Conscious Choice: O'Hare, Meigs, and Peotone

February 2002 | News of the Earth

O'Hare, Meigs, and Peotone

by Dave Aftandilian

Last June Mayor Daley presented a $6 billion proposal for expanding O’Hare International Airport. The plan included the addition of one new north runway and reconfiguring the existing runways to include a southern one, which would nearly double O’Hare’s flight capacity (from 908,000 flights last year to 1.6 million or more). It also included building an additional highway entrance on the west side of O’Hare. But Illinois is one of only six states in the country in which the governor holds veto power over new airport runways, and Governor George Ryan had made a campaign promise not to allow any new runways at O’Hare. He favored building a new airport at Peotone in rural Will County instead, and wanted to keep Meigs Field on Chicago’s lakefront open as well. (It was scheduled to close in early 2002; Daley had wanted to build a park on the land.)

This deadlock might have lasted at least until the end of Ryan’s term of office if Senator Dick Durbin and Representative William Lipinski hadn’t threatened to go over Ryan’s head and seek federal approval for the O’Hare expansion (on the grounds that flight delays at O’Hare were wreaking havoc with the nation’s air travel). That forced Daley and Ryan to the bargaining table, and resulted in a December 5 announcement that they had reached a deal. Ryan would support all of Daley’s O’Hare expansion plans, and would drop his insistence on capping the number of flights at O’Hare. Instead the plan would commit up to $450 million for soundproofing homes and schools near O’Hare that experienced noise levels of at least 65 decibels averaged over the course of a year. Daley agreed to support an airport in Peotone, and the agreement will allow Meigs Field to remain open until January 1, 2026, although the state general assembly could vote to close it anytime after January 1, 2006 (the two biggest passenger air carriers at O’Hare, currently United and American, will supposedly pay Meigs’ annual operating deficit).

Sounds like everyone got what they wanted, right? Daley won his O’Hare expansion, which the Commercial Club of Chicago and the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce estimate will create an additional 195,000 jobs and generate $16 billion in economic growth for the region. Ryan convinced Daley to drop his opposition to Peotone, and also kept Meigs Field open for another generation. You might think that the only real losers are the hundreds of homeowners and other residents in the western suburbs of Chicago, mainly Bensenville, who will be forced out of their homes to make way for the new south runway at O’Hare.

Wrong — most people lose in this deal. First off, Chicagoans will probably have to put up with Meigs Field for another twenty-five years. Good for a handful of wealthy businesspeople and politicians, who are the main users of Meigs, but not so good for the thousands of residents and visitors who would have enjoyed the new park that Daley and his allies were planning to build there instead. Not to mention the post-9/11 safety risks of having an airport so close to the tall buildings of Chicago’s Loop.

There’s only one potential bright spot in the Ryan/Daley O’Hare expansion deal: if constructed as it stands, it would likely kill plans for the proposed Peotone airport. As U.S. Senator Peter Fitzgerald put it, "there’s no cost justification for Peotone if there is a massive expansion of O’Hare." Small wonder that Fitzgerald, Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr., and other Peotone supporters have vowed to try to torpedo the deal. And there’s nothing in the formal deal that stipulates exactly what Chicago has to do in support of Peotone. When asked just a couple days after the deal was announced what the city’s commitment to Peotone would be, Daley had already begun to waffle: "I have to support and lobby, I guess. I don’t know what that means."

In my view, pretty much anything that prevents Peotone from getting built is a good thing. We don’t need yet another out-of-control economic juggernaut driving sprawl to run roughshod over thousands of acres of prime farmland, pollute one of the highest-quality rivers in the state (the Kankakee), and drive yet another stake into the heart of a rural way of life that is already fast disappearing in Illinois. (For many more reasons not to build an airport at Peotone, see the "News of the Earth" column from August 2001 at www.conscious choice.com/note, or visit Shut This Airport Nightmare Down’s Web page, listed in the resources below.)

But won’t it be a good thing to have more runways at O’Hare? Won’t more planes landing mean fewer delays at the airport, saving time and annoyance for travelers across the country? Maybe. As Jack Saporito, president of the Alliance of Residents Concerning O’Hare (AReCO) puts it, "Expanding airports does not‘fix’ flight delays. The air transport industry manufactured the delays themselves prior to September 11 to market airport expansion, through overscheduling, removal of the high-density rule [a federal rule that limited the number of flights at O’Hare], and other schemes. If there were delays today, they could be fixed through reinstituting the high-density rule, demand-management practices [e.g., charging more for flights during peak travel times, to encourage people not to fly at the busiest times of day], and other management methods."

