It is a seven horse race for Illinois’ much coveted 10th casino license, which includes Hawthorne Race Course in Stickney.

Members of the Illinois Gaming Board opened bids Wednesday , Oct. 15, afternoon for the casino license, with the Rosemont proposal, once again, in the lead at $435 million. In second place is Waukegan, registering a $225 million bid, according to records released Wednesday.

Coming in third is a $175 million bid from Harvey, with Hawthorne Race Course in Stickney and Calumet City tying for fourth place at $150 million apiece.

Former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka is backing a partnership between Hawthorne Race Course, gaming industry real estate firm Altium Development Group and Altium’s sister company, Merit Management Group, to build a $500 million Champions Casino and Resort at the existing racetrack site. The complex would include a hotel and conference center, theater, suite of restaurants and entertainment venues including a water park.

“We can get this up and running in six months,” Hawthorne president and general manager Tim Carey said Wednesday at press conference at Hawthorne. “That means 1,200 people being employed on this project by June. We’re going to totally revitalize the Cicero-Midway corridor.”

Hawthorne Race Course, 3501 S. Laramie Ave., straddles Cicero and Stickney. The project would span 136 acres owned by the Carey family.

Carey said the racetrack’s existing 400,000-square-foot building is too large for today’s horse-racing fans, who might not watch the races at the track, opting for electronic monitoring on cell phones or a Blackberry.

The building would be torn down in stages, and retrofitted to meet much smaller space needs, Carey said. Work could begin on the western end of the building in January, after Gaming Board members select the winner by year’s end.

If awarded the license, Carey projected that the casino project would create more than 3,000 jobs — many of those union positions. Carey said the project would be paid for entirely by private funds.

The proposal calls for a 40,000-square-foot casino, 1,150 slot machines, 50 table games and a poker room, a 300-room casino hotel and conference center. State gaming laws limit the number of slot machines to 1,200.

Also proposed is a 140,000-square-foot entertainment district, with eight to 12 restaurants, a 150,000-square-foot water park with 400 all-inclusive suites, a multi-screen movie theater, 25,000-square-foot bowling alley and 4,800-seat outdoor amphitheater.

“We want to put a restaurant in it,” Ditka said in a Life Newspaper interview Wednesday. “(The Hawthorne group partners) would front the cost of building it out, and we would be co-owners with them.”

The license application was filed by 5 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 14, with the Gaming Board. The other two applications were for casinos in Des Plaines and Country Club Hills, with bids of $100 million and $60 million, respectively.

Board members plan to review casino license applications and create a short-list of three finalists. Within about 10 days of being selected, finalists will be called to make presentations during an open session of a Gaming Board meeting, according to the board. Residents at this time may comment about the presentations to board members.

Ditka said building a Champions Casino and Resort with a sports theme makes sense in the Chicago area.

“This truly makes more sense than the other ones. It can be up and running in the shortest amount of time,” he said. “We’re talking about the economy today. It would be a great boon to this city.”