Leaders of the anti-noise fight around O`Hare International Airport said Friday that they would gladly meet with Gov. Jim Edgar to discuss capping flights at O`Hare, but said they do not believe that the governor can persuade them to drop their opposition to new runways.
Suburban O`Hare Commission officials also affirmed that no amount of concessions by Chicago on O`Hare noise and runway issues could persuade them to drop their opposition to a third major regional airport at Lake Calumet.
Commission officials were responding to a letter this week from Illinois Transportation Secretary Kirk Brown inviting them to meet with Edgar to talk about a cap or ceiling on the number of flights at O`Hare in exchange for a new runway to reduce delays.
The commission has opposed new runways at O`Hare, contending that an expansion of the airport`s flight-handling capacity could lead to more flight operations and worse jet noise for surrounding residents. O`Hare currently handles about 800,000 flights a year.
Before the Suburban O`Hare Commission would even consider changing its position, ”the first step is that we`d have to have a nailed-down plan for an ironclad cap,” said Matthew Rosenberg, spokesman for the group and director of its grass-roots affiliate, the O`Hare Citizens Coalition.
”Then we`d have to have it accepted by the Federal Aviation Administration and others, then signed and legally carved in stone forever, with no way to overturn it,” Rosenberg said.
Asked whether such a cap could persuade the commission to drop its opposition to a Lake Calumet airport, Elk Grove Village President Charles Zettek responded, ”Absolutely, positively, unequivocally not!”
”There will be no tradeoff on Lake Calumet for concessions at O`Hare,”
said Zettek, vice chairman of the commission. ”We will not do that under any circumstances.”
The commission supports a rural site for the new airport, saying the Lake Calumet site is too small to accommodate future growth and that new flights would be pushed back to O`Hare.
The Suburban O`Hare Commission is a coalition of Du Page County and 12 suburbs in northeast Du Page and in west and northwest Cook County.
Should the commission maintain a hard line against Lake Calumet, it could hinder plans by some legislators to wring O`Hare noise concessions out of Chicago in exchange for suburban support for the new Southeast Side airport.
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House Minority Leader Lee Daniels (R-Elmhurst), for one, has called for a regional airport noise commission, a cap on new flights, nighttime curfews on certain runways and accelerated use of quieter aircraft as part of legislation creating a regional airport authority, a bill that would bring construction of the third airport one step closer.
In an interview Friday, Transportation Secretary Brown said the state and the region needed ”a framework” within which to discuss the new runway and flight caps at O`Hare, and that is where Daniels` proposed noise commission could come in.
If the noise commission ends up being part of the final Lake Calumet deal, the runway-flight caps issue could be the first item on its agenda, Brown said.
But in a statement released Friday, the Suburban O`Hare Commission said that although it welcomes the opportunity to meet with the governor, ”recent letters from the Edgar administration and the FAA only reaffirm that fail-safe caps on O`Hare flights are difficult, if not impossible. . . . SOC has maintained caps are impossible to enforce.”
Brown responded that he nonetheless was ”very pleased with that response. I think it`s very reasonable.”
Brown explained that his letter of this week was intended to reaffirm Edgar`s commitment not to push for an O`Hare expansion without some agreement with suburban officials, and to get people to start talking about flight caps. Brown said discussions on O`Hare runways would not hold up the progress of Lake Calumet negotiations. Those talks are in the ”dotting the i`s and crossing the t`s stage” and mostly involve the lawyers now, he said, adding that ”it`s not a situation where we have major issues dividing us.”
Edgar has faced bipartisan opposition in the General Assembly to the Lake Calumet airport, from suburban Republicans representing noise-impacted communities near O`Hare to Chicago Democrats whose Southeast Side constituents would be displaced by the new airfield.