Airport Plan May Get Its Wings Clipped

CHICAGO —  Windows of bungalows lining the streets of the city’s industrial South Side are starting to sport new signs--an airplane stamped with a red circle and a slash.

The message: No airport.

Mayor Richard M. Daley’s plan to build a third metropolitan airport near the Indiana line has sparked heated debate among politicians in two states and across the neighborhoods that would be bulldozed and replaced with runways.

Daley announced the $4.9-billion project in February, saying it represents jobs and an investment that would help revitalize the area, site of shuttered steel mills and toxic dumps.

But Indiana officials are fighting for a share of any new airport that might be built to alleviate congestion at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, the world’s busiest. A bi-state committee already had been considering four possible sites, none in Chicago.

And even in Hegewisch, a mixed industrial and residential neighborhood that Daley’s Lake Calumet Airport would displace, there is no consensus.

“Why should we have to leave? Why should somebody tell us where to live?” homeowner Janet Chibicki said.

But contractor James Amendola, a resident for 26 years, says there are any number of reasons to bulldoze Hegewisch for an airport.

“I think it’d be really good for the area, considering we got dumps on one side killing us. The water’s contaminated. What have we got left? All’s we got left is people got pride,” he said.

On one street, a block of white frame houses dead-ends with a view of a flaming smokestack at the LTV Steel yard. At the William W. Powers State Fish and Wildlife Area, picnic tables overlook oil tanks on the opposite shore of Wolf Lake.

Under the mayor’s proposal, 5,510 to 9,360 homes would be replaced by runways in Chicago’s Hegewisch and South Deering neighborhoods and in suburban Burnham and Calumet City.

“It took everything we have to get this house; now they’re going to take it away from us,” Chibicki said. She and her husband, Gary, saved 10 years before buying it for $64,000 in 1988, and she does not think they will get a fair price for it.

“I don’t think anybody, even the powerful mayor of the City of Chicago, has the right to literally destroy neighborhoods, when you have options 20 miles south or east of us,” said Calumet City Mayor Robert Stefaniak.

No option has won federal support and, even if Lake Calumet Airport is built, it would not open for about 20 years.

The airport would cover 9,400 acres, contrasted with O’Hare’s 7,700 acres. The city intends to pay for it with bonds, federal grants and either a $2.25 tax on travelers at O’Hare--on the Northwest Side--and at Midway Airport--on the Southwest Side--or with state and local taxes.

The city estimates that the airport would create more than 200,000 permanent jobs and each year would inject $13.7 billion into the regional economy.

The city has pledged to reimburse homeowners at fair-market value and to pay moving expenses and a relocation allowance, said Marj Halperin, Daley’s deputy press secretary.

Daley’s announcement also spawned a political fight, because it preempts the Illinois-Indiana committee that already had chosen four finalist airport sites, two in Indiana and two south of Chicago.

Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) has enlisted the aid of fellow Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), to fight Daley’s plan.

“The mayor’s plan is clearly unfair to Indiana, which has played by the rules from the beginning in the selection process for that new airport,” Coats said.

He is trying to block $5.2 million the city requested from the Federal Aviation Administration to produce a master plan for the airport.

Rep. Peter J. Visclosky (D-Ind.) has accused U.S. Transportation Secretary Samuel K. Skinner, former chairman of the Regional Transportation Authority of Northern Illinois, of favoring the city.

“All I’ve agreed to do is not eliminate any choices,” Skinner said after meeting with Coats and Dole.