The Chicago Bears Stadium Saga · Part two

How the money moves, PILOT, Lake County, and the system that does not need a suitcase

A payment-in-lieu-of-taxes is not a bribe. A public stadium authority is not a conviction. Together, in this region, they are how public cash is designed to travel. Past, present, and if this deal closes, next.

Chicago · Lake County, Ind. · 15 September 2026

Standing brief · The Bears stadium deal

There is no public indictment that says someone bought the @ChicagoBears stadium with a suitcase. That is not the same as saying the ground is clean. Or the statute.

What moves money here is mostly not a Hollywood payoff. It is a system that has been convicted before, still lives on campaign checks and lobbyists, and is now wrapping itself around two pipes. A 40-year Illinois PILOT that would freeze a school tax base, and an Indiana stadium authority that can float bonds, sign contracts, and collect new taxes on food and hotels. Follow those pipes. That is how the money moved, how it moves, and how it moves next.

I. What a PILOT actually is, and what it is for

PILOT means payment in lieu of taxes. The owner does not pay the normal property tax bill that would grow as the building and the land get more valuable. Instead they pay a negotiated number, often for decades, while the assessed value is frozen or treated as if the stadium were not there.

Illinois’ failed 2026 megaprojects bill would have done that at industrial scale. Projects over $100 million could lock assessments; a $1 billion-plus project like the Bears’ could lock them for 40 years. On top of a frozen bill, the team would negotiate a “special payment” with local taxing bodies. Schools first among them. Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas’s office ran the math on a conservative stadium value. Full freight could have been in the $50 million-a-year neighborhood. Freeze the old racetrack bill (a few million) and add a hypothetical $10 million PILOT, and the break is about $39 million a year. Over 40 years that is more than $1.5 billion that does not hit the normal tax rolls.

Half of some versions of the PILOT was supposed to go toward property-tax relief for other people. That is the political perfume. The structure underneath is simple. Growth that would have funded classrooms, pensions, and local services is capped by statute, then a smaller check is bargained in a room most voters never enter.

Who moved money this way before? Cities have used PILOTs for hospitals, universities, and stadiums for decades. A nonprofit or a public building is exempt, so the city collects something instead of nothing. The Bears use is different. This is a for-profit franchise asking the state to treat a private entertainment district like a church so the tax bill cannot explode after they build. They walked into that ask when they closed on Arlington Park in 2023 for $197.2 million and the assessor used the sale price as the new baseline. “Certainty” is the word they use. The money word is cap.

How a PILOT moves cash, year after year

Year zero. Land is vacant or under-assessed. Schools get a small bill. Year five. A $2 billion stadium and a mixed-use district sit on the parcel. Without a PILOT, the assessment jumps and the annual bill can jump with it. With a PILOT, the assessment stays near the old number, plus a negotiated check. The difference is not paid by the governor’s budget. It is paid by every other taxpayer whose rate does not fall when the big new value is taken off the growth table, and by the school district that cannot count on the new building the way it counts on a new warehouse down the road.

Senate Democrats said the megaprojects tool further breaks an already broken property tax system. The bill would have been available to any large project in Illinois. Once you punch that hole for the Bears, every other big developer lines up with the same form.

II. Indiana’s pipe is different. And wider

Indiana did not offer the Bears a PILOT on land they already own. Indiana offered a public building. A Northwest Indiana Stadium Authority can finance, construct, and lease a stadium. The team puts up about $2 billion. The public side is about $1 billion, repaid by admissions taxes, a 1 percent food-and-beverage tax in Lake and Porter counties, extra hotel tax in Lake County, a professional sports development district that captures sales taxes near the site, and possible toll-road money. The team keeps operating revenue. After the 40-year bonds are paid, the team can buy the building cheap.

Visitor and local spending hits the new taxes. Those taxes service the bonds. Bond proceeds pay contractors, engineers, lawyers, and, if the dirt is dirty, whoever hauls slag and sits in the IDEM room. The team collects tickets, suites, naming, concerts, and the district around the bowl. Forty years later the public has paid off the debt and the private owner can take the keys. That is the official design. Analysts have already asked whether the tax take covers the debt. If it does not, the state backstop or a tax hike is the next move. If remediation eats the first slice of the $1 billion, the public pile shrinks before a seat is sold.

Porter County officials have already said they do not want to tax diners for a stadium that is not in their county. That fight is the first leak in the pipe. Local tax votes are not automatic. They are the political moment when the money has to show its face.

Illinois PILOT

2023 sale at $197.2M reset the assessment fight. Megaprojects bill passed the House, died in the Senate. Last-minute municipal stadium-authority bill died in the House at 5 a.m.

Narrower Arlington-only bill in fall or special session; or no bill, land sits, team uses Hammond as the whip. Schools stay in the assessment war either way.

Indiana authority + new taxes

Feb. 2026 statute created the authority and the tax menu. Team board voted June 5 to advance Hammond. Cores and soil tests ongoing. Local food/hotel taxes not all adopted.

If cores are “good enough” for conditional closure. Bonds, contractors, cap-and-covenant, 2031 talk. If cores are not. Delay, more public money for dirt, or the deal thins.

Lobby / sweetener

Village retainers ($10k then $5k a month). Bears lobby bench in Springfield. 2025 offer of $25M “to benefit Chicago” plus yearly park money to peel off city votes.

Same firms get paid until a bill dies for good. $25M-style checks reappear if Chicago legislators are the veto. That money does not go to Palatine classrooms.

Campaign / vendor network

Pritzker campaigns paid firms tied to older convicts. The governor is not charged with anything. Johnson orbit. IG cases on contractors, hiring, small returned donation.

Whoever hosts the dome inherits the donor list that follows a “transformational” project. Construction PACs and trade money show up after the first bid package, not before the press conference.

