A disgusted newspaper columnist listened to a debate by the Democrats who wanted to be governor and discovered only one “with the guts to oppose the idiotic Peotone airport boondoggle.” That was Michael Bakalis, and Bakalis would later drop out.
A third of the passengers at O’Hare and Midway are traveling 300 to 500 miles–making them the market for a proposed nine-state high-speed rail network that would have Chicago as its hub. Congressional support for this network is growing, but IDOT is dismissive of high-speed rail as an alternative to air travel. Illinois has allocated $60 million toward the construction of a new rail corridor between Chicago and Saint Louis that eventually could run through the Peotone cornfields. A high-speed rail link to O’Hare (the world’s busiest airport) isn’t being considered.
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On December 5 Daley and Ryan announced their historic plan. O’Hare would expand, Meigs Field would endure, and Daley would join–or at least no longer publicly ridicule–the state’s effort to build an “inaugural” airport in Will County. “Our goal was to do something at O’Hare, and we’ve done that, and to do something about Peotone,” the governor said. “He’s happy about O’Hare and so am I. I’m happier about Peotone than he is.”
The Daley-Ryan deal forced Brown, as Springfield’s airport point man, to talk a new game. After all, IDOT’s strategy had been premised on the idea that landlocked O’Hare wouldn’t be a major factor in handling future air-traffic growth. So now Peotone has become necessary even if reconfiguration increases the annual number of flights O’Hare can handle from the 912,000 of 2001 to 1.6 million by 2022. That’s a stopgap improvement, IDOT says.
In 1972 Ogilvie lost to Dan Walker–Illinois’ last Democratic governor–but under Walker, road builders “continued to play the same games,” an unnamed Republican official told the Sun-Times. “The key to the asphalt pavers is that they get contracts for their work on a predictable basis. The business continued to flow and the campaign contributions flowed to the Democratic governor, just like the Republican governor.”
The contracts to build a new airport and the toll roads to get us there would allow the state to express billions of dollars in additional gratitude.
In 1989 the newly formed Illinois-Indiana Regional Airport Study commission hired a consultant to identify the location of the next O’Hare. Four places were originally in the running–the Gary airport, a site straddling the Illinois-Indiana border, Peotone, and Kankakee. Meanwhile, the FAA used all kinds of channels to send the message that no new airport would be built until there was “regional consensus.” This meant the city of Chicago–which had stayed out of the discussion throughout the 80s. The Harold Washington and Eugene Sawyer administrations refused to participate in negotiations on the grounds that a new airport would siphon business from O’Hare and Midway. After being elected mayor in 1989, Richard M. Daley unveiled a plan to build a new airport at Lake Calumet. As the mayor’s press secretary told the Southtown Economist: “It’s an idiotic notion to think that something like this is going to be built without the city. There is no game until the city is at the table.”
