Now it’s about to become very clear just how serious the Bears stadium bid from Indiana really is.
Despite all-night political negotiations that ran into Monday morning, and weeks of preceding deliberations, the Illinois House of Representatives adjourned without taking up a Bears stadium bill. The state Senate approved that proposal—which would allow certain Cook County towns to create stadium authorities to help support a Bears venue—around 4:40 a.m. ET on Monday.
In the House, though, the depth and complexity of that bill proved to be too much to approach in a legislative session already running into overtime.
“The bill came over from the Senate after many of us had been up for 20 hours and it is not enough time to vet a really important bill,” said Democratic state Rep. Lindsey LaPointe. “Many of us are going to scrutinize anything that is potentially a tax giveaway to the super wealthy or big corporations.”
In the dramatically reworked Senate bill, the Bears would pay for the stadium, but the host town would own it, and the team would not pay property taxes.
