THE ILLINOIZE: Monday Free for All
February 14, 2022
Good morning, Valentines. Love you guys.
I’m writing this part of the e-mail before the Super Bowl starts, so I’ll just put it here that I put my hard earned money via legal Illinois sports betting on the Rams. Over $35 million was bet on football in the state last February (basically, for the Super Bowl), and I’ll bet that’s higher this year.
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Let’s get to it!
YOUR MONDAY FREE FOR ALL
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A stadium like SoFi in Arlington Heights? Chicago Bears fans can dream of the Super Bowl site, but the reality likely requires something more affordable. (Chicago Tribune)
If the Chicago Bears dare to dream big about a new stadium in Arlington Heights, they can find inspiration in SoFi Stadium, the new star attraction of the NFL.
The league’s largest and most expensive arena and the site of Sunday’s Super Bowl, SoFi, just outside Los Angeles, is overwhelming fans with its sweeping curves and epic scale. The stadium and its development highlight certain parallels to the Bears’ proposal to buy and redevelop Arlington International Racecourse. Both reflect desires to leave century-old stadiums and home cities for vast sites that allow for planned enclaves of surrounding restaurants, hotels, offices, stores and homes.
But several key elements make SoFi an unlikely model for the Bears to follow. First, it’s home to two NFL teams, the Rams and the Chargers, as well as NFL Media, which increases its usage and revenue. Second, it has open sides, so is not a true dome, as would be required to hold other events such as the Super Bowl in the Midwest.
Most crucially, the stadium alone, which was privately financed, reportedly cost more than $5 billion. That’s money that Rams owner and real estate developer Stan Kroenke, who married into the family that owns Walmart, apparently can afford. It might be impossible for the McCaskey family-owned Bears, who don’t have a similar independent source of wealth. And there has been little support for taxpayers to pay for a new home.
Chicago sports consultant Marc Ganis said he’d be surprised if the Bears built a dome, because it adds tremendously to the cost — and it doesn’t fit the Bears’ brand of playing in “Bears weather.” As an alternative, Ganis said, a lot of seats may be enclosed and climate controlled.
Despite the allure of a stadium like SoFi, everything works against the Bears building a stadium, according to Allen Sanderson, an economist at the University of Chicago.
There appears to be little public appetite for more government subsidies for the Bears, while taxpayers are still paying for $432 million of the $690 million cost to renovate Soldier Field, completed in 2004.
“When people get down to the table and do the math, it’s going to be a pretty hard sell,” Sanderson said. “Who exactly is going to come up with $2 billion?”
Related: Lightfoot hints at new proposals for Soldier Field (Chicago Sun-Times)
As much as I like the idea of a Bears game three Metra stops from my house instead of the maddening trek to the Lakefront, we all need to come to the realization the Bears aren’t going to be building a stadium in Arlington Heights.
How downstate judge's mask ruling sowed confusion in schools across suburbs, state (Daily Herald)
When Sangamon County Circuit Court Judge Raylene Grischow issued a temporary restraining order against a statewide masking requirement inside schools Feb. 4, it left hundreds of school districts scrambling to figure out how the ruling affected students and staff.
Most legal experts believe the ruling covered only the more than 140 school districts listed as defendants and applied to just the students listed as plaintiffs.
But many school districts not named in the suit dropped the mask requirements for all students after the restraining order was issued, while some districts named in the suit defied the order. Still other districts fell somewhere in between, sparking outrage and protests from both sides of the debate.
But in her Feb. 4 ruling this year, Grischow said new emergency mitigation rules for schools created last August amounted to a kind of "quarantine" and that the Pritzker administration overstepped its bounds by issuing them.
She said the Department of Public Health at that time had known about COVID-19 for well over a year and a half and that vaccines had been around for more than nine months, suggesting the rules could have been developed under the normal process with public comment and legislative review.
Related: Some southwest Illinois parents are putting immense pressure on schools over masks (Belleville News-Democrat)
How educators are trying to keep bullying at bay in mask-optional school districts (Daily Herald)
Editorial: Law needed to prepare for next pandemic (Shaw Media)
On Feb. 4, Sangamon County Circuit Judge Raylene Grischow issued a temporary restraining order barring schools from enforcing the state’s indoor mask requirement. Then chaos ensued across Illinois.
The incidents persisted throughout the week. Even some public school board meetings were canceled or moved to virtual gatherings for the public’s safety. And as the Attorney General sought to appeal the judge’s ruling, Gov. JB Pritzker on Wednesday tried to make the mask mandate more clear: proclaiming masks would no longer be needed indoors starting Feb. 28 – but they would remain mandatory in schools. It’s also worth mentioning the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continues to recommend masks.
The lessons our children are learning from these episodes have nothing to do with education, and more to do with the worst of the worst of politics. And we saw it coming when the governor last August issued an executive order to fight the pandemic mandating citizens wear masks indoors, including inside schools. Immediately, school board of education meetings erupted into shouting matches. Some board members and administrators were threatened with violence. Lawsuits were filed, including the one the Sangamon County judge ruled on last week. But this case involved hundreds of school districts, increasing the impact of the judge’s ruling.
