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of its centralized location. It should have been aggressively pursued for its economic development potential where railroad tracks traverse the south suburbs. Unfortunately, the potential to develop a nationwide freight hub has been all but ignored by Jesse Jackson, Jr., the south suburban congressman. Instead, he has obsessed for ten years over building an airport, which would be located outside his congressional district.

Another alternative to a new airport, completely dismissed by state officials for decades, included simply making improvements to O'Hare International Airport, the second busiest in the world. That has finally begun, but it took a national aviation capacity crisis and threat of federal intervention to cause IDOT to consider O'Hare's expansion.

Even now, IDOT dismisses the regional benefit of fully utilizing existing facilities as an enhancement to the Chicagoland aviation system. Officials still refer to the Peotone proposal as the third airport, but in reality Indiana's Gary/Chicago International; western suburban Chicago/Rockford International; and Wisconsin's General Mitchell International airports have claimed title as Chicagoland's third airport. If built, the Peotone proposal would be the sixth. All three regional airports - Gary, Milwaukee, and Rockford - have excess capacity and assert underutilization.

That coupled with a study process that has been skewed since its inception, toward building an airport at Peotone, was highly criticized by technical experts as having "numerous misrepresentations, misconceptions, and incorrect assumptions."

Instead of an aviation solution, the Peotone airport has been simply a politically motivated scheme, using transportation and economic development as a guise to promote urban sprawl, enhance real estate development, and reward political contributors for the sake of a stronger political power base.

The word 'study' assumes an investigation into factual learning. But in the case of the Peotone airport, it is more accurate to claim that volumes of reports have been written and re-written - massaged - until the final document could meet the minimum requirements for building an airport.

What began as a three-state endeavor concluded in 1992 with a consensus against the Peotone site. But in November of 1994, former Gov. Jim Edgar took on sole support throwing Illinois funds into promoting the Peotone site based on the earlier studies. It has cost Illinois taxpayers tens of millions of dollars for studies, consultants, and public relations work despite a letter written to Edgar from the sixteen major airlines, asserting that they would not use a new airport at Peotone site.

Ex. governor George Ryan, who now resides in a federal penitentiary, convicted of corruption and the same kind of political wrangling that has kept the Peotone proposal alive, was the first to set aside $75 million to buy land.

The state now owns about one-third of what would be needed to build the first phase of the airport. A majority of the local governments near and including Peotone as well as an overwhelming majority of the people most affected by it oppose the project, which has now become a generational irritant.

Learn more about this author, Carol Henrichs.
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