As a remote worker, I do not live in BLM, but I did check out the Pantaraph and saw the article that basically said State Farm was committed to keeping the same number of employees in Bloomington.
Do not believe it.
The company is clearly -- very clearly -- interested in drastically reducing head count. If they weren't, they would have given their teleworkers a chance to relocate to a hub, provided those employees were still providing a benefit to the business. None of the affected business areas were allowed to extend such a relocation offer (with or without relo benefits) so clearly the objective was reducing head count, not increasing efficiency or benefiting from co-location, per the narrative.
And if you go out and look at the professional/technical JOPs, you will see that 95% of them require development experience (most are java development positions) or expertise in a particular set of tools. That should give you some idea of what the future is. It's fewer people doing more work and being responsible for more technical work. In and of itself, that's not a bad work model, but it does mean fewer people employed Systems wide. And it means that those who are lucky enough to keep their jobs will need to re-tool.
I'm not really familiar with your local media outlets, but I've seen enough to know I wouldn't trust anything printed in the Pantagraph.