chicago still owes renovation debt either way. Personal-seat licenses are another transfer from fans to owners. None of that shows up in a rendering.

V. Pritzker the operator

Pritzker is not trying to keep the Bears at any price. He is trying to keep the loss off his name while never writing the check that would lock them in. He will not pay for a privately owned stadium. Said it after the 2024 lakefront plan died, said it again after the spring session died in 2026. Arlington Heights was always the cheaper political product for him. The team already owns the land, the state isn't buying the building, and the "help" is a property-tax freeze that hits school districts and suburban taxpayers, not his own checkbook.

His bet since June has been to let the clock run. Advise the Bears, hand them the pen, wait for a clean bill, and call the special session only once one exists, so that either the credit or the failure lands on the Bears and the legislature, never on him directly. He is also betting, correctly as of this September, that Hammond is slower and dirtier than the Bears admit. You can pass a tax bill in Indianapolis in eight days. You cannot legislate slag into clean sand, and the EPA is still actively deciding what to do about the lead in that neighborhood's yards as of last month.

At the same time he holds this line on the Bears, Pritzker has been building an alliance with the Chicago real estate industry around his Build Illinois zoning package. Sitting for a friendly interview on a leading local real estate broker's podcast, where he brought up the Bears unprompted. Two different rooms, same governor, same season, both full of people who benefit from staying close to him. Whether those two relationships ever touch each other on paper is a question worth real digging, not speculation. And it's getting its own part in this series.

VI. The dirt. What The Region knows

Lost Marsh Golf Course is not a meadow that happened to grow grass. For decades Harry Bairstow dumped steel-mill slag there. Bairstow Mountain. The pile was too hard and too expensive to haul away, so Hammond capped it. Sand dredged from Lake George, biosolids from the Sanitary District, powdered lime, laid over 3.5 million cubic yards of slag and fly ash. That was sold in 2003 as a Midwest brownfield success story. It is still a cover over industrial waste.

A few blocks away is the Federated Metals Superfund site. A smelter that ran lead and arsenic into the surrounding yards from 1937 to 1983. EPA put it on the National Priorities List in September 2023. As recently as this August, EPA issued a new cleanup decision covering roughly 160 more residential properties in that neighborhood. That is not a closed chapter. That is a live federal case, right now, this summer, while the Bears are coring ground a few hundred yards away.

Wolf Lake Terminal, the site Hammond's own mayor now calls superior, is an industrial peninsula with tank farms, old federal land, and wetlands around it, and none of Lost Marsh's twenty years of paper trail behind it. McDermott says the tests will come back "clean as a whistle." The Bears say they are doing "extreme environmental testing." Those two sentences only exist if someone is worried the dirt is not ordinary dirt.

Zoom out and you get the Grand Calumet River / Indiana Harbor Ship Canal Area of Concern. The only one in Indiana, the bottom of the river a chemical landfill that never got a lid. PCBs, PAHs, mercury, cadmium, chromium, lead. Fish advisories. Beach closings. More than 1.6 million cubic yards already dredged out, more still planned. People from the Calumet put it plainer than any federal report. Worms that live off garbage cannot survive in that river.

VII. The only way the tests "pass". And why that is not the same as clean

Indiana does not require park-clean. IDEM uses risk-based closure. A stadium is commercial, not a backyard. Published contamination limits for a commercial site and its excavation workers run higher than for a kid playing in dirt. The legal path. Pick a parcel outside the Superfund footprint, run the cores, and if contamination shows up (and around Wolf Lake it will) the remedy is a cap plus a deed restriction. The stadium slab and the parking lots are the cap. An Environmental Restrictive Covenant goes on the title. No wells, no basements, no digging without a soil-management plan, commercial use only. During construction, they treat the excavated dirt as regulated material and haul it. IDEM or the Indiana Brownfields Program issues a comfort letter. The bank and the NFL accept that letter as cleared for this use.

That letter can satisfy IDEM. It does not satisfy the sniff test of somebody who grew up on that ground and knows what it does. Those are two different tests, and only one of them is on the form.

VIII. Same hole, different paperwork

This part is personal.

My family worked U.S. Steel. South Works, then Gary. Three generations, into the ground and back out, into the ground again. Nobody dressed that up. Nobody handed my grandfather a comfort letter. The company told him the work was dangerous, paid him for dangerous work, and everybody involved at least agreed on what it was.

