Butch asked for an article, here it is:
Kevin Warren Is Going to Burn It All Down — And George McCaskey Is Handing Him the Matches
Let’s get one thing straight before we dive in: what you’re watching right now isn’t a savvy negotiating tactic. It isn’t leverage. It isn’t a masterclass in business strategy. This is Kevin Warren we are talking about, a guy who was run out of the Big 10 for being an asshole.
What you’re watching is the slow-motion implosion of one of the most storied franchises in NFL history, orchestrated by a President who has confused activity with competence, while the owner nods along from the back seat like a golden retriever on the way to what he doesn’t know is the vet.
Welcome to the Chicago Bears, folks. Kevin Warren is going to become a generational pariah. George Halas will actually try and strangle him when Kevin finally reaches the pearly gates.
The Setup: How We Got Here
Three years ago, the Bears purchased the old Arlington Park horse racing grounds for $200 million. For a brief, shining moment, it looked like the franchise was finally serious about a real stadium — a proper home befitting a team with a century of history. Then the property tax negotiations with Illinois turned into a quagmire, Kevin Warren pivoted back toward the city, then away again, then floated a Soldier Field dome, then pointed at Indiana, and now here we are: the “most meaningful step forward” in Bears stadium history is apparently a golf course built on a landfill, in the shadow of the largest oil refinery in the Midwest.
Congratulations, Bears fans. You waited 40 years for this.
The “Tax Certainty” Con: How to Beg for a Subsidy Without Calling It One
Before we get to Hammond, it’s worth understanding exactly why the Arlington Heights deal collapsed — because the Bears’ PR operation has successfully muddied this water beyond recognition, and the truth is both simpler and more damning than anything read in the awful beat coverage. Damn I wish Adam Hoge would get George’s pecker out his mouth.
When the Bears bought the old Arlington Park property for $200 million, Arlington Heights assessed it the way any local government assesses any newly purchased property: at market value. The resulting tax bill came in around $9 million a year. The Bears negotiated it down to roughly $3 million. Fine. Property owners negotiate tax assessments. That’s legal and normal.
But then the Bears wanted more. Specifically, they wanted to lock in that discounted rate for 40 years — regardless of what they build on the land. I work in Texas and have heavy interaction with the Railroad Commission, who regulate the oil & gas industry down here. Watch the show Landman with Billy Bob and you will know, that proposal is a fucking joke. That gets you laughed out of the room and nobody takes you serious again. Warren is a clown.
And here’s why that matters. In every property tax system in America, if you improve your land, the value gets reassessed. Add a deck to your house, your taxes go up. It’s not punitive. It’s just how it works — the land is worth more because you made it worth more. The Bears are proposing to build not just a stadium but an entire entertainment district: restaurants, retail, hotels, possibly a casino. A football town. Each of those improvements would normally be assessed individually, generating tax revenue for local schools, police, fire departments, and yes — the infrastructure the development requires.
The Bears don’t want that. They want “tax certainty” — which is a beautifully crafted piece of PR language that means: we want to pay a fixed, discounted rate on this land no matter what we build on it, for four decades, so that our tax bill never reflects the actual value of what we’ve created. The city of Arlington Heights can go fuck itself; we want to make Pottersville from “It’s a Wonderful Life” look like a hick backwater town.
When you hear the Bears throw around numbers like $180-200 million in potential annual taxes, understand what that figure represents. That’s the projected total tax burden across all the improvements they plan to build — the stadium, the restaurants, the retail, the hotels, everything. It assumes the full buildout of their football utopia. The stadium alone wouldn’t generate anything close to that. The number is engineered to sound alarming while describing a completely normal outcome for a massive commercial development.
What the Bears are asking for, stripped of the euphemisms, is a 40-year tax break worth hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars — money that won’t go to local schools, won’t fund the police and fire services their development will require, won’t pay for the roads and utilities that their patrons will use. That cost doesn’t disappear. It gets redistributed to everyone else in the tax base. Local residents will see their own property taxes rise to cover services that a Bears-adjacent entertainment district generates demand for, while the Bears themselves pay a rate frozen in the era when the land was an empty horse track.
That is a taxpayer subsidy. It doesn’t appear on any line item labeled “Bears subsidy.” It never will. But that’s what it is.
The state of Illinois understood this and pushed back. Arlington Heights, to its credit, said no. Kevin Warren’s response was to reframe a rejection of a sweetheart tax deal as the state being “obstreperous” and refusing to cooperate on basic infrastructure. The media, by and large, bought it. Hye guys at the Score 670 didn’t but the news people, or what’s left of the Trib and Sun Times, had nothing to say.
Nothing is preventing the Bears from negotiating their property taxes every year, just like every other property owner in Illinois. What they can’t do — what the state correctly refused to allow — is lock in a discounted rate on undeveloped land and carry it forward through a billion-dollar buildout for four decades. That’s not tax negotiation. That’s a blank check written by Illinois taxpayers, signed by people who’ll never see the Bears name on the bill. It’s bullshit, but it’s the kind of bullshit that the State of Indiana seems eager to take on. The lawmakers there must pass around jars of Vaseline to each other.