Trips to the emergency room are a regular part of life for Gladys and Miguel Martinez, a young couple raising their family in Pilsen. Their three children–three-year-old Alexis, four-year-old Michael, and five-year-old Ariel–all have serious asthma, compounded by occasional bouts of pneumonia. For a time Michael was going to the ER twice a week, though since the family got a nebulizer at home their trips have grown a little less frequent.
Of course you’ll hear the same story from health workers in almost any lower-income urban neighborhood–asthma, which has puzzled experts by turning epidemic even as the nation’s general air quality has improved, takes a disproportionate toll in those areas. Researchers are looking at everything from cockroach droppings to psychosocial stress as possible causes. But Pilsen and Little Village, respectively, are home to the Fisk and Crawford coal-burning power plants. And in 2001, after conducting a study of nine older Illinois power plants, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health concluded that pollution from these two plants was responsible for approximately 2,800 asthma attacks, 550 emergency room visits, and 41 premature deaths every year. The study also found that “in general, per capita health risks were greater closer to the power plants.”
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On election day last month, residents in two precincts in Pilsen and Little Village said as much in a vote on a nonbinding referendum on the proposed Chicago Clean Power Ordinance, which would impose mandatory emissions caps on sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon dioxide, and mercury to be met by January 2006. The plants would be required to submit emissions reports every January 31 for the previous year. For every ton of sulfur dioxide or nitrogen oxides, every ten tons of carbon dioxide, and every pound of mercury over the limits, they would be fined $1,000.
But Dick Simpson, a political science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and alderman of the 44th Ward from 1971 to ’79, said he thinks Burke’s motives are both genuine and in character. “On one hand he’s a typical machine politician, but he’s very different from your average alderman,” said Simpson, who covered Burke’s relationship with Daley in Rogues, Rebels, and Rubber Stamps, his 2001 history of the City Council. He noted that while Burke is generally loyal to Daley, they also have a long-standing political rivalry.
The ordinance is stuck in the Committee on Energy, Environmental Protection & Public Utilities, chaired by 19th Ward alderman Virginia Rugai. Norine Hughes, a Rugai spokeswoman, said the committee is reviewing it and trying to work out a “compromise” with Midwest Generation. There is no projected date for a committee vote, and no public hearings have been held.
In the weeks before the ballot referendum, Midwest Generation sent a letter to all voters in the two precincts asking them not to fall for the “extreme politics” of proponents of the ordinance and stating that it would have to close the plants if the ordinance passed.
