Will County Green Party

Earlier this week, I joined a large group of STAND and Will County Green Party members protested against Governor Quinn and the use of eminent domain to take property for the proposed Peotone airport. The demonstration was at the Tinley Park Convention Center on Tuesday. We made the front page of the Southtown Star, and a local edition of the Chicago Tribune. WBBM 780 radio reported several times we were demanding that there should be no eminent at Peotone prior to the FAA deciding if an airport can be built. In addition, Russell Publications, and a couple of other newspapers covered the story.We had been waiting for the Governor to show up, but assumed we missed him, that he snuck in the back door, and so we began to leave shortly after noon. But we did see a black SUV drive around the parking lot, which did not drop the governor off but finally parked at the far end of the parking lot.

My wife, Maureen said we should wait and see if he was hiding in the SUV. After we got into our cars and most cars left, the Governor and his group got out of their SUV and started walking to the center. So Maureen, John Fransese, and I got out our big NO EMINENT DOMAIN banner, and I approached Quinn, who knows me, shook hands, and told him that eminent domain was wrong, since there is no FAA Record of Decision. He said the airport is coming. I repeated that it is still wrong to take people’s land before an FAA ROD. I was polite, respectful and spoke from the heart.

I also, said that I knew Jesse was putting a lot of pressure on him, but it’s simply wrong to take people’s land.

I asked if he had heard about MidAmerica. He had of course. I said this will be another white elephant, and the same people who crunched the numbers for MidAmerica, TAMS, saying that MidAmerica would create 24,000 jobs,are the ones who crunched the numbers for Peotone. He said we had talked about that. (We had not.)

In talking with him I wanted to appeal to his human side (which apparently died a while ago). In mentioning the white elephant, I wanted to appeal to his concerns about his legacy. (Even wacky Blagojevich expressed fear that Peotone would be a white elephant.)

There were two main purposes for the event. One was to get out our message that the state should not to do eminent domain prior to an FAA record of decision. It looks like we succeeded at getting some media coverage on that.

The other purpose was to let Quinn know that if he uses eminent domain, there will be a big outcry by us and it will be covered by the media. That was accomplished.

We are at an important moment in the airport battle. We need to ramp up our opposition and get as much media coverage as possible on the fact that the state is abusing eminent domain and wasting tax dollars. We need to raise hell!