What a difference a few miles make.
Out at the new Wal-Mart on the edge of Downstate Rantoul Friday, spirits were as low as the after-Christmas prices following an announcement that nearby Chanute Air Force Base was on a list of military installations to be closed.
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”This store is 65,000 square feet, a lot bigger than a town this size should have,” said store manager Michele Deal. ”That`s because of Chanute.
The base, she said, with more than 5,500 employees and 18,000 trainees passing through each year, is the major economic force in town.
”Half of my employees have ties to Chanute, and our sales depend on military paychecks,” she said. ”We know when it`s payday. Closing Chanute would be devastating.”
Across the town, business owners and officials agreed that if the base is closed and not replaced by other industry, the town could lose a third of its population, forcing Wal-Mart into tight times and virtually shuttering small businesses, like the Hair Force Barber Shop and Breezy`s Tattoo Studio, that live and die with the fortunes of Chanute.
But 150 miles away, in communities neighboring Ft. Sheridan along Chicago`s North Shore, the mood was somewhat different last week.
Chanute and Ft. Sheridan were among 86 military bases targeted for closure Thursday by a federal cost-cutting commission. As Sheridan officials made preliminary shutdown plans, officials of nearby communities and developers sat rubbing their hands in glee over what could prove to be one of the biggest economic boons for the towns in decades.
The difference between the two military bases, quite simply, is location. In Rantoul, where farmland prices have fallen by half in the last 10 years, Chanute`s flat 2,460-acre expanse is worth probably $2,000 an acre, said Joe Whalen, a land broker in a local Century 21 real estate office.
And that`s only if a buyer can be found for the land and its 239 buildings. Mayor Katy Podagrosi and base commander Brig. Gen. Peter Robinson talked Thursday of finding a new use for the base, but the suggestions-housing, industry, maybe a vocational school-were still tentative and hopeful.
Meanwhile, to the north, the villages of Highwood, Lake Forest and Highland Park were scrambling over each other to lay claim to the fort`s 698 acres of lakefront property, estimated to be worth $300,000 an acre.
”You`re talking about single-family homes going for close to $1 million,” said Robert Reaumond, a vice president of Coldwell Banker Commercial Real Estate Services, when queried about possible residential development. ”I don`t think anything remotely close to this size has ever opened up at one single point (along Lake Michigan).”
U.S. Rep. John E. Porter (R., Ill.) said he might fight the decision to close the base ”if it`s geographically or politically based,” but agreed with village officials that the closure could have some positive effects for nearby towns.
”That`s . . . prime land along Lake Michigan. It`s not on the tax rolls,” he said. ”If it were developed with single-family homes and multi-family residences, along with schools and parks, like the three communities that surround it, it would strike me as a very positive thing for Highwood, Highland Park and Lake Forest.”
Thursday`s announcement of the closure list sent attorneys and officials of those communities scurrying to dig up old claims to Ft. Sheridan`s land.
Though no village can lay claim to the fort while it is in federal hands, Highwood annexed 550 acres of the fort in 1965 as a pre-emptive move, according to old news reports.
But Highland Park disputed the claim, saying its 1869 city charter gave it part of the fort. Highwood officials countered with an 1887 document showing the state had ceded the land to the federal government, wiping out Highland Park`s claim.
Highwood`s annexation attempt was voided by a federal judge, but an annexation filing by Lake Forest in the 1970s still sits, relatively unnoticed, at the Lake County recorder of deeds office, said Lt. Col. Ron Yacovelli, a fort spokesman. Highland Park, meanwhile, is frantically scouring its archives for an annexation document of its own.
The result is a legal quagmire that may not be resolved for years.
Rantoul residents wish they had half of those troubles.
”If Chanute closes, everything will just stop,” said one resident.
”Everything will be really affected.”
Among the hardest hit would be the schools, according to Rantoul school officials. Fully 70 percent of the town`s elementary school students have ties to Chanute, said Dr. Gail Conely, the high school district superintendent. If the base closed, the number of elementary schools would be reduced from six to one or two, school officials said.
At the high school, 40 percent of the students have parents who work at Chanute.
Closing Chanute ”would be a major disruption to our total program, reducing the size of the program and the staff 20 to 40 percent,” Conely said. ”The snowball effect also is a concern of ours. As we have to reduce staff, those people also leave the community, taking another round of students.”
`It`s going to have a drastic effect, I`m sure,” said Minnie Burk, a secretary at the school for 26 years.
Meanwhile, around Ft. Sheridan, area schools predicted a significantly smaller 31 percent loss of elementary school students and a 5 percent loss at the high school. Nearby restaurant owners said their lunch crowd would drop if the base is closed, but most stand to gain considerable business if the fort is developed into homes or offices, creating a population boom.
Rantoul, however, stands to lose nearly 7,000 of its 20,000 residents if the base is closed, according to village officials.
”A lot of military people planned to retire here. They thought this would be their last move before retiring,” said Deal, manager of the Rantoul Wal-Mart, which employs over 60 military people, many retired. ”Now they`ll have to move again or take early retirement.”
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At the Village Hall Friday and at Jim`s Barber Shop and the Ben Franklin store downtown, residents who stopped in talked quietly among themselves. Some wondered whether they should let their children begin college at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, 15 miles to the south, or wait to see where they might be transferred. Retired couples worried that their rental property, designed to provide a retirement income, might now become useless.
In her office, Mayor Podagrosi fielded calls from a shocked Rantoul businessman who had just opened a music store north of Chanute`s main gate and a Champaign attorney who had been ready to close a real estate deal on a Rantoul mobile home park-until the announcement.
”Nobody could go out and sell a house today if they tried,” she said.
A dispatcher at A-1 Limousine Service in Rantoul, which shuttles servicemen between Willard Airport in Champaign and Chanute, said the company will lose 85 percent of its business if Chanute closes.
Still, Podagrosi said she was already working with legislators to try to find some economic salvation for Rantoul.
According to Robert Tauner, director of the federal defense department`s Office of Economic Adjustment, that could come in a variety of forms.
”We`ve tracked over the last 25 years about 100 bases that have been closed, and what you typically find with a major airfield . . . is that the local jurisdiction takes it and turns it into a city airport,” he said.
However, because Chanute`s runway, built during World War II, is obsolete and the town does not need an airport, Rantoul could follow the lead of other towns like Decatur. Decatur replaced its army signal depot, closed in 1962, with a Firestone Tire and Rubber Co. plant. Other towns have turned old bases into prisons or industrial parks, Tauner said.
”Rantoul certainly will be hurt when the payroll goes away,” he said.
”But there`s also opportunity there, even though it`s Downstate, in an agricultural area.”