When the Chicago Bears kick off against the Minnesota Vikings for their 2026 home opener on Sunday, it will mark the start of their 55th season at Soldier Field.
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Hammond, Indiana, certainly hopes it is.
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The Bears announced in June that they were moving forward with stadium development plans across state lines in Hammond, Indiana.
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This isn’t the first time the Bears have talked about moving to Indiana, as there were discussions in the late 1990s, but none were serious.
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The discussions are as serious as Ben Johnson saying he wants the Bears to have the highest-scoring offense in NFL history.
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Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr. said that while the city has been preparing for this, even he didn’t think the work would eventually lead to Hammond potentially becoming the next home of the Bears.
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"We did a lot of things in Hammond and in Indiana to prepare us for this day," McDermott told OutKick in a recent interview.
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"But you know, I'd be lying to you if I told you I thought that when we were doing this, I thought we'd be the future home of the Chicago Bears.
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How Hammond Prepared for This
The Bears completed their review of the Lost Marsh site in Hammond while also doing their due diligence on the Lake Terminal site.
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McDermott said those potential sites for a stadium came to be through efforts to clean up the area.
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"The site that we're talking about right now, if you were looking at it when I first took over, it was I don't think the Bears would have even thought it was possible to locate a stadium there because there was so many different landowners.
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it was underutilized and it was just old-fashioned, old thinking," McDermott said.
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"For the first two or three terms, in cooperation with the state government, we started assembling dozens and dozens of acres and we got it to where we have about 300 acres available.
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"
But even throughout the process of assembling the acreage, it was never done with the thought the it could one day be the home of the Bears.
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"I'll be honest with you, never in a million years did I think that we'd one day be the home—the future home of the Chicago Bears.
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We were just doing it to clean up and hoping that good things would happen and improve the quality of life," McDermott said.
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However, acquiring and developing land wasn’t the only thing Hammond did to prepare for the Bears.
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The state of Indiana has more favorable property tax caps than Illinois, which McDermott said was of interest to the Bears.
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"Another thing that Indiana did to prepare for this day was there's a gap from one side of the state line to the other in what it costs to run a household, what it costs to run a business, and in Indiana, we enshrine tax caps, property tax caps, into our constitution.
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And one of the buzzwords of this whole ordeal with the Bears is property tax certainty, which is something the Bears are interested in, and they can't get property tax certainty in Illinois," McDermott said.
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"And certainly in year zero and for the next 30 years, they certainly can't get property tax certainty.
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And in Indiana, ours are enshrined in our constitution.
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You can't pay over 1%, 2% or 3% depending on your classification."
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Heather Ennis, president and CEO of the Northwest Indiana Forum, told OutKick in a recent interview that Northwest Indiana has seen billions of dollars invested in the region, not including any potential deal with the Bears.
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"We're a $52 billion regional economy and we're seeing in the last 10 months over $30 billion of investment committed to the region, and that doesn't even include any of the Bears conversation.
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So we're really seeing people be bullish on Northwest Indiana and the opportunities that are coming to the region," Ennis told OutKick.
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McDermott said he has never seen more bipartisan cooperation in his 23 years than he has during the Bears discussions.
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"I'm in my sixth term and I've never seen the coordination across federal, state, bipartisan, Republican and Democratic lines, everybody working in lockstep.
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And I mean from the U.S. senators in Indiana, both of them are working on this project.
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And you wouldn't know it at all when you're looking at everybody working so hard on this project," McDermott said
"Governor Braun has been a great leader for Indiana.
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He is helping Hammond out tremendously.
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And this is a Democratic city that probably didn’t vote for Governor Braun for governor.
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So the bipartisanship, the federal partnerships that we have with the state partnerships, you need all that.
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And quite frankly, we started off on one location in Hammond and sort of changed course a couple months ago and nothing changed.
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We just shifted modes up here.
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And I think that impressed the - it was literally a gear shift and we just rolled right with it and they're the customer."
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"If this is what the Bears want us to look at, no problem, sir.
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…and 92 more, not listed.
The Aporia