These battles must stop. Calling for civility is not enough, and hasn’t worked. We’ve asked for it before and today the situation is even worse.
The pandemic cannot be ended through executive orders and lawsuits. We need a law to address this situation. Executive orders have only so much power and can be fought in court, as we see today. And they often expire with the executive who made them. But laws have more power and set precedent for generations, until a legislature votes them down or amends them. They also set guidelines.
The next pandemic may not take another 100 years to reoccur, like the 1918 flu. We should be prepared for it with a law in place that sets rules and standards for our leaders and citizens to follow.
I completely agree with my friends at Shaw that we all need to chill out a little bit with the madness, fury, screaming and shouting, and insults over a little cloth covering our mouth.
That said, state law gives the Governor executive authority to handle emergencies as they arise. It’s called the Illinois Emergency Management Act. A General Assembly can be called in at the order of the Governor if he or she needs clarity on what authority is granted under the law. Obviously, a General Assembly doesn’t need to be compelled by a Governor’s order to come back and pass legislation.
To lay out a laundry list of rules and regulations for an emergency that may or may not arise is pointless. We went 100 years without a pandemic in Illinois, what if we were required to follow “what if” laws that had been passed a century ago?
Related: ‘We have lived through the omicron surge’ (Crain’s Chicago Business)
Springfield Mayor Langfelder backs lifting of mask mandate, doesn't expect rise in COVID-19 hospitalizations (State Journal-Register)
Pritzker ties GOP challengers to Trump’s ‘big lie’ and other ‘crazy things’ ex-president says: ‘We don’t want to go backwards’ (Chicago Sun-Times)
As he ramps up his reelection bid, Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Friday took some of his sharpest shots yet at Republican challengers, accusing them of buying into “crazy” messages spread by former President Donald Trump, including false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
In one of Pritzker’s first public campaign appearances since formalizing his run for a second term last summer, the Democratic incumbent told a small group of north suburban supporters that anyone in the five-man race for the GOP nomination would send Illinois “backwards.”
“Some of these folks who are running on the Republican side — maybe all of them, I’m not sure — don’t accept the results of the 2020 elections. … [They] question whether elections are fair in Illinois, and they can’t even call out the former President Trump when he says crazy things about our country.
“I worry that having a governor in the sixth-most populous state in the country, and the fifth-largest economy in the county — in the center of the country — you know, the governor being someone who believes in the big lie? That’s not who we are in Illinois,” Pritzker said.
Pritzker — whose public schedule has been light on campaign appearances, though his ads have flooded the airwaves — is sure to continue trying to tie GOP challengers to Trump, who garnered about 41% of Illinois’ vote in 2020 to President Joe Biden’s 58%.
But the reality TV star-turned-Republican-president remains enormously popular in many downstate counties, posing a conundrum for the GOP candidates vying in the June 28 primary for the chance to face Pritzker in November.
The Republicans say Pritzker is trying to shift the focus from issues such as rising crime.
Bull Valley businessman Gary Rabine pushed back in an email, saying: “My concern is that voting isn’t fraudulent and that as many people that want to do vote. Pritzker has to focus on Trump because he can’t talk about the COVID chaos he has created and the fact that Chicago, the largest city in his state, is now the crime capital of the country.”
Cozying up to Trump voters is a great way to win a primary but make a GOP candidate absolutely unelectable in a general election. What do Illinois Republican voters prefer?
Related: GOP candidates for governor have to campaign in Trump’s shadow, reconcile tough on crime message with RNC stance on Jan. 6 insurrection (Chicago Tribune)
'Somebody's got to fix it': Shoe repair shops are dwindling, but survivors are in demand (Daily Herald)
To walk into Al's Shoe Service at the Mount Prospect Metra station is to step back in time.
The walls remind customers and visitors of the rich history of a business that began when Al DeAngelo opened a shop in Chicago in 1937.
There are pictures of Al with his son, current owner Larry DeAngelo, at the previous store location in Franklin Park. And you can see some of the same repair equipment from that location, including a machine known as the Landis finisher.
"These are 100-year-old hammers," Larry DeAngelo says of some of the older tools in his shop. "My father used these hammers all his life."
DeAngelo is a survivor, the keeper of a tradition. But die-hards like him -- while in demand, especially for high-end shoes that require tender loving care -- are becoming a rare breed.
His peer group in the suburbs shrunk again recently, when Phil's Shoe Repair ended its 20-year run in Buffalo Grove's Chase Plaza shopping center.
I’m a bit of a fiend for dress shoes and boots, as I’m sure some of you have seen, and it is hard to find a place to do a quality resole on even a moderately quality pair of shoes—like an Allen Edmonds. A cobbler I liked around Golf Mill shut down due to lack of business and I often find myself mailing off shoes to Washington DC or Nashville for big resole projects.
Wear better shoes, guys.
SOME TOP LINKS FROM LAST WEEK
Expert: No Way to Tell if Appellate Court Will Overturn Mask Ruling
Pritzker Takes Aim at Judge Who Ruled Against School Mask Mandate
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