Does Illinois Even Want The Chicago Bears?
- Illinois is not aggressively pursuing a deal to keep the Bears, leaving room for Indiana to make competitive offers.
- The teachers' union wants a cut of any deal, complicating negotiations and signaling Illinois' lack of urgency.
- Players and staff may prefer to live and work in Indiana due to the tax benefits, further incentivizing the Bears' relocation.
Does Illinois Even Want The Chicago Bears?
So Illinois is trying to keep the Chicago Bears in Illinois? Yet everything they’re doing says, “Nah, let him go to Northwest Indiana,” which is cool by me.
They (Chicago Bears) want to go from Soldier Field where they are right now in Chicago. They want to go to Arlington Heights and get a whole new stadium and everything else, and Illinois was really not interested. And then all of a sudden it was like, well what if we went to Northwest Indiana. And Northwest Indiana said, oh yeah, we could do this here or here or here, and they actually put out proposals and started, you know, going at each other in a very good way, competing for the spot. And the state said, wait, what do you want to do and they said, well, here’s what we want to do. And the state said, okay, we could do this, this or this actually put out a plan and then there’s some interest in Hammond.
Then it could be done here and look at out could connect you guys, do this and we’ll put this money in the Bears putting skin into the game, which is key and paramount to this whole thing. The Bears have to put skin in the game, real dollars into the ground. Otherwise the whole thing is nonsense because we don’t have to do much. They come to Indiana, they save so much money. What I will be curious to see is where do the players decide to live, Because if I’m a player for the Chicago Bears, maybe I’m hanging out in Chicago, but I’d rather domicile in Indiana. For the taxes, oh absolutely every day of the week, which is going to lead to a bigger conversation about where their practice facility is. Because they’ve said they don’t want to move the practice facility out of Chicago or out of that area. And the answer is, yeah, you do, of course you do. You want the whole thing in Indiana. You don’t want anybody paying any jock taxes or anything else. Your players are going to be so much more happy, Your staff is going to be so thrilled about not having to do that if they moved to Indiana, Oh, it’s gonna be awesome.
But anyway, now, Illinois is very serious about this and now they’re talking about legislation. They’re working on this and working on that. But they’ve not been aggressive about it. I think is the best way to describe it. They have not been aggressive about it. And then we shared yesterday that one of the local affiliates there in Chicago was discussing the legislation and the Teachers’ union want their cut because if they’re gonna come to Arlington Heights, well are they gonna pay the property taxes? Because that’s how we fund the schools. There’s nothing more important than funding the public schools, no matter how much we fail, because the teachers need to get paid.
I mean, we have to “care about the kids,” so the teachers union put their hands out and said, don’t forget us. You don’t get to make a deal unless we get ours. Very odd, well I shouldn’t say odd.. very on brand for a union that doesn’t care about the students. So, then there was supposed to be a reading of a second piece of legislation that was supposed to be up, and it was supposed to have a short debate and they didn’t get to it. They talked about other business, as Russ McQuaid reports, and then the Democrats request a caucus meeting starting at 2p, and then recess until today. So they didn’t make a move yesterday. Now, you could say the signals a lot of things in a lot of ways. I would agree that no one really wants to move the team out of Illinois. If they can get something close to a deal, they may still very well take it.
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