The deal: a promise of private money, and the bonds that replaced it

1992 – 1993

The promise came first. Mayor Kernan pledged that the Hall would be funded by corporate donations, not taxpayer funds, and the city set out to raise the money privately. The corporate fundraising produced under $2 million. Against a building that would cost many times that, the pledge could not be kept, and the city issued municipal bonds and built the Hall itself. The Tribune's editorial record has never let the sequence blur: the Hall was sold to the city as a privately funded prize, and it was publicly financed in the event. The financing was structured through the city's redevelopment apparatus — a lease for the combined College Football Hall of Fame and Century Center project between the South Bend Redevelopment Authority and the South Bend Redevelopment Commission, dated November 1, 1993, under Resolution No. 1202, adopted December 3, 1993. The city, in form, built the Hall as landlord and leased it within its own redevelopment structure; the Foundation operated the museum inside a building the public owned.

The bond bill ran long past the Hall's welcome. The city's annual payment on the Hall's bonds was $1.6 million a year. The press record splits on the end date — the Indianapolis Business Journal's account runs the payments through 2017, the Associated Press version through 2018 — and the credit record settles the tail: the Redevelopment Authority's lease rental revenue refunding bonds, series 2011A, carried a last lease payment of February 1, 2018, at which point the city would own the facility outright. When the Hall left at the end of 2012, about $3 million in bond payments remained outstanding — a figure the Foundation's own retrospective on the Atlanta Hall states, and the Tribune's editorial page agrees with. The deal's whole arc is therefore in the record without adornment: a $14 million proposal, a private-money promise that raised under $2 million, a public building put up on bonds, and a payment schedule that outlasted the tenant by more than five years. The mayoral politics of the deal — the criticism Kernan absorbed for it across the late nineties — belongs to the Government record and is cross-referenced there, not retold here.

Sources:

1. City of South Bend — the November 1, 1993 lease between the Redevelopment Authority and the Redevelopment Commission for the College Football Hall of Fame/Century Center Project, and Resolution No. 1202 of December 3, 1993 (docs.southbendin.gov).
2. South Bend Tribune, editorial and news record, as carried in Government — Kernan's no-taxpayer-funds pledge, the under-$2 million corporate raise, and the issuance of municipal bonds.
3. Indianapolis Business Journal, September 23, 2009, and the Associated Press account of the same date — the $1.6 million annual bond payment, through 2017 in the one and 2018 in the other.
4. Fitch Ratings, on the Redevelopment Authority's series 2011A refunding bonds — the last lease payment of February 1, 2018 and the city's outright ownership from that date.
5. National Football Foundation, tenth-anniversary account of the Atlanta Hall, August 2024 — the $3 million in outstanding bond payments the Hall left behind, agreeing with the Tribune editorial record.