* NY Times columnist Bob Herbert has written two columns this week about the forever-stalled third Chicago-area airport project…
The U.S. is in a world-class recession, hemorrhaging jobs and spending trillions of dollars trying to extricate itself from the mess. That this ready-to-go project is still sitting on the table, still waiting for state government approval after several long years have already been wasted, is plain nuts.
As is pretty obvious from that above passage, Herbert fully supports Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr.’s private airport plan…
The airport proposal has long been the primary focus of Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., a Chicago Democrat. He has spent years mastering its complexities, lining up financing that would keep taxpayer contributions to a minimum and fending off interests that do not want the competition that a third airport would bring, or who would like to carve out a corrupt stake in the project.
And he seems to understand a big part of the resistance…
The major airlines serving Chicago are not interested in seeing low-cost competition flying in and out of a spanking new airport, especially one with enormous growth potential. And many of the big-time politicians in and around Chicago are upset at the very thought of an airport being built in which they would be unable to control the jobs and the contracts. Airports tend to be monstrous patronage mills. This one would not be.
Nobody messes with Mayor Daley’s airports. That’s the Number One rule in Chicago. And a competing airport violates that “sacred” rule.
* But in today’s column, Herbert shows that he doesn’t fully appreciate the hurdles faced by Jackson’s plan…
No one that I’ve spoken with has found fault with the plan or its financing, which relies primarily on private capital. But there has been a palpable coolness to the project by some of the major political players in Chicago and in the state capital of Springfield. They have created a long-term behind-the-scenes bottleneck for the project.
Something that almost never gets mentioned is that the proposed airport footprint is not in Jackson’s congressional district, and some of the people who live in or adjacent to that footprint, particulary in Will County, don’t think that Jackson should be dictating to them.
Granted, the Will County folks never really came up with their own plan until Jackson rolled out a doable project. Some of this Will County resistance is just a plain ol’ turf war. But they do bring up legit points, so maybe Herbert could call Will County Executive Larry Walsh and hear him out. It didn’t help Jackson’s cause that the former Illinois Senate Majority Leader, Debbie Halvorson, lived next to the proposed airport and was a major opponent of Jackson’s plan. It also didn’t help that former Senate President Emil Jones didn’t particularly care for the congressman, to say the least.
Also, for years the third airport plan was allegedly used by political insiders in get rich(er) quick schemes. They bought and sold parcels of airport-area land and made a nice buck or two. The plan was mostly a fiction - and most everyone preferred it that way - until Jackson came along with a realistic alternative. For that, he’s to be commended. He does have a decent plan. What’s been lacking is real support from the powers that be in Will County. If Jackson can pull that off, then this thing might eventually fly.
* Peter Fitzgerald used to tell me that politics was like an onion, especially in Illinois. You had to peel layer after layer until you got to the truth. In reality, every one of those layers represents part of the truth, and there are a whole lot of layers here. So when Herbert concludes his column today with this…
The goal from the beginning has been to keep the proposed airport out of the clutches of Chicago’s notorious “pay-to-play” tradition.
That is the most likely reason that this project, with its potential to unleash so many jobs, has taken so long to get off the ground.
…I’d suggest that he has one layer right, but there are several others out there.