The crews who cut the cap at Wolf Lake or Lost Marsh, drive the piles, stand in the hole when something Bairstow buried and the lab missed comes up. They'll get paid, and the pay will likely be very good against the local wage. Fine. Blue-collar work has always rolled this way in this region. A contract like this can mean a new house, or another kid, or just breathing room, and men here have taken that trade before and will take it again with their eyes wide open. That's not somebody being fooled. That's somebody doing the math correctly. Don't let the pay convince you this is a different transaction than the one my family made with U.S. Steel a hundred years ago, though. It's the same trade. Risk your body, take the check.

It's worse because in 1906 nobody pretended the mill floor was safe. Here, an Environmental Restrictive Covenant and a conditional-closure letter exist for the specific purpose of saying, on paper, that it is. The document that makes the deal bankable is the same document that makes the risk invisible. Nobody has to call it dangerous work anymore. IDEM already signed a letter that says it's handled. The crew still has to punch through a cap that's been sitting on 3.5 million cubic yards of slag and fly ash for twenty years, or drive piles into a peninsula that's never been capped at all, next to a Superfund site the EPA is still actively working a few hundred yards away. The ground didn't get any cleaner between 1906 and now. The paperwork got better at saying it did.

And it's worse for a second reason. My grandfather's danger built something. Rail, beams, wire. Steel that held up bridges and buildings for a hundred years after he was dead. This danger builds a stadium bowl and a mixed-use entertainment district so a family that already owns the team can monetize it 365 days a year. Same risk to the same kind of body. Different thing at the other end of it.

The $2 billion and the $1 billion buy steel, architects, and bond lawyers. The people who do the actual work, the same kind of bodies that already worked the mills, the tanks, the docks, and the cleanup jobs the Calumet never finished, are not McCaskey, not Braun, not McDermott, not Pritzker. They're not even mentioned. If the covenant on the deed says don't dig later, the digging still happens first, before the concrete goes down, before there's a cap left to protect anybody. Years of it. Not a ribbon-cutting weekend.

IX. Who benefits and who takes it on the chin

Benefits. The McCaskey family and the Bears organization. Higher franchise value, more events, more real-estate income, more control. Indiana politicians and Hammond. Ribbon-cuttings, construction jobs, bragging rights. Developers, contractors, hotels, and restaurants that land contracts. The NFL. A modern building that can host Super Bowls. Pritzker, if the stall holds. Johnson, for as long as Chicago stays in the sentence. School districts, for as long as there is no freeze.

Takes it on the chin. Illinois taxpayers if Springfield later caves. Indiana residents who pay new food, hotel, and ticket taxes whether they like football or not. Chicago. Identity, events, and renovation debt that does not disappear. Fans. Higher prices, longer drives, personal-seat licenses. And the crews who cut that cap and stand in that hole, whose health bill, if the ground does what ground like that tends to do, comes due on nobody's balance sheet but their own, ten or twenty years after the ribbon's already come down.

X. What still sits on the table

No site is chosen. No financing documents are signed. Construction in Hammond, if it happens, has been talked about as starting around 2027 and opening around 2031. Dates that assume clean cores and local tax votes that aren't all in the bank yet. Porter County resistance to the food tax is already on the record. Illinois can still pass something in a fall or special session. Arlington Heights hasn't taken its lobbyists off the clock. Goodell's comments keep a sliver of daylight open.

The team stays the Chicago Bears even if the building sits in Indiana. The name is the last thing they give up. The revenue is the first thing they don't. Hammond is closer to Soldier Field than Arlington Heights is. A test that passes can still leave a Superfund neighbor, a refinery stack and a river that has not been delisted. The people who would build this are not the people announcing it.

XI. The short version

A rich family wants a better cash machine. Two states are bidding with other people's money. And in one case, other people's bodies. Chicago's lakefront plan is dead. Arlington Heights is land the team already owns and a tax fight they walked into on purpose. Hammond is closer on the map and dirtier in the ground, and Hammond's own mayor just steered the team toward the dirtier of its two remaining options. Pritzker won't spend his political capital to save the team and won't own the loss if they leave. And he's not sitting still while he waits, either. Indiana bought speed with a dollar-bill buyback.

The money doesn't follow the idea of keeping the Bears in Chicago. It follows the owners' need for a building they can monetize year-round. The Calumet doesn't care who owns the franchise. It cares who signs the first construction contract before the cores come back. And who they send in to break ground once it's signed. That was never going to be anybody in the room. It's going to be somebody's kid, same as it was somebody's grandfather. My grandfather's danger at least had his name on it. This one has an Environmental Restrictive Covenant on the title instead.

Until a site is chosen, the lab work is public, and the bonds are sold, this is still a negotiation.

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