Winter 2003

On a hot July afternoon, the tall oak trees of eastern Will County's Raccoon Grove Forest Preserve provide a shady refuge. Bird songs echo through the forest as visitors follow a trail through the thick green understory containing at least 174 native plant species, among them the state-threatened goldenseal.

This woodland prairie grove has avoided the axe and plow, enjoying relative tranquility over the 170 years since European settlers arrived. Yet here on the edge of this 78.7 -acre nature preserve with its 132.5-acre dedicated buffer, the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) is intent on building a massive airport.

The proposed south-suburban airport is best known as "Peotone" after one of the five semi-rural towns that encircle the site. The Peotone airport would be much bigger than generally recognized. Blueprints call for eventual acquisition of 24,000 acres of eastern Will County — 35 square miles of real estate, an area nearly three times the size of O'Hare. Boosters envision the "third" airport becoming Chicago's primary airport, an "engine for economic development" that would "create" 236,000 jobs and bring 400,000 new residents to southern Cook, eastern Will, and northern Kankakee counties.

The Sierra Club's Illinois chapter sees an ecological disaster in the making. "One of the biggest threats to biodiversity in the Chicago region is poorly planned suburban real estate development," chapter director Jack Darin contends. Between the airport and a related network of over 100 miles of proposed toll roads, Darin sees a scheme by local, state, and federal interests to promote sprawl with no regard for nature. Darin underlines this by pointing out that the Peotone site's rural location 35 miles from Chicago's central business district encourages low-density development.

The fully built-out airport footprint (in white) would cover 24,000 acres of land that feeds tributaries of the Kankakee River. The airport's first phase is outlined in red. Map courtesy of IDOT/FAA.

The airport site is near a mid-continental divide. To the north is the Little Calumet River watershed. Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) Senior Engineer Bill Eyring says some south Cook County suburbs there can expect Peotone to bring more flooding and poorer water quality. Most runoff, however, would flow south into the Kankakee River watershed, a predominantly rural area consisting of remarkably healthy tributary streams and a diverse fishery. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR) calls this river basin "one of Illinois' greatest natural resource treasures." Flowing westward from northern Indiana en route to the Illinois River, the 90-mile Kankakee has a diverse and abundant mussel population that the Illinois Natural History Survey's Larry Page has called "a resource of national importance."

According to an environmental impact statement (EIS) released in July 2002, the airport plan would fill in some waterways (including a seven-mile length of Black Walnut Creek) and transform others into channels that quickly move large volumes of polluted water. More than 180 acres of wetlands would be destroyed, and 1,200 acres of floodplain impacted.

Innovative management of water quality, water supply, storm water runoff and flooding doesn't appear to be a priority for airport planners. A source who has failed to convince IDOT consultants to be more proactive concludes: "They aren't trained to incorporate energy-efficient or ecological designs into their plans."

What About Runoff?
Elaborate systems would be built to trap such pollutants as jet de-icing chemicals. This is not the case, however, for runoff from parking lots, rooftops, and most runways — let alone all the new development that the project is intended to stimulate. After a heavy rain, the runoff would rush into on-site storm sewers and local streams to be detained in large on-stream basins a mile or more downstream. These detention ponds would trap some effluent. But a significant volume of partially treated water contaminated by oil and grease, sediment, heavy metals, and nutrients would be funneled into the watershed's tributaries and dumped in the Kankakee.

One such tributary is Exline Slough — a farm drainage ditch with a diverse fish community, now classified as a class A stream. IDNR Streams Biologist Steve Pescitelli says about half of its 23 species, including several types of darters, are intolerant to major changes in habitat or water quality.

Last summer Pescitelli, with a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers fisheries biologist and three interns, developed a new appreciation for the Kankakee during a river survey near the city of Wilmington. He knew that the river has the highest rating of any in the Chicago region — "B" with pockets in the "A" range. Indeed, previous studies have shown that the river has as many as 89 varieties of fish and an abundant mussel population. Using multiple collection techniques over the course of several hours, this team found nearly 50 fish species — including the state-threatened river red horse and the endangered pallid shiner. "That was a career day for me," Pescitelli says.

According to the EIS, the new airport would create a daily demand for two million gallons of water. Induced growth of an additional 400,000 area residents would mean a daily demand for an additional 47.6 million gallons. Where all this water would come from is unknown. Lake Michigan isn't likely to be an option, as Illinois has already exceeded its quota for what it can draw. And an airport and related growth would create an ever-larger footprint of impervious surfaces that would block water from taking its natural course, thus diminishing underground water supplies.

The EIS doesn't calculate the amount of storm water runoff that would result from paving over so much land. Openlands Project Regional Land Use Coordinator Richard Acker estimates that a second O'Hare and its resulting suburbs would mean the annual production of tens of billions of gallons of storm water runoff. One billion gallons could fill two Sears Towers.

River Down a Slippery Slope
Sierra Club's Darin agrees that airport planners don't "seem to have made any effort to quantify whether the Kankakee can sustain all these added inputs, let alone the draw-downs." Such government-sanctioned neglect could send the Kankakee down the same slippery slope that so badly degraded the upper Des Plaines and DuPage Rivers.

Poring through the EIS, Acker has found other food for thought. The fully built-out 24,000-acre airport would pave over 15,595 acres of "prime" and "important" farmland, so designated for its capacity to maximize yields with minimal inputs. He predicts airport-driven suburbanization would eventually cover an area larger than the city of Chicago — the lion's share of this, too, would be high-quality farmland. Addition-ally, the airport would annually generate 140 million pounds of new air pollutants in what today is a rolling countryside blessed with fresh air. The EIS also acknowledges the wealth of wildlife in the area, including such state-endangered species as the three-toed and blue-spotted salamanders, and the Massasauga rattlesnake, but doesn't quantify what development would do to them.

