Jim Tinaglia was tending bar in the northwest suburbs when the 1985 Chicago Bears shuffled to their Super Bowl title.
Tinaglia hopes the team’s next championship run comes while he’s in the mayor’s office in Arlington Heights — and with the team playing games in his hometown.
“It was crazy fun,” Tinaglia said of his tenure slinging drinks to Bears fans at the Snuggery watering hole in nearby Mount Prospect. “Nothing could be finer than to have that kind of a celebration a few years from now.”
Though the lifelong Bears fan and mayor-elect of Arlington Heights would like to see quarterback Caleb Williams and company find post-season success sooner at Soldier Field, Tinaglia is now leading the drive to lure the team away from the Chicago lakefront to a new suburban dome.
Tinaglia handily won the Arlington Heights mayoral election Tuesday to take the reins from outgoing Mayor Tom Hayes, who stepped down after three terms, the last one dominated by the Bears’ $197.2 million purchase of the shuttered Arlington International Racecourse in 2021.
“My goal is to help review and ensure that the decisions that are made and the concepts that are proposed are the very best for everyone at the table,” Tinaglia told the Sun-Times. “We’re going to live with this for the next hundred years, and it has to be great.”
When Tinaglia is sworn in May 5, the longtime village trustee will inherit a stadium saga that has seen momentum shift back toward Arlington Heights in recent weeks.
After almost a year of pitching a new dome on the parking lot south of Soldier Field, Bears President Kevin Warren shifted tone at the NFL’s annual meetings to say the team’s “stadium focus now is both downtown and Arlington Heights.”
That’s the team’s latest end around in its quest for a new home, which once seemed all but destined for Arlington until the Bears hit an impasse with local school districts over its property tax rate.
They finally struck a deal in December, further cementing the old racetrack as the McCaskey family’s stadium path of least resistance compared with the Museum Campus proposal that could prompt legal challenges — and which has garnered zero support from Gov. JB Pritzker or state lawmakers.
A developer has also pitched the former Michael Reese Hospital site in Bronzeville for a stadium, but Warren has largely dismissed the possibility. Bears executives are still holding out hope to break ground on a stadium this year.
Tinaglia, who was endorsed by Hayes, said he’s not changing the village’s approach to negotiating with the team, which is expected to soon submit traffic and economic impact studies to the village.
“It’s going to take awhile to make sure that all the pieces of the puzzle that are going to be so impactful are in place: safety, economics, traffic and infrastructure,” Tinaglia said. “We don’t want cars spilling out into the neighborhoods and all kinds of nonsense going on. It needs to be understood and controlled, and I think they will do that.”
He’s holding the team to its pledge not to ask for taxpayer money for the stadium itself but acknowledged that state money would be needed for roads and other infrastructure on the 326-acre plot, plus configurations to the interchange to state Route 53.
“We’ll just have to see what that ask is,” he said.
Tinaglia, an architect, said he admires SoFi Stadium, which opened in Inglewood, California, in 2020, and U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, the enclosed stadium Warren spearheaded for the Vikings franchise in 2016.
If it doesn’t work with the Bears, “There are certainly a lot of different sports teams in the world and a lot of different programs out there that will recognize the opportunity” in Arlington Heights, Tinaglia said.
He suggested there’s room for White Sox Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, who covets a new stadium of his own, to look their way — maybe even in conjunction with Bears chairman George McCaskey.
“Would I love to see Jerry Reinsdorf pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey George, we’d love to join you on this program. Can we get some space for a second facility?’ Of course. That makes so much sense to me,” he said. “Will it happen? Probably not.”
If the Bears do end up winning a title with an Arlington Heights ZIP code, Tinaglia said he knows the parade would still happen in the Loop. That’s fine by him.
“I’d just love to have a couple of floats with the big Chicago Bears emblem on it and enjoy that with the Bears family.”