WARE, England (AP) — The Bears remain focused on the city’s lakefront as the location for a nearly $5 billion stadium development project, team president and CEO Kevin Warren reiterated Wednesday.
Warren held a news conference at the team’s hotel outside London ahead of Chicago’s game on Sunday against the Jacksonville Jaguars at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
A proposal unveiled earlier this year calls for an enclosed stadium next door to the Bears’ current home at Soldier Field as part of a major project that would transform the lakefront. The Bears are asking for public funding to help make it happen.
The Bears also owns a 326-acre property in Arlington Heights — at Arlington Park, the former home of Arlington International Racecourse — but Warren maintained Wednesday that the preference is Chicago.
“That Museum Campus is fantastic, and especially with the backdrop of Chicago and the architecture of that city,” he said. “That remains our focus at this point in time.”
The plan calls for $3.2 billion for the new stadium, plus $1.5 billion in infrastructure, potentially including a publicly owned hotel. The proposal calls for just over $2 billion from the Bears, $300 million from an NFL loan and $900 million in bonds from the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority.
The next step, Warren said, is to “get approval from a political standpoint.”
But that doesn’t seem to be happening, at least not in the weeks and month since the Bears released their lakefront stadium proposal in late April.
The proposal has met stiff resistance from local and state lawmakers, including Gov. JB Pritzker, who has repeatedly expressed his disdain toward public funding for new stadium projects. At an unrelated press conference in late July, Pritzker said “there isn’t a proposal on the table right now that would be acceptable to anyone that I know in the legislature.”
Despite the stance of the governor and other lawmakers, Warren remains steadfast in moving forward with the lakefront stadium plan.
“The status is we’re continuing to make progress,” he said. “We stay focused, still, to be able to be in the ground, start construction sometime in 2025. We’re having regular meetings with key business leaders, key politicians, just staying focused and on course.
“This is a long journey. This takes time,” Warren added. “I’ve been there before. We’re exactly where I thought we would be at this point in time.”
Warren was also asked if the Chicago site is “imminent or inevitable,” and he responded: “I don’t know (about) saying imminent or inevitable. I think it’s the best site as of now.”
Warren noted that the plans for a new building will be generic enough to fit more than one site.
“You want to build a stadium where it really becomes agnostic from a location standpoint, because it takes so much time from a planning standpoint,” he said.
In his previous leadership role with the Minnesota Vikings, Warren oversaw plans and development of U.S. Bank Stadium.
“Anything that’s great in life, anything that lasts 50 years, takes a lot of energy and effort,” he said Wednesday.
“I’m confident in the political leadership, the business leadership, our fan base, that we’ll be able to figure this out,” he added. “It will become a crown jewel for the National Football League.”