Gov. JB Pritzker on Tuesday opened the door to holding a special session of the General Assembly this summer to help keep the Chicago Bears in Illinois after the team late last week announced its focus was now trained on a deal to build its home stadium in northwest Indiana.

But the governor put the onus on Bears leadership to be part of any such effort following a recently completed spring legislative session in Springfield that saw two plans aimed at encouraging the team to build a new stadium in state, likely in suburban Arlington Heights, get shot down.

“They’ve got to figure out how they can get the legislature, both sides, around the same bill, and I would be happy to call a special session,” Pritzker said Tuesday afternoon. 

The Illinois House and Senate each passed different bills that created paths for the Bears to build a new stadium in Illinois, but neither passed the other chamber. The negotiations in Illinois stalled in the eleventh hour four months after the Indiana legislature passed a bill that created a structure for the state to help the team build a stadium in Hammond, just over the border.

Pritzker on Tuesday continued to take credit for helping construct the “scaffolding” of a deal that incentivized so-called megaprojects, which cleared the House, and supported infrastructure that would have helped the team. The governor also defended himself against criticism he had not been present enough in Springfield to help steer the talks during the legislative session.

“I put together the deal to start with, to make sure that we knew all things — the Bears didn’t come with a list. It was all the things that they said, but didn’t have a plan around, we put a plan together,” Pritzker said, days after some Republicans, including his Republican opponent in November, Darren Bailey, tried to pin the blame on him for the Bears taking a big step toward migrating east.

The megaproject legislation would have given the Bears property tax certainty through a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes, or PILOT, arrangement at the Arlington Heights site they purchased years ago. Pritzker and lawmakers have long said such legislation would help not only the Bears but also other big businesses seeking to develop large projects.

“They decided to glom onto the megaprojects bill that I proposed,” Pritzker said of the Bears, noting dozens of states already have similar laws on the books.

The megaprojects bill never got a vote in the Illinois Senate, as a key state senator leading the Bears-centric legislation said it lacked support. The Senate last week passed a last-ditch bill that would have allowed larger cities in Cook County, including Arlington Heights and Chicago, to enter into a public-private ownership deal with the Chicago Bears and given the team a path to build a new stadium without paying property taxes on the facility. But that bill was never voted on by the House as the session went into overtime.

Pritzker also continued to insist he would expend political muscle on keeping the Bears in state “on a priority basis.”

“The first priority to me is, we’re not raising people’s taxes to pay for a privately owned stadium. That’s number one,” he said, adding later: “I think it’s a mistake to say somehow that there’s anything less than full commitment on my part to getting a legislative priority done, but again, the priorities are the people of Illinois.”

And Pritzker continued to say the Bears were also to blame for the breakdown in negotiations, saying “they didn’t show up for the end of session.”

“There were a number of issues, some of them self-created by the Bears, some of them just in trying to get the two houses, the House and Senate, to work together in the end,” Pritzker said.

A spokesperson for the Bears did not respond to a request for comment. On Friday, the team said its intention was to “advance our stadium project in Hammond, Indiana,” but it remains clear that any deal is still several steps from completion.

Many Illinois lawmakers have remained skeptical that the Indiana plans represent a final decision, and several leaders on Friday expressed frustration with the team’s tactics after years of seemingly definitive statements about different locations. 

There have been “incoming calls from the Bears, not just to me,” but to legislative leaders, Pritzker said Tuesday. He had not spoken to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, he said, but he didn’t answer a shouted question about who he had spoken with.

Top negotiators in the state House and Senate on Friday said they spoke with Bears President and CEO Kevin Warren, who indicated that he looked forward to continuing discussions about a stadium.

“I’ve said and made sure that they understand they’ve got to decide what their priorities are for the state,” Pritzker said of his conversations with the team. “What they’re going to ask for.”