Illinois House punts Bears stadium bill. Will lawmakers head to summer overtime session?

SPRINGFIELD — Just before the sun rose over the Capitol dome Monday morning, legislators heaved a Hail Mary pass to the end zone to try to keep the Bears in Illinois.

It was incomplete.

But there may be overtime this summer.

After the state Senate’s 37-17 vote to allow municipalities like Arlington Heights and Chicago to create their own local public stadium authorities — in a bid to prevent the NFL franchise’s relocation to Hammond, Indiana — the House punted on the bill, adjourning at 4:40 a.m. without taking a vote.

Internal polling of the supermajority House Democratic caucus indicated the measure didn’t have the votes to pass.

“I’m proud of our House. I’m proud of the processes that let us get big things done,” Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch said in closing remarks on the House floor early Monday, just after a $56 billion state budget was approved.

“Sometimes that takes a little time,” he added. “Sometimes that means we need to take the time to fix it in the House. There’s a lot of work still ahead of us. We’ll continue discussions on a number of issues, including our approach to the Bears stadium question this summer.”

Unless a special session is called, lawmakers won’t otherwise be scheduled to return to Springfield in November.

Will the Bears wait?

Team officials previously indicated they wanted to first see what Illinois lawmakers would do, before making a decision this spring or summer about building a stadium on their 326-acre Arlington Park property, or across state lines.

Since December, the team has been completing due diligence on a stadium site near Wolf Lake in Hammond. Competing legislation to create a public stadium authority in Northwest Indiana sailed through that state’s legislature in February.

“We will finalize our evaluation of both Arlington Heights and Hammond, and remain on the late spring/early summer timeline that we have previously communicated,” according to a Bears team statement released after the House adjourned early Monday. “We will provide an update when we have a decision to share.”

The latest proposal in Springfield — drawn up and advanced on the Senate side in a mere 24 hours — was an alternative to the so-called megaproject legislation the Bears lobbied for at the Capitol for more than three years. The original bill — and its Payment in Lieu of Taxes financing mechanism — was anathema to Chicago-based legislators and progressives in the Senate who were reluctant to vote to have the team leave the city for the suburbs, or to help subsidize a corporation worth an estimated $9 billion.

The House passed that bill by a 78-32 tally on April 22. It contained the structure for a 40-year-long property tax break the Bears long sought at the Arlington Park site. But the 376-page version of the legislation also contained a property tax sweetener and other economic development incentives for big ticket projects across the state — provisions seen as unwieldy and unworkable for many skeptical senators.

It’s even unclear if the stadium authority bill that cleared the Senate is backed by the stakeholders it’s intended to benefit: the Bears, Arlington Heights and Chicago.

“I have talked to all of them,” said state Sen. Bill Cunningham, the bill sponsor and lead Senate negotiator on stadium talks. “I can’t tell you that they said they were supportive of it. They said they were interested to see the language (of the bill).”

Cunningham’s 145-page bill dropped at 11 p.m. Sunday — just an hour before the formal end of the General Assembly’s spring session. Per legislative rules, a vote after midnight would normally have triggered a three-fifths majority to pass — 36 in the Senate and 71 in the House — but because the bill contained no immediate effective date, a simple majority would have sufficed.