The FAA has a good reason for failing to study environmental impacts in its EIS: the agency didn't have to. The document was an unusual "Tier 1" EIS, pertaining only to IDOT's interest in acquiring land, which, of course, won't affect ecosystems. FAA officials promise a thorough analysis of direct and indirect impacts in the yet-to-begin Tier 2 EIS pertaining to development of an actual airport. Critics say the tiered process appears designed to avoid discussion of ecological challenges until IDOT owns the land.

In September, the FAA awarded IDOT $3 million to develop a phase-one airport design, prompting IDOT spokesman Richard Adorjan to tell reporters that federal approval for actual construction is a foregone conclusion. But many conservation and smart-growth organizations oppose such government expenditures and their encouragement of rapid suburban development. They say tax dollars could be better spent investing in strategies to make existing communities more attractive. This same logic could apply to Chicago's airport system, as well as other transportation modes such as high-speed rail.

Fifteen years ago, Indiana officials began touting their Midway-sized airport in Gary as ready to serve the south suburbs. IDOT countered that growing aviation demand dictates the need for a second O'Hare. Plopping another O'Hare atop the existing Gary airport, IDOT officials gleefully observed, would be an ecological disaster. Nearby, the mostly scattered remnants of a globally rare dune-and-swale ecosystem contain the highest concentrations of threatened and endangered species in Indiana.

The FAA has recently approved a more modest 20-year Gary airport expansion plan. Lake Michigan Federation Habitat Coordinator Joel Brammeier has come away from a series of EIS meetings with concerns about how the Gary expansion will affect the Calumet River. But he doesn't think the airport will damage the rare ecosystem.

Liz McCloskey disagrees. A biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's (USFWS) north Indiana suboffice, she says additional traffic at the barely utilized airport would harm Nature Conservancy and State of Indiana holdings located within a half mile of the end of the runways. Migratory birds would be deemed a danger to planes, and a nearby population of the federally endangered Karner blue butterfly could be adversely affected. However, McCloskey concedes that the Gary plan isn't nearly as bad as "the monster airport" that IDOT once proposed for the site.

More Than Enough Capacity
Acker has tracked both the Gary and Peotone proposals, contending that the Gary/Chicago airport appears to be "a useful part of the solution. IDOT has set up a false choice, claiming Gary isn't viable because it can't solve 100 percent of the problem," Acker says. "What IDOT never asks in its EIS is whether using a combination of all available resources — such as Gary, Midway, O'Hare, and high-speed rail — can help meet some percentage of the projected travel demands." "The Peotone EIS ignores the fact that combining these alternatives will give the region more than enough capacity."

USFWS Field Supervisor John Rogner made a similar common-sense request in a letter to the FAA. Rogner asks for something that's been missing throughout the airport planning process — an explanation of "the relationship among several projects (or project alternatives) to improve air service."

Raccoon Grove Nature Preserve could be degraded by the proposed airport. Photo by Jim Nachel.

Meanwhile, the City of Chicago, which owns O'Hare and Midway, and IDOT want to substantially increase capacity at O'Hare. O'Hare foes quietly concede that the expansion of O'Hare, which would require less than one square mile of land, could create enough capacity to preclude the need for a brand-new mega-airport. Such an increase at the world's busiest airport won't approach the landscape alteration that Will County would experience with Peotone, for much damage has already been done. Since the 1950s, suburbanization of lands around O'Hare has unfolded with little regard for the natural environment.

Remarkably, the 13-square-mile airport harbors coyotes, red fox, migratory birds, winter raptors, snowy owls, and geese, but their existence there is tenuous. To minimize the chance of collisions with aircraft, county and state officials constantly relocate wildlife. According to Chris Anchor of the Forest Preserve District of Cook County, O'Hare appears to have had little observable ecological impact on intact terrestrial ecosystems, though he knows of no studies on factors such as airport noise and pollution. Busse Woods, only four miles away, remains the largest high-quality flatwoods east of the Mississippi River. Unlike Busse Woods, however, Will County's Raccoon Grove is immediately adjacent to the proposed Peotone airport site and sits downstream.

O'Hare neighbors' concerns about noise and toxic emissions "are very real," Darin says, noting airport pollution is a largely uncharted territory that demands closer scrutiny than ever. Staff of the Spring Brook Nature Center in nearby Itasca must schedule their nature programs around flight schedules due to noise. Further evidence of off-site environmental damage occurred a couple years ago after airline de-icing agent wound up in the Des Plaines River. Nobody much noticed until mountains of foam appeared ten miles downstream at the Hofmann Dam in west suburban Riverside. Maybe nothing noxious, but, then again, human beings don't drink from the Des Plaines.

By contrast, Kankakee, Bourbonnais, and Momence all take water from the Kankakee River, and Joliet wants to. "If the Peotone airport fulfills its promise, the additional demand for water would be much bigger than the sum of what these cities would use," CNT's Eyring said one day last summer, sitting on a shaded picnic table above the river's tree-lined banks. "The airport is designed to be unsustainable."

Robert Heuer is an Evanston-based journalist and consultant. He has written about the airport debate for Illinois Issues, Crain's Chicago Business, Conscious Choice, and the Chicago Reader.