Austin Bonta

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.

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.