The Bears can finally drop the Hammond facade.<\/p>\n
After months of claiming that they\u2019re solely focused<\/a> on building a new stadium in Indiana, the bluff has worked. Via Greg Hinz of Crain\u2019s Chicago Business, the Bears are \u201cclose to a deal that would keep them in Illinois<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n A vote in the Illinois legislature could come as soon as November.<\/p>\n The new venue would \u201cmost likely\u201d be built in Arlington Heights, not Chicago. But Illinois is still Illinois. And it\u2019s not Indiana.<\/p>\n The new law would allow any municipality (including Chicago) to form an authority that would own and operate the stadium, with no property taxes being paid. Taxpayers would be responsible only for new roads and other infrastructure.<\/p>\n Hinz also reports that recent progress has been fueled by the involvement of Bears minority owner Pat Ryan. Commissioner Roger Goodell also has gotten involved, with majority owner George McCaskey and president\/CEO Kevin Warren \u2014 who said in August that Hammond, Indiana was the team\u2019s \u201csole focus<\/a>\u201d \u2014 taking a backseat.<\/p>\n It\u2019s still not done, but it\u2019s the biggest indication yet that the Bears won\u2019t be leaving Illinois. Even after repeatedly saying they would.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Bears can finally drop the Hammond facade. After months of claiming that they\u2019re solely focused on building…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":899250,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":["post-899249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=899249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899249\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/899250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=899249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=899249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=899249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}