Conscious Choice: Just Say No to Peotone

August 2001 | News of the Earth

Just Say No to Peotone

by Dave Aftandilian

If you read any of the local newspapers from the past couple of months, you probably saw headlines about congestion at O’Hare airport, and a number of different proposals to ease that congestion. On the one hand you might have heard about the boosters for building a third Chicago-area airport near Peotone in rural Will County, led by Illinois governor George Ryan, with federal support from Senator Peter Fitzgerald and Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr. And on the other, you might have seen Mayor Richard Daley’s ambitious plan to build new and reconfigure old runways at O’Hare (as well as sending night cargo flights and other traffic to the Gary-Chicago airport), supported by Representative William O. Lipinski and Senate majority leader Tom Daschle.

Who will win this political shell game remains to be seen. Ryan has until September 1 to comment on Daley’s plan, at which point Lipinski may make good on his threat to strip Ryan of his veto power over new runways at O’Hare. And no doubt there will be numerous lawsuits over Daley’s plan — whether Ryan approves it or has his approval power taken away from him — because it would involve the demolition of hundreds of homes and an additional burden of noise and other airport-related pollution on communities that are already sick to death of airplanes.

But no matter what’s decided about Daley’s plan for new runways at O’Hare, building a third airport at Peotone is still an environmentally unsound, economically ill-advised, and unnecessary solution to the problem of congestion at O’Hare. It would be much better for all the main players to take a step back from their personal squabbles, and think instead about long-term solutions to the transportation and economic development needs of the Chicago region and the nation — including a high-speed rail network for the Midwest, hubbing in Chicago, a proposal for which is picking up steam at the federal, state, and local levels.

Reasons Not to Build Peotone

First off, airports are a large and poorly regulated source of noise, air, and water pollution throughout the United States. The Chicago region bears a special burden because it has three of them — O’Hare, Midway, and Meigs Field. Last year, a study by Environ International Corporation detected 219 volatile compounds in the air around O’Hare, and estimated the resulting cancer risk for people living near the airport as five times higher than the regional average. A University of Illinois School of Public Medicine study estimates that pollution from O’Hare’s seven current runways could be affecting the health of up to five million people. And a 1993 EPA health risk assessment concluded that aircraft engines are responsible for approximately 10.5 percent of the cancer cases within a sixteen-square-mile area surrounding Midway.

A 1996 Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) report entitled Flying Off Course: Environmental Impacts of America’s Airports (available at www.nrdc.org) has more bad news. While air pollution from many major industries has stabilized or decreased over time, airport emissions of the ground-level ozone precursors that cause smog increase with each passing year. For example, in 1993, airplanes at U.S. airports produced 350 million pounds of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and nitrogen oxides during their landing and takeoff cycles — more than twice the amount they produced in 1970 (NRDC estimates that 1,428 tons of VOCs were released at O’Hare in 1993). Airports also produce significant amounts of deicing fluid (which contains ethylene glycol) and other chemicals, which are washed into local waterways, polluting groundwater sources. And that’s not to mention the noise pollution.

Yet, airports are exempt from the federal law that requires toxic pollution sources to report their toxic emission totals, and neither airports nor airlines are held accountable for the aggregate impacts of their ground-level aircraft emissions. No doubt this has something to do with the fact that state and local agencies do not have jurisdiction over airplanes (because they are considered interstate commerce), and the federal agency responsible for monitoring airplane pollution is the same agency charged with promoting air travel — the Federal Aviation Administration.

Even if you decide that the cost of airport and airplane pollution is worth the convenience of air travel, the site proposed for a new airport near Peotone in Will County is a poor choice for a number of reasons. The airport would consume 24,000 acres of open space, much of it prime farmland, and would displace four thousand people and destroy ninety-five operating farms, according to George Ochsenfeld, president of Shut This Airport Nightmare Down (STAND). And that’s just in the airport footprint itself; related road construction to connect the site with Chicago, and the sprawling development that would surely follow, would consume thousands more acres of land. In the Southern Wisconsin/Northern Illinois region, which was named the third most threatened region in the country in terms of farmland loss to development in American Farmland Trust’s 1997 Farming on the Edge report (available at www.farmlandinfo.org/ cae/foe2/foetoc.html), the last thing we need is to encourage sprawl into prime farmland forty miles from the city center.

