Twenty years is a long time to hang on to a dream. But Mike Pasteris is a patient man.
It was 1976 when he spotted an Illinois Commerce Commission announcement that the Penn Central Railroad was selling its right-of-way through Will County.
Spending two days walking the 20-plus miles of the abandoned rail line from his home in Joliet, Pasteris began dreaming of a hiking and biking trail that would snake through some of the last remaining virgin prairie in the state.
Getting people to share his excitement was the easy part. Colleagues from the Will County Forest Preserve District, where Pasteris was an intern at the time (he’s now assistant director), applauded the concept, as did officials from 14 municipalities and a network of environmental advocacy groups, among them the Openlands Project, headquartered in Chicago; the Nature Conservancy, based in Arlington, Va.; and the Sierra Club, based in San Francisco.
It was “a simple idea,” he figured.
But that was before a speeding train of irate homeowners, deed complications, flip-flopping state legislators and reluctant railroad company officers turned the Old Plank Road Trail proposal into a battle royal.
In 1982, Tom Hahn of Mokena, now executive director of CorLands (the Chicago-based real estate affiliate of the Openlands Project, the conservation group that negotiated with the railroad for the sale of the property), told a group of supporters that “we expected the right-of-way to be acquired in a year.”
Hahn was off by 10 years, and it would be another three before Pasteris could say, “We’re now right back where we started”–ready to have a bike path.
With anticipated approval from the Illinois Department of Transportation this summer, the trail’s first phase is expected to open next year, when 12 miles of paving–from Western Avenue in Park Forest to Owens Road in Frankfort–will be completed.
“Now it’s easy to say I’m excited,” said Rita Miotti of Matteson, chairman of the Old Plank Road Trail Management Commission, the intergovernmental coalition of municipal, township, county and state agencies that own trail land. The commission has been one of the driving forces behind the project.
“The frustrations are behind us. We finally accomplished something that’s going to provide so many opportunities for our communities for many more years than it took to make it happen,” said Miotti, who, like Pasteris, was in on the first meetings in 1976 and has been fighting for the trail ever since.
Miotti isn’t alone. Conservation experts have been eager to preserve the trail, which will be the only hiking and biking path in the region that borders native, or deep-soil, prairie. Native prairie comprises ground that has never been cultivated; other trails border restored prairie.
“A person will be able to lumber down the path on his bicycle and still enjoy some of the same classically pristine areas that one of the railroad men would have viewed (more than 100 years ago),” said George Bellovics of the Illinois Department of Conservation. The department owns a one-mile stretch of the path in Matteson between Cicero and Central Avenues that the agency hopes to dedicate as a nature preserve because of its value as a prairie.
The trail, once developed, is expected to serve as a southern anchor for a 1,000-mile network of greenways being developed in the Chicago area under a plan created by the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission and the Openlands Project. Equally significant for ardent cyclists is the fact that the Old Plank Road Trail provides a vital link on the northern route of the projected coast-to-coast American Discovery Trail System, a hiking and biking trail that eventually will stretch 3,000 miles from California to Maryland.
“Family recreation generally comes with a dollar sign these days, whether you go to a movie or somewhere else, but the trail will provide an opportunity for families to be together hiking and biking without spending a plug nickel,” said Bruce Hodgdon of Joliet, public information naturalist for the Will County Forest Preserve District, which owns more than half of the 20.1-mile trail.
Hundreds of people have a stake in the project. One of them is Bill Zales, a Mokena man who has kept a tight grip on the dream since joining the effort 15 years ago.
A botany professor at Joliet Junior College, Zales was the man who led a brisk trek through portions of the trail where volunteers have spent thousands of hours ripping out underbrush and trash that still clogs some of the right-of-way.
He pointed out the places where the red-orange prairie lilies and the Slender Lady’s Tress orchid, among many rare prairie species, will be flourishing by summer.
As regional steward for the volunteer Old Plank Road Trail Association, he said he chalked up 1,200 miles in his car last year working on the project, and “the trail is only 3 miles from my house.”
Zales is in charge of the individual stewards, each of whom is the volunteer “mother hen” for a mile or so of the trail; they pick up trash, tear out underbrush, report any problems, collect prairie seeds and make an inventory of native plants.
Some of the stewards, such as Bonnie Major of Park Forest, plan special events along their portions of the trail. For instance, Major has hosted a community Easter egg hunt for the last couple of years.
