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Hammond Mayor More Confident Than Ever the Bears Will Leave Illinois

The Tribune's Gary Post-Tribune reports Mayor Thomas McDermott said the McCaskeys already made up their minds on Indiana before the public learned of possibility.
Gene Chamberlain|
Hammond, Ind., Mayor Thomas McDermott is very confident the Bears will be building their stadium in his community.
Hammond, Ind., Mayor Thomas McDermott is very confident the Bears will be building their stadium in his community. | Michael Caterina / USA TODAY NETWORK

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Chicago Bears

While the Illinois legislature, Chicago politicians, and even Bernie Sanders, have combined to thwart attempts by the Bears to move, fans in Illinois might find it surprising that the mayor of Hammond, Ind., has full confidence his state has won the stadium battle.

Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott said the Bears will not only wind up in Indiana, but that they have planned to go there all along.

“The Bears had already made their mind up before most of the public found out about it,” McDermott said, according to the Gary Post-Tribune's Doug Ross.

The Bears' stadium project has already passed in Indiana and while speaking at a northwest Indiana economic development function, a group of officials from that area seemed so confident that they were dividing up the Bears for their own communities.

“Can I have a practice field over here?” Michigan City Mayor Angie Nelson Deuitch asked, according to Ross.

It's been widely source-reported in Chicago media that the Bears will remain at Halas Hall in Lake Forest, Ill. for their practice facilities.

"I think eventually you’re going to see Chicago Bears living in Porter County on the lake right there,” McDermott told the gathering. “This project is going to affect all of us in northwest Indiana.”

The whole thing is going to come together quickly, McDermott said.

“It’s domed, and it’s mid-December, and there’s 65,000 people in there,” McDermott commented.

McDermott says no residents would be displaced by the new stadium, but businesses would. In fact, it seems some could already be.

It's gotten pretty serious in Indiana. McDermott said businesses have begun calling city hall to ask what is going on after state officials started saying they were buying out area businesses. The mayor said he had no idea what the callers were talking about but this seems unlikely with the way speculators work.

McDermott anticipates the stadium will start an influx of Illinoisans and businesses to northwest Indiana.

“It’s going to be a steady drumbeat for that going forward," McDermott told the gathering.

The Bears have been waiting to give Illinois' slow-moving government a chance to work in getting them infrastructure and tax certainty legislation for their property in Arlington Heights. Nothing has happened beyond passage through a House committee. It hasn't been voted on yet.

City officials want to be paid money the team doesn't owe as some sort of retribution if they leave the city limits for Arlington Heights. Going to Indiana would likely allow the Bears to do pretty much what they want, and for a better deal than they could get by staying in the suburbs on their own property.

If the Bears move to Hammond, Chicago would have little control over the situation. So they got Sanders to co-sponsor a federal bill that would require pro teams to be put up for sale if they sought to move out of their state—obviously targeting the Bears. Whether such legislation would ever gain enough support to pass seems unlikely, and it's even less likely it would hold up in courts after numerous teams in all sports have been allowed to leave their cities for better venues.

The NFL requires teams leaving their cities to get permission from a three-quarters vote of the league if it's out of their immediate market. Hammond is well within the Chicago sphere and not subject to a vote of the league.

What team president Kevin Warren and owner George McCaskey think about the state's progress in efforts to help the Bears land at Arlington Heights, the city's attempts to prevent it, and the Indiana stadium could become more apparent in the next few days.

Both usually speak at the owners meetings that have begun in Phoenix.

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Gene Chamberlain
GENE CHAMBERLAIN

Gene Chamberlain has covered the Chicago Bears full time as a beat writer since 1994 and prior to this on a part-time basis for 10 years. He covered the Bears as a beat writer for Suburban Chicago Newspapers, the Daily Southtown, Copley News Service and has been a contributor for the Daily Herald, the Associated Press, Bear Report, CBS Sports.com and The Sporting News. He also has worked a prep sports writer for Tribune Newspapers and Sun-Times newspapers.

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