Boosters urge Pritzker to support proposed South Suburban Airport
South suburban economic development boosters met Thursday with state officials for the first time in three years to discuss the proposed South Suburban Airport near Peotone, an official said Friday.
State lawmakers who represent the region likely prompted the meeting by sending a letter to Gov. J.B. Pritzker, said Rick Bryant, an aide to U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Matteson.
“There were a lot of people in attendance,” Bryant said of Thursday’s session. Bryant publicly addressed a teleconference forum presented by Chicago Southland Economic Development Corporation.
The congressional aide said he informed state officials that Amazon and others are using the Rockford airport as a cargo hub but eyeing an airport in Gary, Indiana, because it is closer to Chicago-area distribution centers, Bryant said.
Illinois risks losing business to a neighboring state unless it acts, he said.
“I told them our competition is really Gary,” Bryant said. “We need to focus on building this before Gary builds out.”
Gary’s airport is landlocked and cannot expand beyond a single runway, Bryant said. Amazon and others would prefer a site with multiple runways that is not already congested with commercial air traffic, he said.
“In the long term we have a better site,” Bryant said. “In the short term Gary has the upper hand.”
Rockford is too far away from millions of Chicago-area customers when every mile and every minute means money in the highly competitive world of e-commerce.
State Rep. Anthony DeLuca, D-Chicago Heights, wrote the Oct. 5 letter to Pritzker. It was signed by state Sens. Michael Hastings, D-Frankfort, Napoleon Harris, D-Harvey and Patrick Joyce, D-Essex and state Reps. Kelly Burke, D-Evergreen Park, Will Davis, D-Homewood, Debbie Meyers-Martin, D-Olympia Fields, Bob
Rita, D-Blue Island, and Nicholas Smith, D-Chicago.
Lawmakers criticized Pritzker for hiring consultants to study alternate uses for the nearly 5,000 acres the state spent about $100 million to acquire, and for eliminating engineering for a proposed Interstate 57 interchange to serve the airport from the Illinois Department of Transportation’s five-year plan, according to the letter.
“As longtime Southland residents, we’ve witnessed our region overlooked,” DeLuca and other lawmakers wrote. “We will no longer stand idly by for any governor who does not make improving the economic quality of life in our region a top priority.”
Will County farmers and other opponents have complained for more than 30 years that the so-called third airport would be a boondoggle and waste of state money.
Proponents want to show how e-commerce growth, the Southland’s network of highways and rail lines and booming business in warehouses, logistics and intermodal facilities are driving demand for additional air cargo capacity that O’Hare and Midway airports could not provide.
“I think we’re making some progress at the state level,” Bryant said.
Bryant said after I reported on his presentation about the airport to the Southland development group in April, he got a call the next day from Ross Perot Jr., son of the late billionaire and 1992 presidential candidate Ross Perot.
Perot Jr. read my story and invited Bryant to the Dallas, Texas, area to visit Fort Worth Alliance Airport. The facility is billed as the world’s first industrial airport and opened in 1989 as a joint venture of Perot, the city of Fort Worth and the Federal Aviation Administration.
Bryant and Reggie Greenwood, executive director of the Chicago Southland Economic Development Corporation, accepted Perot’s invitation and recently toured Alliance Airport, Bryant said. Perot told them his father endured a lot of criticism when he built the airport 30 years ago in the middle of nowhere.
“People laughed at him,” Bryant said. “People aren’t laughing at him anymore.”
An industrial complex has grown around the airport for miles in each direction, Bryant said. More than 65,000 people work at businesses in the complex, which is known informally as the city of Alliance, he said.
“They don’t have any commercial air traffic because they never planned for that but they have every other type of aviation service,” Bryant said. “It’s a major cargo and logistics hub.”
Driverless, autonomous trucks operate between the airport and nearby warehouses, he said.
“They have all kinds of technology,” Bryant said.
Amazon has said it will buy 100 airplanes to complete with FedEx and UPS, Bryant said. E-commerce companies have little interest in passenger airports like O’Hare and Midway, he said.
“They’re building air cargo hubs all around the country very quickly,” Bryant said. “The air cargo business model is to have two facilities on opposite ends of a metro area so they don’t have to deal with congestion at the core of the city.”
“They use secondary airports,” Bryant said. “They don’t use primary airports because they’re too congested.”
Bryant said Perot asked what he could do to help move along the South Suburban Airport, which is proposed for the site of Bult Field near Monee. Bryant said he asked Perot to give Pritzker a call.
Perot declined, he said, but said he would talk to the governor if Pritzker called him.
Just as south suburban lawmakers urged in their letter to Pritzker, Bryant said he told the governor’s representatives Thursday the state should move ahead with plans for the I-57 interchange and commit to developing the South Suburban Airport.
Alliance Airport should be a prototype for the South Suburban Airport because it shows how an air cargo facility would create jobs and economic development, he said.
“It’s a huge success story,” Bryant said.