Governor J.B. Pritzker

We need to continue our conversations on the Bayer Stadium question.

I know in the house, we need time to review the bill that came over early this morning.

We need to know where do the Bears stand.

We need to take the time to get it right.

My principles have been the same from the very beginning and until yesterday and remain today.

We're about...

protecting the taxpayers of the state of Illinois.

We want to keep businesses and grow businesses here, attract businesses to the state, make sure that the Chicago Bears are still an Illinois-based team, and we worked very hard to make all of those things happen at the same time.

Oh, gosh, I was in meetings throughout the weekend indeed on this, not to mention throughout the last six months.

So what I can tell you is that my principles focused on the taxpayers of Illinois and making sure we weren't doing something like paying for a stadium, a privately owned stadium for a billionaire owned team.

That didn't make any sense to me.

And I said from the very beginning, we're not going to do that.

that we would focus on only providing what was necessary in order to create infrastructure as we have for other businesses in the state of Illinois so they can do business in the state.

Those were all things that were part of the package that I set up and allowed the legislature to

debate to the House passed a version of that.

The Senate passed a version of that.

And the fact that there wasn't agreement by the two houses is a question, I think, for the legislature.

But I will say, I think the principles remained intact throughout.

It actually doesn't look like a deal.

It looks like, you know, the people have talked about the fact that gas prices and oil prices should be much higher than they are right now.