Northwest suburban school board leaders on Thursday approved a property tax agreement that clears the Chicago Bears’ running lane toward a potential new stadium in Arlington Heights, though the team insists their drive for a dome is still focused on the lakefront.
Board members of Arlington Heights-based Township High School District 214 and Palatine-based Township High School District 211 approved the memorandum of understanding to lower the Bears’ property tax bill on the former Arlington International Racecourse for at least the next three years as the team mulls the location of its future home.
Those districts’ votes followed approvals earlier in the week from Arlington Heights’ Village Board and Palatine’s Community Consolidated School District 15, sealing a deal that’ll have the Bears pay $3.6 million in taxes on the old racetrack site through 2027.
The team had been at loggerheads with the school districts over the property tax number for about a year, a stalemate that shifted the team’s stadium drive back toward the Museum Campus.
They closed on the $197.2 million purchase of Arlington Park last year, eventually getting tagged with a $9 million property tax bill based on a $124.7 valuation from the Cook County Board of Review.
The team appealed for a lower valuation that would’ve resulted in a $1.7 million tax bill, but the three suburban schools districts — the biggest beneficiary of those taxes — intervened to try to raise that to $5 million.
Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi’s office still has to approve the negotiated figure of $3.6 million, while the team is still expected to pay $8.9 million on its 2023 bill.
Arlington Heights Mayor Tom Hayes helped mediate the agreement that doesn’t mean the Bears will end up in the suburbs — but could end up making it the Bears’ smoothest transition out of Soldier Field.
“This is just another step in the process, but it really is a significant step. It really gets us forward to further exploration and discussion in the hope of making a new Bears stadium in Arlington Heights a reality,” Hayes said Monday.
A Bears spokesman reiterated the team’s stance that even with the suburban property tax certainty, they “remain focused on investing over $2 billion to build a publicly owned enclosed stadium on Chicago’s lakefront while reevaluating the feasibility of a development in Bronzeville.”
That means they’re still pushing for a $4.7 billion dome just south of Soldier Field, where they’re under lease through 2033. But their glitzy lakeside proposal released in the spring would require upwards of a billion dollars in public funding that state lawmakers so far have uniformly rejected.
Elected officials have given a warmer reception to the possibility of the Bears developing Bronzeville’s former Michael Reese Hospital site. Bears President Kevin Warren previously dismissed it as too narrow for an NFL stadium, but the team shifted course last month to say they’re reconsidering it.