Even if expanding O’Hare actually will reduce flight delays, how high a price are we willing to pay for alleviating our inconvenience at the airport? Let’s start with the dollars and common sense. Many analysts suggest that the massive expansion Daley has proposed for O’Hare will cost far more than the $6 billion he currently estimates. Where will the money come from? Daley has said that "[the agreement] protects local taxpayers, because the costs will be paid by the airlines, through passenger facility charges, and through the airport improvement fund, none of which obligate local taxpayers." But many airlines almost went bankrupt in the aftermath of September 11, necessitating a multi-billion-dollar federal bailout, and almost all of them have experienced significant declines in ridership since then. Is it really reasonable to expect the airlines to be able to fund a major expansion of O’Hare? If they can’t, taxpayers will have to pick up the slack — quite possibly billions of dollars’ worth of it.

And that’s not to mention the fact that airports are some of the highest-volume and least-regulated producers of toxic waste — including a number of known carcinogens — and noise pollution in the country. For instance, a recent 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 a little more than 10 percent of the cancer cases within a sixteen-square-mile area surrounding Midway.

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) report Flying Off Course: Environmental Impacts of America’s Airports (available at www.nrdc.org), 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 de-icing fluid (which contains ethylene glycol) and other chemicals that are washed into local waterways, polluting groundwater sources.

And that’s not to mention the noise pollution. At a busy airport like O’Hare, aircraft can take off every fifteen to twenty-two seconds, and the noise can adversely affect the health and sanity of residents more than fifteen miles away from the airport. To make matters worse, the FAA calculates its permissible noise level limits based on a yearly average, rather than the single ear-splittingly loud events that characterize aircraft take-offs and landings. And the 65 DNL (decibels averaged over a year) level the FAA uses is not enough to protect people from harmful noise; the World Health Organization, the EPA, and other groups determined years ago that noise above a 55 DNL level is harmful. For instance, a study last year published in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine found that exposure to single-event maximum aircraft noise levels of 55 decibels significantly increased the incidence of high blood pressure among those exposed. The study concluded that "Exposure to aircraft noise may be a risk factor for hypertension.... It is suggested that special attention be paid to maximum noise levels because of possible physiological effects from aircraft noise." (For more information on the health effects of aircraft noise, visit the Web site listed below for the Alliance of Residents Concerning O’Hare.)

So what’s the solution? Are we all supposed to just walk where we need to go? For relatively short regional trips — which constitute about 17 percent of flights to and from O’Hare, according to Richard Harnish, executive director of the Midwest High Speed Rail Coalition — we should indeed seek a more practical, less polluting method of travel than airplanes. How about high-speed rail? The Environmental Law and Policy Center locally, and other groups nationally, have been working for years to make Chicago a high-speed rail hub for the Midwest. Imagine being able to take a train or el from your neighborhood to downtown, then board a clean, quiet, Internet-equipped train to speed you on your way to Milwaukee, Bloomington, Detroit, or other Midwestern destinations. Better still, the train would take passengers to the heart of downtown, where most business and tourist travelers want to be, rather than to an outlying airport an hour or more from the final destination. All we need is a little support for the idea from our elected officials.

Failing that, we should at least ensure that the proper environmental impact studies are conducted prior to expanding O’Hare, so that we can avoid or minimize as many of the environmental problems from the new runways and highway as possible. But bills recently introduced in the U.S. Senate by Dick Durbin (S.1786, National Aviation Capacity Expansion Act) and in the U.S. House of Representatives by William Lipinski (same title) would instead mandate the expansion, regardless of whether it was safe and environmentally sound or not. In fact, these bills would specifically exempt the massive O’Hare expansion from complying with the Clean Air Act, and would "expedite" the environmental review process of the FAA and other federal agencies, completely bypassing the reviews required under the National Environmental Policy Act if the preconstruction reviews are not completed by the end of 2004. This is not a very impressive performance from either of these elected officials, especially the supposedly pro-environment Durbin. In fact, Durbin, a Democrat, took a page from the Republicans’ playbook when he tried to sneak this bill past the Senate last year as a rider on the Defense Appropriations bill that funded the war on terrorism. Thanks to an unofficial filibuster by the Republican senator from Illinois, Peter Fitzgerald, Durbin failed.

The final chapter in this airport expansion saga is far from written in stone yet. If Durbin and Lipinski fail to push their O’Hare expansion bills through Congress, the governor to be elected next year could decide to bow out of the deal (as could Daley, for that matter). In the meantime, we should all let our elected officials know that we do not want an airport in Peotone, that we would prefer high-speed rail, and that if we must have O’Hare expansion, we want to make sure that the proper reviews are undertaken to protect our health and safety and the environment.

Resources

Alliance of Residents Concerning O’Hare (AreCO)

Environmental Law and Policy Center

Midwest High-Speed Rail Coalition

Shut This Airport Nightmare Down (STAND)

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