Bears thought they got their stadium on lakefront

A)  I agree with your assessment.  The mayor's own base in the black community is furious with him right now for diverting resources to illegal aliens instead of poor already-existing neighborhoods in need.  I'm not gonna get into the politics here too much for obvious reasons but suffice it say he will lose even more support if he pushes this hard and there little support for it in Springfield either.  The city and the state are both flat broke with bond ratings barely above junk status.  

If it's gonna be on public land and owned by the city, then yeah Butkus is right they have to pay a good chunk of the costs.  Can't have it both ways.  If they don't want to pay, which I agree with you they won't and it will get delayed many years in fighting over it, the Bears should be smart enough to go fully private in AH.  Stop wasting your time with city and state bureaucracy.  You'd think they would have learned that by now.

B)  The Bears are NOT trying to dodge paying taxes.  The Cook County Assessor's office in conjunction with some AH school districts, both of which had their greedy hands out salivating over money, made a ridiculous valuation of the AH property to falsely inflate the taxes due.  These people are just as greedy, territorial, and power-thirsty as any Gordon Gecko-like capitalist movie villain.  They tried to value the property as though it had already been fully developed, rather than as bare land which it presently is.  Even the "reduction" you mentioned is still blatantly inaccurate.  This is nothing more than a power play by government officials looking to pick the pocket of what is perceived to be a company with deep pockets.  The Bears have never asked to be exempted from appropriately-assessed property taxes.

I'm sure you didn't mean to convey it, but your statement insinuated the Bears were asking for "special tax breaks" in AH.  No, they weren't.