Yes, the Bears are moving forward with a new stadium project in Indiana. No, the Bears haven’t pulled the plug on finding a solution in Illinois.
Via Christopher Placek of the Arlington Heights Daily Herald, the Bears are cobbling together parts of different bills that were making progress during the most recent legislative session, in the hopes of arriving at one bill that will get through the Illinois House and Senate.
Speaking to reporters at an unrelated event in Chicago on Tuesday, Governor J.B. Pritzker said the Bears have asked for advice regarding the drafting process.
“[W]e’ve been advising and trying to help out wherever we could,” Pritzker said.
Nothing can happen without a bill that reduces to writing the things the Bears want from Illinois.
“It takes a bill,” Pritzker said. “And that’s really what we need them to put together are the provisions of a bill. It’s one thing to articulate generally what you want. It’s another thing to actually say we’d like a provision like this, a provision like that. And those are, many of them anyway, already written.”
Pritzker repeated on Tuesday his willingness to call a special session of the legislature, if one specific bill will be presented. Pritzker also threw water on the idea that the Bears have a viable project in Indiana.
“What the Indiana legislature chose to do is to foist it all off on the counties and the cities around (the potential) stadium,” Pritzker said. “And so, guess what? They don’t have a tax that’s passed to help pay for it there. They don’t yet have the tolls that would be required to pay for it there. We don’t want to raise taxes on the people of Illinois. . . . And so we think we’re actually as close as anybody to getting a stadium done here. I don’t think Indiana is a whole heck of a lot closer than we are.”
Indiana continues to be, in our view, the leverage to get something done in Illinois. The fact that the Bears are still working to make something happen in Illinois makes that as clear as it can be.
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