While downplaying online rumors that the Chicago Bears have reached a deal to move to Arlington Heights, a village official said Thursday the team will soon submit important traffic and financial studies of the proposal.
Arlington Heights Mayor Tom Hayes said that reports from local real estate agents that the team had reached a deal to build a new enclosed stadium are “speculation.”
“We think things are heading in a very positive direction,” he said. “But there’s certainly no done deal yet.”
Hayes is due to step down from office May 5, and hopes to finalize a deal before then, but many issues need to be ironed out. The village board will meet Monday to consider hiring consultants, including Hunden Partners real estate consultants of Chicago, to assess the Bears’ traffic and economic impact studies, which were expected in the next week or so.
Village officials had asked for those studies all along, but the team had held off while they were at a stalemate over property taxes.
In November, the team reached agreement with the village and local schools on the amount of property taxes it would pay for the site it owns that used to be Arlington International Racecourse.
The Bears bought the 326-acre property for $197 million in 2023, and proposed building a stadium there as part of a huge development with housing and an entertainment district.
When new team President Kevin Warren arrived, he changed the plans to instead build a new stadium to replace the team’s current home at Solider Field on the lakefront in Chicago.
That proposal included up to $2.5 billion in public spending, plus interest, and went nowhere with Gov. JB Pritzker and leading state lawmakers.
Team officials maintain they remain focused on Chicago, and will see what comes of this spring’s legislative session. But they say they are exploring all feasible locations.
“We continue to have productive conversations with the village and school districts and are aligned on a framework should we choose to explore a potential development,” the team said in an announcement last year following the tax agreement.
Paul Osipoff, a local real estate agent who posted on X (formerly Twitter) that the Bears would start building at the Arlington site this year, said he simply asked Grok AI to summarize the situation.
“I don’t have inside information,” he clarified. “But everyone’s saying it’s a foregone conclusion.”
Under the Bears’ agreement with the village and schools, the team would pay an annual tax of about $3.6 million on the empty site.
If an agreement is reached to build a stadium there, team officials said they would need legislation and a new agreement to determine the taxes they would pay on a developed property.
