PALM BEACH, Fla. -- The Chicago Bears' plans to build a new stadium took a shift in tone Wednesday at the NFL's annual meeting.
Just over a year after the team declared its goal to build a stadium south of the current site of Soldier Field on the lakefront in Chicago, team president and CEO Kevin Warren said the Bears are expanding their options to include Arlington Heights, Illinois, where the franchise currently owns the 326-acre property that previously housed the Arlington International Racecourse.
"The focus now is both downtown 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 pleased with where we are. I think we, collectively as a group, are where we thought we would be."
The Bears purchased the land in Arlington Heights for $197.2 million in Sept. 2021 but have not begun developing the site, which was expected to feature a multibillion-dollar stadium project and include restaurants, retail space and real estate. The team began exploring options for a new stadium beyond Arlington Heights in the summer of 2023 when they announced that those plans were "at risk" as negotiations over property taxes reached a $100 million impasse.
One day before the 2024 NFL draft, the Bears unveiled plans for a domed stadium on the museum campus in Chicago. While the team has maintained that the construction of a new stadium will be privately funded, concerns over the burden placed on taxpayers to fund the infrastructure around the stadium have led to an impasse.
In December, the Arlington Heights Board of Trustees unanimously approved a tax settlement with three school districts, which settled the annual property tax bill for the Bears' potential stadium site at $3.6 million. While Warren noted the "progress" made with Arlington Heights, he also noted that there is more work to be done.
"Because these projects are so complex and so difficult, they're literally virtually impossible to do if you don't have all hands on deck and everyone committed," Warren said. "Even if you have that they're difficult. So that was important to see the focus on it."
Warren reiterated that the team's goal is to begin construction on a new stadium in 2025. Bears chairman George McCaskey said that private equity "may be utilized as part of our stadium construction financing plan," but that the team has yet to make a decision on that front.
"Yes, my goal still remains, to be able to move dirt around in 2025, which is important because there's a lot of preconstruction work that needs to go into these projects, whether you're at the museum campus, Michael Reese [hospital site] or downtown, to get things ready to go, and so we're only one-quarter of the way through the year," Warren said.
Also Wednesday, speaking publicly for the first time since the passing of his mother, Virginia Halas McCaskey, an emotional George McCaskey addressed the state of the team's ownership, which has been in his family for 105 years.
"We've said for many years that we intend to own the Bears for as long as possible," George McCaskey said. "Another 100 years would be great. She set it up for us to accomplish that. She gave us the playbook. She coached us up. Now we've gotta execute the plan, and we're prepared to do that. We've got to stick together."
McCaskey said that the Bears' succession plan was approved by the NFL, and he does not anticipate any changes in ownership structure.
"[Virginia McCaskey] set it up for a smooth transition, and it's a credit to her," George McCaskey said. "In law school, I heard stories about people who just couldn't contemplate their mortality, and as a result, it caused a lot of confusion and problems for the family, and she had the foresight to set it up so we don't have that problem."
