-
Courtney Cronin
Palm Beach, Florida. – The plans of the Chicago Bears to build a new stadium took a tone shift on Wednesday at the annual NFL meeting.
Just over a year after the team declared its goal of building a stadium south of the current Soldier Field site on the shore of the Lake in Chicago, the president and CEO of the team, Kevin Warren, said that the Bears are expanding their options to include Arlington Heights, Illinois, where the franchise currently owns the property of 326 acres that previously housed the international career of Arlington.
“The approach is now so much in the center and Arlington Heights,” Warren said. “These are not linear processes or projects. They take time, they take a lot of energy and effort. I am very, very satisfied with the place where we are. I think that we, collectively as a group, we are where we think we would be.”
The Bears bought the land in Arlington Heights for $ 197.2 million in September 2021, but they have not begun to develop the site, which was expected to present a multimillion -dollar stadium project and include restaurants, retail spaces and real estate. The team began to explore options for a new stadium beyond Arlington Heights in the summer of 2023 when they announced that these plans were “at risk”, since negotiations on property taxes reached an impasse of $ 100 million.
One day before the NFL 2024 draft, the Bears announced plans for a museum in the museum campus in Chicago. While the team has maintained that the construction of a new stadium will be financed privately, concerns about the load imposed on taxpayers to finance the infrastructure around the stadium have led to a dead point.
In December, the Arlington Heights Trustee Board unanimously approved a tax agreement with three school districts, which resolved the annual property tax bill for the potential site of the Bears Stadium at $ 3.6 million. While Warren pointed out the “progress” made with Arlington Heights, he also said there is more work to do.
“Because these projects are so complex and so difficult that they are literally impossible to do if you don’t have all your hands on the deck and everyone got engaged,” Warren said. “Even if you have that, they are difficult. So it was important to see the focus on it.”
Warren reiterated that the team’s goal is to begin the construction of a new stadium in 2025. The president of the Bears, George McCaskey, said that private capital “can be used as part of our construction planning plan of the stadium”, but that the team has not yet made a decision on that front.
“Yes, my goal still remains, to be able to move dirt in 2025, which is important because there are many preconstruction work that must enter these projects, whether you are on the museum campus, Michael Reese [hospital site] Or in the center, to prepare things, so we are only a room on the road during the year, “Warren said.
Also on Wednesday, speaking publicly for the first time since the death of his mother, Virginia Halas McCaskey, an emotional George McCaskey addressed the team owned by the team, which has been in his family for 105 years.
“We have said for many years that we intend to be the owners of the Bears as long as possible,” said George McCaskey. “Other 100 years would be great. She prepared him to achieve that. He gave us the play book. He trained us. Now we have to execute the plan, and we are prepared to do it. We have to stay together.”
McCaskey said that the Bears Succession Plan was approved by the NFL, and that it does not anticipate any change in the property structure.
“[Virginia McCaskey] Establish for a transition without problems, and is a loan for her, “said George McCaskey.” In the Law Faculty, I heard stories about people who simply could not contemplate their mortality, and as a result, it caused a lot of confusion and family problems, and she had the forecast to establish it, so we have no problem. “
