Arlington Heights mayor urges Pritzker to ‘coach’ legislators on Bears stadium deal
Arlington Heights Mayor Jim Tinaglia Monday called on Gov. JB Pritzker to play the role of a head coach — and criticized Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson for blocking and tackling — to try to get a deal done to keep the Bears’ home field on this side of the state line.
Tinaglia, who a week ago labeled the legislature’s failure to pass Bears-friendly stadium legislation “a fumble for the state of Illinois,” wants Pritzker to take a more active role to push legislation paving the way for a stadium at the Arlington Park property.
By the end of a marathon spring session last weekend, the House had approved one version of a bill and the Senate another, but lawmakers adjourned without coming to a final deal. Then Friday, Bears brass announced their board of directors had voted to advance a stadium development project in Hammond, Indiana.
“He is the one who needs to coach his whole group of elected officials,” Tinaglia said of Pritzker. “If you’ve got one guy trying to run a football down this way, another one running the football down that way, we’re going nowhere. And that’s what it kind of feels like.”
In a statement following the Bears’ announcement Friday, Tinaglia expressed disappointment — and acceptance — with the team’s change of direction.
But in an interview Monday, he softened that approach, saying the Bears haven’t closed off communications with Arlington Heights, and interpreted the team’s three-sentence statement as “the door is still going to remain able to open.”
“There has been nothing that I have heard come from anybody’s lips in the Bears organization that would make me believe that they want to go to Indiana. This is all part of a program that they have no choice, but they have to investigate,” Tinaglia said of the team’s Indiana stadium play. “My heart of hearts says that in time it’ll turn around again, and the road will lead back this way again.
“But that won’t happen unless the coach, the defense and the offense and all the players of our state government recognize what the win looks like,” he added. “When that whole team gets on the same page with the same playbook, then I think that road could turn back this way, as it should.”
Amid earlier criticism from some legislators that he should have been more involved at the state Capitol, Pritzker defended his approach and role in negotiations in the waning hours of the legislative session. At a press conference in his Springfield office just hours after the 4:40 a.m. June 1 adjournment, the governor promised to work over the summer with the House in hopes of being “able to provide something for the Bears.”
One of the obstacles to getting Bears-backed megaproject legislation past the Senate was earning the votes of Chicago legislators, who were being asked to approve a property tax break that would have helped the team leave the city.
It may have been an easier pill to swallow — indeed, the bill advanced in the House more than a month earlier — had talk of the Bears reengaging in private conversations with Chicago city officials over a stadium deal not resurfaced. At the time, team officials said publicly they were only considering two locations for a new stadium: Arlington Heights and Hammond.
Tinaglia maintained Monday that was the case — “Chicago is not in the game, as far as I understand it” — while blaming Johnson and legislators for “anti-Arlington Heights” rhetoric.
“It’s all just too much interference, and if we could just get everybody playing for the same team, for the same end zone, for all the same reasons, and this is for the state of Illinois as opposed to being too self-focused, then we’d be in much better shape,” Tinaglia said.
Johnson, who also said the Bears’ Indiana announcement isn’t a done deal, has stood by his 2024 plan for a new publicly owned stadium south of Soldier Field.
“My position has been steady and consistent over the last couple of years, that the best location for the Bears to play is the lakefront,” he said Sunday during an interview on WGN radio.