Business leaders hope to seize surging momentum for the South Suburban Airport and clear political hurdles that have kept the project grounded.
The project gained traction last week when a bipartisan committee of lawmakers unanimously approved a measure that would require the state to seek proposals from developers.
“If my presentation were a newspaper, the headline might read, ‘South Suburban Airport has its best week in at least eight years,'” congressional aide Rick Bryant said Tuesday during a lunchtime teleconference with Chicago Southland Chamber of Commerce members.
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Bryant has been working on the proposed airport for many years as an aide to U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Matteson, and her predecessor, former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.
A bill sponsored by state Rep. Will Davis, D-Homewood, sailed through the House Government Affairs Committee and triggered a flurry of news coverage about the airport. The full House will take up the measure at some point.
“We’re getting some traction now,” Bryant said. “We’ve almost reached that point where it’s a do-or-die situation.”
To date, Will County farmers, environmentalists and other opponents have won the narrative that buying land and building roads for the Peotone airport was a boondoggle.
Booming e-commerce in the Southland, however, has exploded the market for warehouses, logistics, intermodal, rail, trucking and related businesses. Developers cannot build million-square-foot buildings fast enough. Vacancy rates are near zero and the cost to lease buildings is skyrocketing.
Economic demand for a cargo airport to serve the Chicago area has never been greater.
“We cannot afford four more years of inaction if we want to build this airport,” Bryant told his online audience. “The fierce urgency of now is upon us. We have some momentum and we need to keep it up.”
Shoppers were already shifting online and away from brick and mortar stores before the pandemic hit e-commerce like a shot of steroids. Now Amazon, Target, Walmart and other retailers struggle to ship goods with dizzying speed.
For too long, airport opponents convinced political leaders that Peotone deserved a wait-and-see approach. Doubt loomed like storm clouds. Maybe the state should cut its losses and sell the nearly 5,000 acres it spent $100 million to acquire.
Ironically, naysayers have succeeded in squelching the project so far by insisting that no one would use the airport and that no developer would want to join the state in a public-private partnership to invest in building the airport.
But now the only argument that makes sense is to move ahead at full speed. To oppose the airport is to ignore the geography that puts Chicago in the middle of nation, the only place where all the major railways intersect.
It’s the same dynamic that led Montgomery Ward and Sears to make Chicago the hub of their shipping operations more than a century ago. Then you’ve got access to interstate highways, which companies want to ship and receive goods all over the country and the world.
“Companies want to be located near airports,” Bryant said. “Right now transportation comprises 45% to 70% of supply chain costs.”
In other words, if you’re Amazon or some other company, every mile between the Chicago market and airports in Rockford, Gary or Milwaukee means wasted dollars. Demand is so great to fly cargo into O’Hare that shippers are paying $1,000 per hour to park planes between flights, developer Paul Ahern told Tuesday’s audience. Ahern helped develop Rockford as a cargo airport.
“They’re the fastest growing cargo airport internationally year after year,” Ahern said. “They’re now the 17th largest cargo airport in the United States.”
That’s shocking, he said, because big passenger jets don’t fly in and out of Rockford.
“A lot of cargo flies in the luggage compartment of a passenger plane,” Ahern said.
Rockford’s airport has grown from having an economic impact of $1 billion and 5,000 jobs in 2011 to $4.7 billion and 21,000 jobs in the region in 2022, he said. Ahern said his companies also built about 5 million square feet of buildings devoted to cargo near O’Hare.
“South Suburban Airport would be a major infrastructure project for the whole nation. It would be the first airport to be developed in 50 years,” Ahern said. “We are located right on top of the transcontinental cargo route — Interstate 80. Our location is excellent.”
Ahern told Tuesday’s audience a developer should expect to spend between $1.2 billion and $1.5 billion to build the South Suburban Airport. About $700 million of that would be the cost of constructing a 10,000-foot runway, he said.
It will take nearly five years from when the project gets the green light to open it for cargo traffic, he said. About two years is needed for design, another two for construction and a year to install aviation equipment, according to Ahern.
Audience members asked about obstacles to building the airport.
“We need to get the political support lined up,” Bryant said. “Some of that comes from us. The business community has to step and say, ‘We need this airport.'”
The airport would create jobs and other opportunities for residents throughout the region.
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“This is good for the state of Illinois, this is good for the taxpayers,” Bryant said. “It’s good for job seekers and it’s good for keeping people in Illinois.”
A courageous political leader could ignore the naysayers and voice support for the airport. It doesn’t help that e-commerce businesses are notorious tight-lipped about their investment plans for strategic and competitive reasons.
That’s the problem with a project that has been proposed for more than 30 years. When it started out, Peotone was pitched as a passenger airport, and not a single airline would commit to flying passengers to a place surrounded by cornfields in eastern Will County.
Now the business model has shifted to cargo and the demand is obvious, but that lack of commitment lingers. Investors want a sure thing that will deliver money in the bank, not speculation.
“I think we really need a user of some kind to step forward,” Ahern said. “I think what would really get it to the top of the pile is some level of user interest.”
Ted Slowik is a columnist for the Daily Southtown.