The dirt

Lost Marsh sits on capped slag. Federated Metals is Superfund. Grand Calumet is still an Area of Concern. Tests are the current spend.

Conditional closure + ERC + slab-as-cap. Cleanup cost comes out of the public package or the schedule. Crews, not owners, stand in the hole.

III. Lake County’s relevant past. Adjacent, not identical

Lake County, Indiana, earned a national reputation. Robert Kennedy called it one of the most corrupt counties in the country. In the 1980s, Operation Lights Out produced federal cases against commissioners and an assessor. Cash for janitorial contracts at the Crown Point complex, payoffs to lower property assessments, cable-franchise grease. Prosecutors said county government was “up for sale.” The jobs that got sold were the same jobs a stadium authority will hold. Who gets the contract, who sets the number on the land, who looks the other way.

East Chicago later saw a mayoral election tossed for campaign misconduct and voter-fraud convictions. Gary’s former congresswoman pleaded in a mail-fraud case over making clerks raise campaign money to keep jobs. That is the civic weather this authority would be born in. Neither McDermott nor Braun is charged with anything. Weather is why a billion-dollar board with no-bid power and a new tax deserves more daylight than a ribbon.

What is on McDermott’s public record. Appearance, not a stadium charge

McDermott is the salesman for “clean as a whistle.” The documented file is ethics appearance. A large transfer from his campaign account to his wife’s judicial campaign that judicial officials treated as too big; a for-profit podcast that took ads from companies that do business with the city he runs, with ethics experts flagging pay-for-influence risk; an FEC complaint about using city water bills to promote a campaign radio show, later dismissed. Lake County’s election board has knocked a GOP challenger off the ballot on a paperwork technicality. That is machine hygiene. The mayor who would host the dome already lives where city vendors and political money sit at the same table.

IV. Illinois’ relevant past. The statute as the product

Chicago and Springfield’s modern template is ComEd. The utility admitted a years-long scheme to keep then-House Speaker Michael Madigan happy with jobs and money in exchange for legislative help. ComEd paid a $200 million fine. Madigan was convicted in 2025 on bribery, conspiracy, and wire-fraud counts. Related “ComEd Four” convictions have been shaken on appeal. The lesson that survived the appeals is not “every lobbyist is a felon.” It is this. In Illinois the product for sale was often the statute itself. Who gets written into the bill, who gets a job that looks like consulting, who gets a friendly hearing.

A PILOT bill is a statute. A megaprojects bill that applies statewide is a statute that outlives the Bears. The Senate balked. Lobbyists are still on retainer in Arlington Heights at $5,000 a month through 2027, and the Bears kept a Springfield bench after the session died. You do not pay those retainers for nostalgia. You pay them because the next draft of the bill is where the money will be hidden or revealed.

City Hall’s current IG docket is the small-bore version of the same pattern. A senior staffer using a title to get a contractor to hire a child, then pushing a $9.6 million invoice; Johnson aides with prior ties to that firm; a $250 campaign check later slated for return. It is the culture a city delegation brings to Springfield when someone asks them to vote the team to the suburbs. Or to take $25 million “for Chicago” to swallow the vote.

V. How the money moves from here

If Hammond’s cores support a conditional closure (contamination left in place, slab and parking as the cap, an Environmental Restrictive Covenant on the deed), the public money moves first into dirt, lawyers, and geotech, then into steel. The team’s $2 billion follows when the authority can lease a site that banks will bond. New local taxes have to pass. If Porter County holds out, Lake County and state backstops eat more of the load. Construction packages then move through the authority. That is the moment Lake County’s old reflex, who gets the contract, becomes a live question again. The first no-bid or “emergency” award is where Lights Out used to live.

If the cores fail the sniff test even for commercial use, the deal slows. Pritzker’s delay bet pays. Illinois can offer a thinner PILOT or a municipal authority that makes the stadium public so property tax disappears another way. That second path still moves school money; it just wears a different hat. The Bears still keep operating revenue. Fans still buy PSLs.

If nothing passes in either capital, the $197 million Arlington parcel sits as a land bank and a tax fight. The team keeps Soldier Field through 2033 and pays a penalty only if it leaves early. That is the quiet option nobody puts on a rendering. Own dirt in two states, play in a building you do not own, wait for a governor or a mayor who needs a win.

Campaign money will not lead. It will follow. After a site is named, trade groups, contractors, and hotel interests fund the people who voted yes. That is legal. It is also how the pipe stays open for the next project.

VI. Who benefits, who takes it on the chin

Benefits. The franchise, which keeps revenue in any structure that closes. Lobbyists on monthly clocks. Bond lawyers. Whoever wins the first dirt and steel packages. Local officials who cut the ribbon. Campaign vendors who have worked every side of Springfield and still get the next check.

Takes it on the chin. School districts under a 40-year freeze. Lake and Porter diners under a food tax. Chicago if the team leaves and the renovation debt does not. Crews who cut a slag cap for years so a covenant can say the site is “closed.” Neighbors who already live with Superfund yards and a river that worms do not finish.

VII. The line

Pritzker, Johnson, McDermott and the McCaskeys have not been charged over this stadium. A PILOT moves a billion and a half off a school roll without being called a subsidy. A public authority with new taxes and contract power moves a billion through a board most people will never see. This region has sold assessments and contracts before, in federal court.

The envelope is optional. The pipes are not. Until the cores are public and the official statement for the bonds is filed, every announcement is still a negotiation about whose pocket the next dollar leaves.

Editor’s note: This companion does not allege a crime by any current official on the Bears project. It maps legal pipes and documented history that sit next to those pipes. Dollar figures are from official analyses and contemporaneous reporting as of Sept. 15, 2026.

End of part two.

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