Ted Stalnos said he used to feel like a funeral home director as a development staffer helping people look for work on the Southeast Side, where the steel mills had shut and their good jobs had died.
Today Stalnos, a 57-year-old Southest Side native, is planning and administration director for the Calumet Area Industrial Commission, and he is thrilled about four major new developments proposed or in the works around Lake Calumet. “I feel like Lazarus,” he said, “watching it all come up again.”
Others fear what else might come up again. The area had one of the nation’s largest concentrations of heavy industry for decades, producing a plethora of choking, poisonous and far-reaching pollutants, including lasting contamination of soil and marshes. As much as jobs are needed, some residents worry the area will again become the place where Chicago’s dirty work is done.
On July 13, Gov. Pat Quinn signed a bill facilitating construction of a $3 billion plant that would turn coal into natural gas on the site of a former steel-mill coking plant at 115th Street and Burley Avenue. A commercial composting operation and a cement plant also are planned nearby, and a new asphalt storage facility is under construction.
Like Stalnos, Peggy Salazar grew up on the Southeast Side during the area’s economic heyday. But as a member of the Southeast Environmental Task Force, Salazar says the new developments will add pollution and could endanger long-standing plans for the area. The task force envisions a future based on the wetlands and open spaces for hiking, biking, fishing and birding, interspersed with preserved relics celebrating the area’s industrial past.
“That could be our economic engine, those are the assets we have on the Southeast Side,” said Salazar, 58, who grew up across the street from the giant U.S. Steel South Works mill several miles north of the Lake Calumet area. The vacant site enjoyed a dramatic new turn in July when it hosted the Dave Matthews Caravan, a three-day music festival. Now It is slated for a massive residential and commercial development still in the financing stages.
Task force members worry about air pollution from the cement plant, gasification plant and asphalt storage facility. They suspect the composting operation will produce unpleasant odors, and they worry about harmful diesel emissions from the influx of truck traffic.
The city for years has developed an industrial blueprint for the Southeast Side including parks, trails and the state-of-the-art Ford Calumet Environmental Center, which has stalled for lack of funding. Task force members would like the city to devote more effort to creating open space and recreational areas.
Developers say they are taking environmental impact into account. Leucadia National Corp., the company building the coal gasification plant, says it would be “99 percent cleaner” than conventional coal-fired power plants, which produce electricity while this plant would produce gas. The new plant would sit on the Calumet River adjacent to the DTE Chicago Fuels Terminal where thousands of tons of coal and petroleum coke from BP’s oil refinery in Whiting, Ind. await shipment on barges.
Hoyt Hudson, a consultant representing the gasification plant, said it would create 1,100 construction jobs and 200 permanent jobs.
The state law that Quinn signed was crucial to making the project financially viable, but the company still needs to obtain permits from state environmental and pollution control authorities. The legislation requires that 85 percent of the plant’s carbon dioxide emissions be captured and stored, either in a sequestration site underground or piped to Gulf Coast oil fields where carbon dioxide is used to push the last remaining oil out of depleted wells.
There currently are no large carbon sequestration sites nearby, though one is slated for central Illinois in connection with the long-delayed FutureGen “zero emissions” coal plant. Selling carbon for oil operations would depend on a major pipeline being built across the Midwest.
Environmental task force member Tom Shepherd said the group is concerned about the gasification plant’s emissions and about the influx of coal and petroleum coke to fuel it. Already the DTE Chicago Fuels Terminal is expanding to handle up to 6,000 tons a day of petroleum coke from BP’s oil refinery in Whiting, Ind. If the gasification plant is built, thousands more tons of coal per day from downstate Illinois also will be delivered by rail.
At 117th Street and Torrence on the site of a former grain elevator, Ozinga Ready Mix Concrete may build a plant to make cement, a key component in concrete, in a bid to stay competitive with foreign companies. Ozinga also is looking at sites in Northwest Indiana, where Gov. Mitch Daniels has offered them incentives, according to company executive vice president Marty Ozinga IV.
Environmentalists are concerned about emissions from the Ozinga plant, but the company is focused on its ability to create jobs and to replace other plants that produce higher concentrations of polluting gases. Ozinga said the proposed cement plant will create about 100 mostly union jobs and use modern pollution controls that meet strict new federal air standards for cement plants taking effect by 2013.
Making cement involves heating limestone to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, a process that creates toxic gases, dust and other emissions. The new regulations are expected to force older cement plants to close.
Ozinga said the 83-year-old family-owned company needs to make its own cement to compete with foreign corporations that make their own cement and have bought up other Midwestern concrete suppliers. When the building market was thriving before the economic crisis, Ozinga imported cement from Asia, where it is produced under much laxer environmental standards than in the U.S.
“In theory this will be replacing much dirtier plants,” Ozinga said.
Meanwhile an asphalt storage facility is under construction on the site of the old Wisconsin Steel mill at 106th Street near the Calumet River. In an April press conference, then-Mayor Richard M. Daley touted it as a keystone of Southeast Side revitalization. Asphalt Operating Services received $45 million in city Recovery Zone bonds plus county tax incentives to open the facility, which the company says will create 40 permanent jobs. Environmental task force members say they worry about the health effects of fumes from the liquid asphalt and diesel pollution from barges and trucks that carry it.
The Rhode Island-based Peninsula Compost Company wants to build a facility on 122nd Street near Torrence Avenue that would process 600 tons of food and yard waste daily from restaurants, hospitals and other institutions, turning it into soil and fertilizer for sale to Illinois farmers. Waste Management is a major investor in the company, raising the suspicions of residents who have battled Waste Management for years over its landfills.
Peninsula Compost co-founder and marketing director Nelson Widell said his operation would keep compost completely enclosed to prevent odors. He said the company has received no complaints on an odor hotline it maintains at its similar facility in Delaware. The Chicago operation would create 30 permanent jobs, Widell said, and reduce the amount of waste headed for landfills.
The environmental task force officially opposes the cement plant and coal gasification plant, but it is taking a wait-and-see attitude toward the composting facility.
Stalnos’s industrial commission is already working with South Side community colleges to provide training for the influx of work it expects from the new developments. But Salazar and other critics say the promised jobs are a pittance compared to the thousands who used to work in the steel mills and that the new industries will do little to change the Southeast Side’s reputation for heavy industry and pollution.
Trauma technician and local resident William Balasa, 36, would like to see the Calumet area get renewable energy projects like the Exelon “solar farm” located several miles west. He also favors new hospitals or colleges which he thinks would generate more jobs and less pollution than the proposed projects.
“We could bring in wind, solar, hydroelectric; you could grow algae” for biofuel, said Balasa. “There’s a lot you could do. But now, everybody is getting their hand in it except the community.”
This project is supported by the Chicago Local Reporting Initiative.