The Bears have taken their most significant step yet toward leaving Chicago, voting to advance a new stadium development in Hammond, Ind., days after the Illinois spring legislative session ended without a deal to keep the franchise.
The Bears’ board of directors voted Thursday to push forward with the Hammond project, with the exact site still to be confirmed. It is the first time the board has voted on any stadium site in a process that has dragged on for the better part of five years.
A last-ditch bill was introduced in the Illinois Senate at 11 p.m. local time on Sunday night in a final attempt to keep the team in state.
By Monday morning lawmakers had adjourned without a vote.
“Illinois has had three and a half years to deal with this and then they missed their own deadline,” Hammond mayor Tom McDermott said. “I think Illinois is out of the picture.”
The Bears never asked for public money. They wanted infrastructure commitments for roads and utilities, and spent years waiting for a state government that kept telling them to come back later.
When they purchased 326 acres at the old Arlington Park racetrack site in Arlington Heights for $197 million in 2023, a new stadium felt close. Instead, the project stalled, the negotiations went nowhere, and the franchise was eventually told directly that Illinois would not be making it a priority in 2026.
Indiana moved in the opposite direction.
The state established a Northwest Indiana Stadium Authority earlier this year to finance, construct and lease a new facility, with Hammond as the primary site.
The Bears have committed $2 billion of their own money toward construction, with the land to be publicly owned.
Chairman George McCaskey and CEO Kevin Warren framed the move as a regional opportunity.
“We believe a world-class stadium project in Hammond will transform the region, connecting Northwest Indiana and the South Side of Chicago through the Loop and across the neighborhoods and suburbs stretching north of the city,” they said in a statement.
Bears fans may find that framing hard to swallow. Hammond sits across a state line, roughly 15 miles from Soldier Field, where the franchise has played since 1971. The Bears have never owned their own stadium in over a century of existence. That could be about to change — and Chicago might not be part of it.
