A Public Bears Stadium Is the Right Deal. It Only Kills the Tax Bill If One Clause Makes the Bill.

Illinois is trying again to keep the Bears. After a Thursday meeting between Commissioner Roger Goodell, Bears minority owner Pat Ryan, Governor JB Pritzker and legislative leaders, reporting from Crain's Chicago Business and ABC7 says lawmakers are working on a plan in which the team's new stadium would be owned by a public stadium authority. Pritzker has pointed to November's veto session as the moment it could pass.

The Bears would still pay to build it. What public ownership changes, according to every account of the plan, is the property tax bill: a publicly owned stadium, the reporting says, means no property taxes for the Bears. A similar bill passed the Illinois Senate earlier this year but never got a House vote.

The site would be the Bears' 326-acre property in Arlington Heights, the former Arlington Park racetrack, where a property tax dispute has stalled the project for years. The team's alternative is Hammond, Indiana, and that option is the leverage that has Illinois back at the table.

The tax question is governed by the Illinois Property Tax Code, and two provisions matter.

The first is the general rule that property owned by government is exempt. A stadium authority's stadium, standing alone, would owe nothing.

The second is the one the coverage leaves out. Section 9-195 of the Property Tax Code addresses exactly this arrangement: when exempt property is leased to someone whose property is not exempt, the leasehold estate and its appurtenances are listed as the lessee's property and taxed, with the lessee liable for the tax. The public owner stays exempt. The private tenant does not.

The statute does contain exceptions, and that is the point. The General Assembly has carved specific uses out of the leasehold tax over the years, including certain municipal toll roads and municipal parking leased to private operators. Each carve-out was written into the code for a particular kind of property. A stadium leased to an NFL team is not on that list today.

Public ownership is the right structure for Illinois. It is the model most of the NFL already uses, it lets the state keep the Bears without writing a construction check, and it gives Illinois something to offer against Indiana that costs nothing up front. On the merits, it is the smartest deal available.

But it only works if the bill says one more thing. Under Section 9-195, transferring the stadium to an authority and leasing it back to the Bears does not make the property tax disappear. It moves the tax from the building to the lease. The team would be assessed on its leasehold interest, and depending on how the lease is valued, that could recover much of the bill public ownership was supposed to eliminate.

How much depends on the lease. A leasehold is assessed on what the tenant's right to use the property is worth, and the terms the parties write, the length, the rent, who keeps which revenue, drive that number. A long lease at nominal rent on a stadium that generates NFL revenue is exactly the kind of interest an assessor values highly. The drafting choices in the lease and the bill are therefore tax choices, whether or not anyone describes them that way.

So the operative language is not the ownership provision. It is whether the legislation adds the stadium to the list of leaseholds exempt from Section 9-195, the way the code already does for toll roads and parking. Without that clause, the deal promises something Illinois law does not deliver, and the first assessment notice turns into the next property tax dispute at a site that has already had one.

That clause is also where the honest cost of the deal sits. Property taxes in Illinois fund local bodies, chiefly school districts. A leasehold exemption is the mechanism by which they give up revenue on a multibillion-dollar private development. That is a policy choice lawmakers are entitled to make, and there are reasonable arguments for it, starting with the fact that a stadium in Indiana pays Illinois nothing. But it should be made out loud, in the bill text, rather than described in press accounts as a free side effect of public ownership.

None of this is final. No bill has been filed. The earlier Senate version is the best evidence of the drafting, and the House never voted on it. Until the text exists, the accurate statement is narrower than the headlines: public ownership can end the Bears' property tax bill, if Illinois writes the exemption that makes it so.

The Bears, and the reason is a state line. Hammond is roughly the same distance from Soldier Field as Arlington Heights, and Indiana has courted the team openly. That alternative is what moved Illinois from refusing public money to drafting an ownership structure. The state holds the other half of the leverage: only the General Assembly can write the leasehold exemption the deal depends on, and it can set conditions on it. Local school districts hold the least, though they have the most at stake, because the exemption is written in Springfield and paid for in their budgets.

Public ownership is Illinois' best offer. But Illinois taxes a private tenant's lease on public land, so the Bears' tax bill only disappears if the bill exempts the lease.

Watch for bill text before the November veto session, and read it for one thing first: whether it amends Section 9-195 or the code's exemption sections to cover the stadium leasehold. Watch for any payment in lieu of taxes, the usual compromise that gives local bodies part of what they lose. And watch the Indiana side, because every week the Illinois bill slips, the Hammond option gets more valuable to the Bears.