She and Zales are among the core volunteers who have spent years lobbying for the trail, rarely missing a town planning commission meeting, township hearing or state legislative session on the issue.
“Some of the things the opponents were saying were so very untrue. It made me want to work all the harder to see that the project was completed,” said Carl Glassford, the first president of the Old Plank Road Trail volunteer group. Although some homeowners have raised the specter of crime, destruction of their property and declining property values in opposing the trail, Glassford pointed out that national research on recreational trails shows those fears to be unfounded.
Instead, bicycle trails have a positive economic impact on communities, according to research conducted by the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, based in Washington, D.C. The national environmental group has spawned 681 existing biking and hiking trails built on former railroad rights-of-way throughout the country, with 900 more on the drawing boards.
Nonetheless, some adjacent property owners claimed the Old Plank Road Trail would invade their privacy and breed mayhem.
“It did get hot,” recalled Glassford of Homewood.
Zales admitted that he had felt like throwing in the towel several times during the battle–called by one conservation group “one of the region’s most arduous conservation acquisitions.”
But he, like hundreds of others, stuck it out, marching in parades, managing fires to burn off the underbrush and instituting a series of educational trail walks to teach people the story of the prairie and its scarcity in Illinois today.
“Only one-tenth of one percent of the original 21 million acres of tall-grass prairie in the state is left,” Zales said. He explained that preserving native prairie species could be far more significant in the future, when current agricultural methods no longer work.
He foresees the time when perennial agriculture modeled on the prairie will replace today’s method of “plowing every inch of Illinois (farmland) and turning it upside down every year.”
Such a revolutionary method would renew the soil and sharply cut back the need for pesticides, he predicted.
If the prairie isn’t saved, “where will we go to find the plants that have lived in Illinois’ unpredictable weather for thousands of years?” Zales asked.
He also gave the long view on the acquisition. Even before the land was purchased from the railroad in 1992, Zales and his crew of volunteers had been cutting back the brush on selected sections of the trail, “just to keep ourselves enthusiastic.”
Along the way, the purchase deal collapsed several times. A request for federal funding was turned down in the late 1970s. The next setback came when the title company discovered clauses in the old deeds giving property rights back to the adjacent landowners.
At one point, the Illinois Department of Transportation considered condemning the land to provide clear titles but backed down in the face of political pressure from adjacent homeowners.
The big break came in 1992. A grant of approximately $1.6 million in matching funds from the Department of Conservation’s Illinois Bicycle Path Grant Program made it possible for the Will County Forest Preserve District, Rich Township and the municipalities of Frankfort, Matteson and Park Forest to buy the land from the Penn Central. Another state grant, from the Illinois Transportation Enhancement Program, funded development of the trail.
Throughout the long-running battle, government and volunteer supporters stuck together.
“People with environmental interests sometimes are working against the government, but with this project we had excellent cooperation, and in many cases it was the county officials and staff who had to stand up to some of the personal attacks (from opponents),” said Glassford, who is now with the Openlands Project.
After IDOT approves the plans for the trail, bids will go out for construction of overpasses, parking lots and asphalt paving for the first 12 miles.
Supporters can’t pop the cork for the entire 20-mile stretch of trail just yet. New Lenox homeowners continue to block paving of the 8.1 miles of trail through their area.
“My views haven’t really changed,” said Mark Rushing of New Lenox, a longtime opponent of the project, who along with his family has ridden on Wisconsin bike trails but sharply opposes such a trail adjacent to his own property. Rushing said he already has had trouble with all-terrain vehicles cutting through his yard. Although motorcycles, all-terrain vehicles, snowmobiles and horses will be prohibited on the Old Plank Road Trail, Rushing questions whether the forest preserve district can adequately police the trail.
In response, the forest preserves’ Hodgdon said, “we are confident that our patroling of the Old Plank trail will preclude the use of any unauthorized motorized vehicles.”
He predicts the ribbon-cutting for the first part of the trail will be in mid- or late 1996.
“We still have a lot of work to do, cutting away the brush so that the prairie can once again thrive,” Zales said, “but now we’re doing what we wanted to be doing in the first place.”
Said Hodgdon, “Hundreds of volunteers have invested blood, sweat and tears in this project. These are the people who will have a tear in their eye when it opens.”
