Greg Casar

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Texas Rep. Greg Casar want communities to be able to buy a sports team before “billionaire owners” try to move it, very pointedly bashing the Chicago Bears’ effort to relocate to Indiana, which Casar repeatedly likened to “negotiating with a gun” to the head.

While it’s typically never a good thing for the Chicago Bears to be compared to the Green Bay Packers, a new bill would allow the Bears, and any other sports team, to be offered up for sale one year before the owners can move it to another state or metropolitan area. The legislation would lift an NFL prohibition on teams being publicly owned, like the Packers are; their ownership structure predates that prohibition. The Wisconsin team is a nonprofit franchise in the NFL, with more than 538,000 shareholders.

Casar even went so far to say that “this is a keep-the-Bears-in-Chicago bill” during a Washington press conference on Thursday.

The Home Team Act would require a team owner to announce any plan to relocate a year prior, giving the community, not-for-profits or private investors a chance to buy the team at “fair market value,” which could include using the community ownership model of the Packers. Franchise owners would be penalized if they don’t comply with the one-year notice.

“There is a right of first refusal to the local community, to community nonprofits and partnerships and for ultimately, if it’s just a wealthy family that wants to keep it, they get a shot at it, too,” Casar said. “But you could imagine a world where the city has a stake in the team, alongside other partners.”

If no one wants to buy the team and keep it in the home city, owners then could move it. Casar called it a way for fans and taxpayers to “finally get a fair deal.”

“Even when teams don’t actually move, the threat of moving sets off a race to the bottom. Billionaire owners pit taxpayers against one another and then extort the government for billions of dollars,” Casar said.

“We see that right now in Chicago, where Indiana taxpayers are now put in a competition against Illinois taxpayers to subsidize a team worth $8 billion,” he said. “Before you move a team away from the fans who have been rooting for it their whole life, you have to give them a chance to buy it and keep it.”

Casar said it’s possible to get “much better deals if you aren’t negotiating with a gun to your head, like we’re seeing right now in Illinois.”

Sanders said the departure of the Dodgers from Brooklyn, New York had a very negative impact on the state, and he called the new legislation “emotional.”

“It’s a big deal, and we should not let the greed of a handful of billionaires make it hard for working-class families to enjoy their local teams,” Sanders said.

Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, D-Ill., is a co-sponsor of the bill and said he’s supporting it in part because he’s a lifelong Bears fan and wants the team to stay in Illinois.

“Football brings communities together, and brings economic opportunities as well, and those opportunities should not be just for the billionaire owners. Sports are a tradition that should not be held hostage by billionaires when they demand government handouts or threaten to relocate,” Garcia said in a statement to the Sun-Times. “The Home Team Act would allow communities to take over their home teams to rein in taxpayer-funded stadium subsidies.”

Indiana state legislators last month advanced legislation creating a stadium finance authority that would help the Bears build a dome in Hammond, a move that the team called “the most meaningful step forward” in a dramatic saga that has stretched on for more than three years. It was also a step taken by the Bears that frustrated Illinois officials, who are trying to craft a deal to keep the Bears in Arlington Heights, a destination that Gov. JB Pritzker and other Illinois Democrats say remains within reach.