Austin Bonta

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 a

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

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

It was very important for us that we had a viable, responsible deal on the table to be able to adequately finance a stadium of this size.

So I would direct you to Lou or if you'd like to, you know, kind of speak to him about all the financial details of it.

But to put it simply, what we're talking about is $5 billion for the stadium plus infrastructure and then a $2 billion sinking fund to cover issues that could come up once it's constructed and once the deal is set up.

And there are certainly elements of the deal as far as how much revenue is going to be paid over how much time to be able to pay back the cost of the stadium and

that would be something that we would negotiate with the bears as we get to that stage.

So like I say, we're very excited about that element of it.

And at the same time, we're also super excited about the site being what we think is the best site for the bears that we can imagine.

So I think that simply put, what separates our deal...

from the other areas have been discussed about, I think that we have to consider certainly the uniqueness of the site, the Hellas Harbor site.