The proposed Peotone airport site would also occupy 1,600 acres of floodplain land and 550 acres of wetlands, and it would displace six streams, all of which might increase downstream flooding, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. All those streams drain into the Kankakee River Basin, which the Illinois Natural History Survey has said should be considered a "national resource" because of its diverse mussel population — by the latest count, there are three threatened and six endangered mussel species present in the basin. Mike Conlin, fisheries chief for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, calls the Kankakee River system "a highly valued resource," and further states, "It is certainly one of the better streams in Illinois. There are ninety species of fish [in] the Kankakee and its tributaries," including seven that are threatened or endangered. The area is also a very popular destination for paddlers, anglers, hikers, bikers, birders, and hunters; the nearby Kankakee River State Park in Bourbonnais is second only to Illinois Beach State Park in terms of annual attendance.

Plunk down an airport in the middle of all that, and what would happen? For one thing, pollution would run off from the airport and contaminate the Kankakee River and its recreational fishery. People would probably not want to come enjoy the natural beauty of the area if they had to listen to jet planes screaming by over their heads on a regular basis, so tourist revenues would dry up. And as Doug Chien, Conservation Field Representative for the Illinois Sierra Club, explained to me, a Peotone airport would put very high hurdles in the path of the Grand Kankakee Marsh National Wildlife Refuge that has been proposed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Not only would land in the area become too expensive for governmental agencies and conservation groups to purchase for the refuge, but the suburbanization of the area would make it a lot less likely that folks would be able to get permission from landowners to cross their property to get to streams to fish in, much less be allowed to actually hunt on their property.

Then there’s the infrastructure — or rather, the lack of it. The small villages surrounding the proposed airport site — Peotone, Monee, Beecher, and Crete — don’t have the highways, access roads, flood control, or water and sewage systems to serve the airport and its associated sprawl; all this would have to be built from scratch. There also just aren’t many potential customers in the area. The airport would be in the middle of nowhere, and the people living in the south suburbs of Chicago tend to be blue-collar workers. As Ochsenfeld puts it, "These are not frequent flyers." He also points out that there are a number of archeological sites in the area, some dating as far back as twelve thousand years.

What about the economics? After all, the main reason the South Suburban Mayors and Managers Association — together with Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr., and Senator Peter Fitzgerald — want to build Peotone isn’t to relieve congestion at O’Hare, but to create jobs for the south suburbs. The problem is that such a notion assumes airlines will want to develop the airport, which most have vehemently refused to do. United, American, and Southwest all feel that a Peotone airport would threaten their hubs at O’Hare and Midway, so they won’t have anything to do with the site. In fact, only three small airlines have expressed any interest at all so far — Spirit Airlines, AirTran Holdings, and Virgin Atlantic. Even in combination, these carriers are not large enough to make construction of the airport worthwhile. Building an airport the airlines don’t want is at best a risky venture, and more likely downright foolhardy. We already have the cautionary example of MidAmerica Airport in Illinois near St. Louis, which was built without any interest from airlines. The airport opened in 1998 with a 50,000-square-foot terminal, a 10,000-foot runway, and four gates. Today this airport is home to only one airline, PanAm, which offers one flight a day.

If good jobs for residents of the south suburbs are the aim, wouldn’t it make more sense to start a little closer to home instead of building an airport the airlines don’t want — an airport that is forty miles from the city it’s supposed to serve? What about pursuing brownfield redevelopment projects, or supporting the proposal for a Grand Kankakee Marsh National Wildlife Refuge, or a National Heritage designation for the Lake Calumet region, any of which could bring millions of dollars in federal and state funds directly to the south suburbs?

Finally, Peotone is not needed to relieve congestion at O’Hare. There are a number of other regional airports that could be expanded, including Gary-Chicago, Rockford, and Milwaukee (important caveat: there are a number of high-quality wetland and dune and swale habitats that could be wiped out by substantial expansion of the Gary-Chicago Airport, including several designated Indiana Nature Preserves). Mayor Daley has also proposed a far-reaching plan to add new runway capacity to O’Hare and solve the roadway congestion problems around the airport. Given the national interest in O’Hare, Daley’s plan seems likely to find sympathetic ears in Washington, D.C., whether or not Governor Ryan here in Illinois likes it. To some, this is bad news; Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr., said Daley’s plan would "essentially kill Peotone in the south suburbs," for instance. But others see the plan in a different light. "We’re hoping that the wisdom of Daley’s project will win out and that will be the end of Peotone," says George Ochsenfeld.

