City pays price for Daley's midnight raid on Meigs

City pays price for Daley's midnight r
September 26, 2006
THE ISSUE: Chicago must pay $33,000 in fines and $1 million in reimbursements to O'Hare and Midway airports as a result of the sudden demolition of Meigs Field in 2003.

WE SAY: The payments are the price the city pays for having a leader who insists on calling all the shots regardless of minor details like federal regulations and public opinion. We wonder how cocky Mayor Richard Daley would be if the Meigs Field drama had played out in 2006 instead of 2003. If Daley and his administration had worries back then, they were nothing compared to the sweating that's going on in city hall these days.

Yet Daley and his gang were brassy enough back in those good ol' days to bulldoze Meigs Field out of business in a midnight raid on the downtown airstrip. With no public warning or discussion or required notification to the federal government, giant X's were carved into the runways by backhoes, making the airport useless.

Daley said he was concerned for the city's safety in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, when aircraft were hijacked and flown into buildings in New York and Washington, D.C. But Daley had another reason: He long had wanted to turn the land on which Meigs existed into a park as part of the expansion of the area around three of Chicago's major museums. Sure enough, the land is now a park and during warm weather is the site of music concerts.

Daley took the hatchet to Meigs amid a lengthy ongoing debate about its future. That debate was anything but resolved before the midnight raid. A vocal segment of the population, including many pilots and several lawmakers, wanted to keep the 55-year-old Meigs open, claiming Chicago would continue to benefit from having an airport near downtown that could handle small, private aircraft. The airport handled about 32,000 flights a year. Daley, however, didn't want to take any chances, even though he recently had gotten the federal government to declare the downtown area a temporary no-fly zone. So, like Zorro with his "Z," Daley ended the debate by leaving his "X."

And now the taxpayers of Chicago are paying a price for Daley's sledgehammer approach to civic improvement. Chicago will pay the Federal Aviation Administration $33,000 for closing Meigs without notice. That comes to $1,100 a day for the minimum 30 days of notice the city should have given the FAA before shutting the airport down. What's more, the city will have to reimburse O'Hare International and Midway airports $1 million for federal airport improvement money that was inappropriately used to prepare the area around Meigs -- known as Northerly Island -- for conversion into a park. The $1 million must come from a "non-aviation fund."

The payments are the result of a settlement of a dispute between the city and the FAA. The city got off cheaply. It had diverted $1.5 million in federal funds for O'Hare and Midway improvements to pay for the Meigs-Northerly Island project and could have faced a fine of $4.5 million. In the settlement, the city did not have to acknowledge any wrongdoing.

Wrongdoing? Who even hinted there was wrongdoing? It's a common practice to send your stealth squad to demolish a city institution while the rest of Chicago is sleeping. One day we'll wake up and Lake Michigan will be paved over as a parking lot. No big deal.

The penalty money being bandied about here is relatively small compared to the entire city budget, but it's still enough that some useful city services won't be properly funded this year. That's the price we taxpayers pay for a reckless stunt made by a stubborn mayor who insists he gets his way all the time. Yes, we do have a nice park on the lake. But it came with a textbook example of how government works in Chicago -- which is how government shouldn't work anywhere.