Jeff Buchholz

continued interest, and Mayor Johnson still talks about this a lot, that the only viable plan that's been presented is the one that he and Kevin Warren laid out two years ago in a big, splashy press conference.

You all remember it, I know.

Oh, yeah.

that would have remade the whole museum campus around this domed football stadium.

There would have been significant demolition and reconstruction around the colonnades at Soldier Field.

More, you know, new landscaping, new park, whatever.

Another friend of the score, Jim Tenaglia, the mayor of Arlington Heights,

told me when I asked about this some weeks ago that the NFL had determined that the lakefront site as proposed couldn't hold a Super Bowl because of the NFL's requirements for space for security and logistics.

And that this is something city leaders have been told a number of times.

I asked the mayor's office to confirm that and they did not respond to my request.

And I don't know if you guys have heard any more about that or not, but that also makes the conversation around a lakefront site feel...

also especially futile if indeed the NFL has already said, hey, we can't have a Super Bowl on the lakefront, which would seem to make any of those sites a non-starter.

I think a lot of the people who are going to have to vote on this thing represent the city of Chicago.

And the Speaker of the House, Chris Welch, has a sort of policy that he doesn't bring any proposal to the floor unless he can get 60 votes.

And that means that whatever the legislative solution is here for the bears, it's going to have to go through the Chicago delegation.

That's the only way that they get votes to make this happen.

And so in the sort of time honored political horse trading tradition in Chicago and in Illinois, the bears are going to have to do something to demonstrate.

demonstrate goodwill or come up with some kind of proposal that will get the folks that represent the city of Chicago to say, okay, sure, we'll do this.

I think that's why.

Yeah, that is it.