A Better Way: High-Speed Rail

Given the enormous number of articles devoted to congestion at O’Hare over the past couple of months, it’s amazing to me that none of the dozens of articles I read mentioned high-speed rail. This is an especially puzzling oversight given that a high-speed rail network in the Midwest, hubbing in Chicago, could help solve O’Hare’s congestion problems in the air and on the land, according to Richard Harnish, executive director of the Midwest High Speed Rail Coalition. High-speed rail could gather O’Hare passengers from around the area and whisk them to O’Hare, bypassing the stop-and-go traffic on the expressway that has become such a nightmare.

Even better, a Midwest high-speed rail network could also take over some of the short regional flights to and from O’Hare, which Harnish estimates constitute about 17 percent of O’Hare’s flights. High-speed rail trains would travel along existing tracks and rights-of-way, breezing along at 110 to 125 miles per hour — faster than cars, obviously, but also often faster than planes when you count travel time to and from the airports (which, unlike high-speed rail stations, are usually not located convenient to downtown destinations). They would connect Chicago with other regional metro centers such as St. Louis, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Indianapolis, as well as with smaller cities in between, such as Ann Arbor, Kalamazoo, Bloomington, Springfield, and Madison. And high-speed rail already has a proven track record in Europe and Japan.

The Environmental Law and Policy Center (ELPC) notes on its Web site that "high-speed trains in the Midwest would be three times as energy efficient as cars and six times as energy efficient as planes. Additionally, trains pollute less than cars and airplanes, improving air quality." And a high-speed rail network would essentially reverse sprawl, running along already existing tracks to downtown centers, both reducing the need to build more highways or airports and also bringing jobs, business, and people back to depopulated inner city cores. For Chicago, which would serve as the hub of a Midwest high-speed rail system, the economic benefits would be huge — a study for the City of Chicago has estimated that high-speed rail would bring eight to ten billion dollars of new economic activity to Chicago, including fifteen thousand new jobs during construction and two thousand permanent jobs. A Midwest high-speed rail network would also strengthen intra-regional business growth, promote local railcar manufacturing, and stimulate travel and tourism between small towns and large cities along the rail routes.

If a high-speed rail network in the Midwest sounds like a win-win proposition to you, you’re not alone. Political momentum has been building for the project over the past couple of years; it just needs a bit of leadership from our elected officials to get the job done. During their winter meeting at Chicago’s Union Station in January, the U.S. Conference of Mayors (USCM) pledged strong support for revitalized passenger rail service nationwide. "We want to say to President-Elect Bush — fuel rail the same way we have fueled airline expansions and highways. It’s clear we need other solutions.... Passenger rail can help us reduce congestion and commuting times," said USCM vice president and New Orleans mayor Marc Morial. I hope President Bush was listening. George Ryan must have been, because he has earmarked $250 million from his Illinois First infrastructure investment program to get a high-speed rail system up and running in Chicago by the fall of 2002.

You can help by urging Illinois’ senators to champion S.250/H.R.2329, the High Speed Rail Reinvestment Act, which would allow Amtrak to raise $12 billion for funding high-speed rail projects nationwide; as of the end of May, the measure had fifty-six cosponsors — including Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Minority Leader Trent Lott — but had not yet been considered by the Finance Committee. You could also urge our U.S. representatives to introduce a companion bill in the House, which has not yet been done, and let President Bush know that instead of supporting Ryan’s ill-conceived notion of a third Chicago airport in Peotone, he should be pushing for a Midwest high-speed rail network instead.

Resources

Environmental Law and Policy Center (ELPC), 312-673-6500

Midwest High Speed Rail Coalition, 312-409-7723

Shut This Airport Nightmare Down (STAND), 708-534-7319

U.S. House of Representatives

U.S. Senate

U.S. White House

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: