The Chicago Bears’ search for a new stadium home took another significant turn this week as Hammond, Indiana Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr. confirmed that senior Bears leadership including team president Kevin Warren and chief operating officer George McCaskey conducted an extensive five-hour due diligence visit to the Lost Marsh site in Hammond, and that the meeting was genuinely positive rather than a courtesy call. McDermott joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to make his case that Hammond represents the best available deal for the Bears franchise and to push back on suggestions that the Arlington Park property in Arlington Heights offers insurmountable advantages.
McDermott said the due diligence visit covered hundreds of items that would need to be resolved if the Bears choose the Hammond site, and that many of the outstanding questions about the property are resolving themselves favorably as the team digs into the details. He noted that the city of Hammond cleaned up the Lost Marsh area approximately twenty-two years ago, meaning the environmental foundation is solid, and that the Bears now know more about the specifics of the site than even local officials do after the depth of investigation they have conducted. The site encompasses roughly three hundred and fifty acres of what McDermott called a blank canvas, giving the Bears the ability to design and build whatever mixed-use development they envision without the constraints that come with a more built-up environment.
He addressed directly the argument from Illinois lobbyists and analysts that the Arlington Park property in Arlington Heights will simply generate more top-line revenue due to its scale and location, and therefore represents a better financial proposition for the McCaskey family regardless of Illinois’s tax environment. McDermott acknowledged the gross revenue argument has some validity but said it misses the more important calculation, which is net revenue after taxes and the full cost of doing business in each state. His estimate is that choosing Hammond over Arlington Heights would save the Bears organization several billion dollars over the life of the deal in taxes alone, a figure that he said changes the bottom-line comparison dramatically even if Arlington Heights wins on the gross revenue side.
He said the legislative picture in Indiana is essentially settled in a way it is not in Illinois. The state has established a sports authority with bonding authority, and the Bears have not characterized the Indiana package as a good first step requiring further amendments in the way they responded to the Illinois House bill this week. The Bears described what passed the Illinois House as promising but said more changes are needed on the Senate side before it becomes something they could support, and the bill still needs to reach Governor Pritzker’s desk in a form that addresses infrastructure funding and the specific property tax arrangements that Arlington Heights requires. McDermott said the contrast between the two processes tells its own story.
He was careful to note that his confidence in the Hammond deal does not mean he believes the decision has already been made in Indiana’s favor, pushing back on media characterizations of his public statements as claiming a done deal. He said he is confident Hammond has put forward the best deal available and that the Bears will save significant money choosing Indiana, but that the only people who know whether that is sufficient to overcome the psychological weight of leaving Illinois are the Bears themselves. He said the single biggest obstacle Hammond faces is not economics but history, noting that the Bears fight song explicitly calls the team the pride and joy of Illinois and that no amount of financial modeling fully accounts for what it means for a franchise to cross a state line that is also embedded in its own anthem.
Governor Mike Braun’s involvement was a recurring theme, with McDermott crediting the Republican governor for setting aside partisan considerations to work as a genuine champion for Indiana’s bid despite McDermott being a prominent Democrat who ran for US Senate. He said the collaboration between a Democratic mayor and a Republican governor stands in sharp contrast to the dysfunction visible in the Illinois legislative process, and that Indiana’s fiscal stability and well-run state government are what enable it to make credible offers of this scale in the first place.
McDermott acknowledged getting some local pushback, though he said it comes more from environmental groups concerned about developing a greenspace than from taxpayers upset about public financing, in part because the stadium financing decisions rest with the state rather than the city of Hammond. He said he remains genuinely uncertain about the outcome and is, in his own words, hanging on every day just like everybody else hoping the Bears make what he considers the right decision.