With the Bears looking at Naperville, Joe McElroy, a city planning consultant, says that keeping various special interest groups reasonably happy will be a difficult, albeit necessary job.

“Soldier Field is the smallest facility in the National Football League, so after more than a century in Chicago, it looks like Bears will probably move to a suburb,” said McElroy, who served on the Naperville City Council and Naperville Plan Commission. “It will be a huge construction project that will generate billions of dollars,” McElroy said.

But who pays? Who stands to gain, and who might lose? Even though they’ve already bought the Arlington Heights racetrack, the Bears say the proposed tax burden could be a deal-breaker, which is why they’re looking at Naperville and other cities.

Major league sports teams have a long history of bolting for greener pastures–McElroy said some people in Brooklyn still bemoan the Dodgers’  move to Los Angeles in 1957–and cities have provided new stadiums and other incentives to land a team. “But there is less appetite for that type of deal today,” said McElroy, adding that a world class city like Chicago–even though it has major problems–does not have to “give away the store” to keep the Bears happy.

Neither does Naperville. “The local economy is strong, our demographics are stellar, and we have good transportation access,” McElroy said. He added that several sites could work, including the former Amoco-BP campus, shown above.