The village of Bridgeview is taking steps to make money from naming rights to Toyota Park after more than a year of letting the automaker put its name on the venue for free.

Fifteen months after the southwest suburb's branding deal for the 20,000-seat soccer stadium expired, village officials have hired Chicago sponsorship sales and marketing firm W Partners to sell naming rights to the stadium as well as other developments going up around it.

Toyota logos still adorn the 11-year-old home of the Chicago Fire, but the hundreds of thousands of dollars the village pulled in annually from stadium naming rights have stopped, putting a greater burden on local taxpayers to pay off a mountain of debt from financing construction of the facility.

The sea of empty lots that surrounds the stadium has seen little change in the dozen years since Bridgeview officials predicted that a new soccer stadium would transform into an economic engine for the area and pay for itself. That lack of development has forced the village to borrow furiously and raise property taxes drastically to meet its annual debt obligations. Property taxes for its 16,000-plus residents doubled between 2009 and 2013. And S&P has downgraded the village's credit rating for the second time in less than two years, this one by four notches to BB–.