Bears president and CEO Kevin Warren is expecting to have a stadium solution in place for the club by late spring or early summer of this year, Warren said in an interview with PFT from the annual league meeting on Monday.
The Bears are currently focused on Arlington Heights, Ill., and Hammond, Ind., as potential stadium sites.
“We have the legislation passed in Indiana, and they’ve been a great partner to work with,” Warren said. “We are going through legitimate due diligence because we have working through traffic, and construction items, and transportation and all those kinds of different things. It’s progressing right on pace.
“Illinois, they’re still working on legislation and we have a wonderful piece of land in Arlington Heights — 326 acres. So we don’t have a set deadline, but I am confident that sometime this spring/summer, we’ll know.”
Warren continued that the goal for the Bears is to “build a world-class environment with a fixed roof that our fans can really enjoy to make sure we have the proper ingress and egress and tailgating, and parking, and all those different accoutrements that great stadiums have.” The enclosed stadium will allow the Bears to host more events, like the Final Four and potentially a Super Bowl. Warren also called it “imperative” for the new venue to have a mixed-use development surrounding the stadium, which means the Bears need the space for it.
That’s part of why downtown Chicago near Soldier Field is no longer a part of the discussion.
“We strongly believe the only site in the state of Illinois and Cook County is Arlington Heights,” Warren said. “Because when you see that property, having 326 acres with the train station there, the things that we would be able to do — there are some great sites, we talked a couple of years ago about doing something at the Museum campus. There was not an appetite at that point in time there. And there are some other sites that just don’t fit.”
So at this point, Warren anticipates having the situation settled in the next few months.
“It has to,” Warren said. “Especially if you look, I’m always intrigued by the financial markets, the capital markets, those are something that we have to focus on because this is challenging work now from a legislation [standpoint], but the real work comes in the construction. That’s really where it comes in. For us to be able to finish the design and build the stadium, that’s the work. The longer we wait, our costs go up about $150 million a year.”
And while Warren and the Bears may not know where the stadium will be or what it will look like quite yet, they do want the new building to have at least one characteristic.
“I think the biggest thing we kind of promised ourselves is to make sure that you know you’re in Chicago,” Warren said.
