Bram demands answers; Mayor insists there are no more
By Dee. Longfellow
For The Elmhurst Independent
At the City Council meeting held Monday, March 20, City Manager James Grabowski gave a presentation about continued expansion at O’Hare Airport, which included updates of the “Fly Quiet Runway Rotation” program. It was full of bullet-pointed lists and statistics, charts and graphs, diagrams of proposed modifications and much more.
But it wasn’t enough for 3rd Ward Alderman Michael Bram.
Always a champion for finding out more and more information about any given discussion that comes before City Council, Bram insisted the presentation contained a lot of information he already knew or could learn by reading the news sources cited in the report.
“I was looking for more information about how this is going to affect Elmhurst,” he said. “Quite frankly, I have read all this information before. I want to see new information, what does it mean for Elmhurst if they add four or five more runways? What does that mean in terms of number of flights?”
Mayor Steve Morley replied by saying there wasn’t much more information available from the Chicago Department of Aviation (CDA) nor from the O’Hare Modernization Plan partly because the leases for both United Airlines and American Airlines are due for renewal in 2018 and those negotiations are going on right now.
“O’Hare won’t be able to tell us much more until they are done working with the airlines on their lease agreements,” Morley explained. “They have not finalized their lease yet with their two major airlines. And they can’t share that — it’s ongoing. So there are no hard and fast facts because at this point, they don’t know how many gates they’ll be negotiating for. It depends on how the negotiations go.
“They won’t know how much they can do in terms of expansion or building until they know what the airlines plan to do themselves. They won’t know for a while how much of a commitment either airline plans to put into the expansion themselves. That will make a difference on number of flights, number of passengers and it’s just too early to predict something like that.”
Bram pressed on, insisting the airlines or the CDA had to have some idea about what could be expected in terms of added flights and changes in flight patterns and what that could mean to Elmhurst.
“What will impact the City of Elmhurst?” he posed. “They must know something about how many additional gates, how many more flights, how many more people. All this [report] is telling us what they plan to do and I still don’t see how exactly it’s going to impact us and what if anything we could do to stop the impact.”
It was then Mayor Morley cut Bram off.
“There are no more answers at this time, Alderman Bram,” he snapped.
“I beg to differ,” Bram said. “I doubt that they have no idea how many flights there could be. I thought we’d have a better definition by now of what we could expect from the expansion. They have to do studies and I’ve been asking for them for six or seven months and still we don’t have any information I appreciate this [report] as an overall view, but we can’t continue to wait for them to give us information.
“The Fly Quiet Project is adding a rotation from two configurations and I don’t think Elmhurst should say, ‘well, it’s better than it was.’ The flight rotation program is a political football and we need to kick it out of Elmhurst altogether.”
Second Ward Alderman Bob Dunn commented that in terms of the survey, Elmhurst had the third highest number of responses.
“It’s good to see that our neighbors are involved and aware,” he said. “We’re out there making noise, no doubt.”
Third Ward Alderman Dannee Polomsky thanked everyone who helped put the report together.
Bram raised a final question.
“At one time, there was competing interest in an airport in Peotone,” he said. “Do we know if that is still on the table.”
Morley and Grabowski indicated they didn’t know if plans for an airport in Peotone were still in the works or not but said they would find out.
