With Bears in mind, Sanders bill would offer up sports teams to city before ‘billionaire owners’ try to move

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Texas Rep. Greg Casar want communities to be able to buy a sports team before “billionaire owners” try to move it, very pointedly bashing the Chicago Bears’ effort to relocate to Indiana, which Casar repeatedly likened to “negotiating with a gun” to the head.

While it’s typically never a good thing for the Chicago Bears to be compared to the Green Bay Packers, a new bill would allow the Bears, and any other sports team, to be offered up for sale one year before the owners can move it to another state or metropolitan area. The legislation would lift an NFL prohibition on teams being publicly owned, like the Packers are; their ownership structure predates that prohibition. The Wisconsin team is a nonprofit franchise in the NFL, with more than 538,000 shareholders.

Casar even went so far to say that “this is a keep-the-Bears-in-Chicago bill” during a Washington press conference on Thursday.

The Home Team Act would require a team owner to announce any plan to relocate a year prior, giving the community, not-for-profits or private investors a chance to buy the team at “fair market value,” which could include using the community ownership model of the Packers. Franchise owners would be penalized if they don’t comply with the one-year notice.

Read the full story at chicago.suntimes.com.