Hammond mulls Cabela's incentives

HAMMOND | The City Council moved two steps closer Monday to building a Cabela's store along the bustling Borman Expressway.

All told, building the massive outdoors retail store and museum in Hammond is expected to cost $78 million, financial consultant Edward Krusa said.

That estimated cost includes incentives and private investments to build the Cabela's store. The figure also includes infrastructure costs, like building a levee along the Little Calumet River and reconfiguring the Indianapolis Boulevard exit ramp to the Borman Expressway.

It was not clear Monday how much of the $78 million would be financed by public debt.

Cabela's hopes to build it's next store on the site of the Woodmar Country Club, which the company is expected to purchase next week for $14 million. But Cabela's officials say they need publicly financed incentives to build their store. On Monday, the City Council voted to allow future planning costs for the project to qualify for reimbursements through state and city bond issues.

"Any expenditures from this time forward can be reimbursed through (public) bonds," Council President Dan Repay said.

Critics of the financing are skeptical about why a large corporation like Cabela's needs public assistance.

Proponents say the bonds will be paid back with the new taxes generated by Cabela's.

Once the bonds are paid down, all tax money will flow to Hammond and Indianapolis.

The total size of the public incentive package has not been announced, but a figure in the tens of millions of dollars would be consistent with other Cabela's developments nationwide.

The incentives come in two varieties. The first is tax increment financing bonds, which would be funded through Hammond property taxes generated by the site.

Perhaps $25 million for the project could come from such TIF bonds, Krusa said.

The second type of incentive is sales tax increment financing bonds, which would be funded with sales taxes that would normally go directly to the state.

Sales tax bonds are rare because they take money that would go to state coffers and focus it on a single local project.

The trade-off is that in the long run, sales tax revenues will be greatly enhanced by the investment, proponents argue.

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