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TRANSCRIPT

Illinois Tech Assistant Professor of Law Lucien Ferguson: Thinking about the Bears project, one way to think about it is that local economic development is a key vector in the, sort of, engine of upward mobility that Illinois is trying to foster.

On the one hand, you might say these kinds of projects can be great for upward mobility. So, they can create jobs, they can build out the tax base, and in so doing, they can result in more money being funneled  into public education.

On the other hand, often these projects can cut the other way if they're structured so the benefits flow overwhelmingly to the private entities involved  rather than the public as a whole. If you get a deal where the benefits go overwhelmingly to private interests rather than public interests, that creates potential issues under the Illinois Constitution.

The Illinois Constitution requires that public money can only be spent for public purposes. This is called the Public Purpose Doctrine.

And so when you have deals that are really slanted one way, if the slant is really extreme, the stakeholders involved have to be worried about potential legal liability under the state constitution. And in the worst case scenario, actually a state court blowing up the deal and or rescinding the contract if it's already happened.