Austin Bonta

The bears picking the site for our city

just allows that to happen a little faster and with two steps happening closer together, if that makes sense.

Oh, but you were asking about how we reach the bears or how we go about it from there.

Portage actually is the third largest city in the region, and we are a

Really amazing city when you actually kind of look under the hood and see what we've got.

We have an international port.

We've got a steel mill.

We are one of the major areas of travel through the Chicagoland region.

44 million people drive through our city every year.

Not everybody stops.

Many people do.

We want to increase that.

But all that said and done, we're already situated in a great spot, and we have a lot of contacts.

So when the bear search started, we started reaching out.

Yeah, so we always had a vision for this site once we were able to get the land together and create the connectivity to it to be able to master develop it, working with maybe one big developer, maybe working with a

team of developers to map out a community that is a little bit higher dense and very much based on its connectivity to the train, the South Shore Line, and being the first base of real public transportation in our city.

And then also its connectivity to the water, because it's got a navigable waterway, what we call the Burns Waterway.

maybe we'll call it the bears waterway one day but connects right to lake michigan so it brings those two different features together and one of the big things i know that when people talk about how is northwest indiana responding to the news about the bears considering coming to our side of chicagoland two big things come to mind one is what is the cost on residents in terms of taxes and of course we have a plan to address that that's getting a lot of attention

But then the second aspect is what does this do to traffic, right?

You know, we've got all these cities in Northwest Indiana.