Austin Bonta

How much traffic is this going to bring in on game days, concert days?

What's particularly neat about what we now call the Hollis Harbor site is 99% of our city residents live south of the highway and definitely south of the waterway that we're talking about building it.

So really what we have the opportunity at Hollis Harbor is essentially to build an entire city crafted around this more dense, this more transit oriented development

And we've always talked about what would be the best anchor.

And I mean, I can just say certainly the Bears coming to the site would be the absolute best anchor to really build that community and that development around it.

Absolutely.

And that was actually one of the things that was the biggest challenges for me is that we definitely see the benefit of a stadium coming into any city as far as what that can do for economic development.

But we also know that whether it's a city, whether it's a state, when taxpayers are funding a stadium and they're on the hook for that much, it can create trouble down the road.

Portage being a city of, again, we're the third largest city in the region, but we're not a million person city.

That's a lot of responsibility to take on or potentially to be in some issue with down the road.

So I told my team it was very important that our pitch included some way to be able to minimize or eliminate taxpayer costs.

At the time, too, we had no idea on January 18th.

what the state of Indiana was going to do with the Bears search.

You know, we wanted to start as quick as we could.

And we ended up finding a partner who's offering an equity deal where a private company would build the stadium.

We would be able to give it to the Bears rent free.

And then the stadium revenue that's generated from non-football related events such as concerts, trade shows, different events happening in the stadium over a long period of time would pay back the cost of building the stadium to the private entity.

Lou has the financial resources to bring that together.

And he's been a very good friend to us and a great partner with us as we put this deal together.

And we understand that as we bring it to the bears and as the state of Indiana takes a look at it and what they want to add to it, we certainly understand that we need to be flexible starting from our current offer, but