A recent vote by Elwood Mayor Jim Clementi and the six-member Village Board setting the stage for annexation of a 1,900-acre parcel at the former Joliet Arsenal is being viewed by many as giving the village a historic second chance.
As the arsenal is redeveloped, Elwood will become the northern gateway to the vast area.
Many of the more than 23,500 acres that were commandeered by the U.S. Army at the start of World War II were taken from Elwood-area farmers to amass what came to be known as the Joliet Army Ammunition Plant, or arsenal.
And despite the thousands of local jobs that the arsenal had produced over the years, the long-standing presence of the now-shuttered munitions complex and its non-tax-producing, federal ownership has severely restricted the ability of Elwood to expand both its geographic and economic base.
The vote was unanimous despite a controversial 100 million-ton landfill, larger than any in Illinois, which is planned for the site.
Crowds packing the Elwood Village Board meeting forced village officials to move from Elwood’s cramped municipal building to a nearby church hall, where the board voted to go forward with the annexation and to issue the zoning permits necessary for the landfill plan.
Members of the Village Board and Plan Commission have said they believe the proposed landfill’s chances of surviving layers of bureaucratic scrutiny are remote. They expressed concerns about what might happen if neighboring Joliet annexes the land and if developer Transport Development Group Inc. wins the battle to construct the landfill, at which point Elwood would have a landfill in its back yard but no control over it.
Typical of the pro-annexation, anti-landfill sentiment that ran through more than three hours of public testimony were the comments of Village Board member Bob Blum.
“I personally do not want to see a landfill back there,” said Blum.
“These are the cards that were dealt to us, (and) this is a decision that we need to make,” he said. “We did not ask for this. We did not go out and petition for this.”
“If we don’t accept it and put the hole in the ground, somebody else will,” said Blum. “We have to have control of our back yard. We have to have control of this project.”
Even for many of its detractors, the promise of tens of millions of dollars in local royalties from a 100 million-ton landfill and a planned $200 million intermodal freight facility is viewed by many in Elwood as the last and perhaps best chance for the village to recoup financially from decades of forced stagnation.
In addition to upfront contributions of $1 million to the Elwood and Wilmington school districts, the industrial park developers are promising millions in revenue to Elwood, based on a storage royalty of $1 a rail car a day from a rail-transfer facility and a 50-cent-a-cubic-yard royalty on garbage that would go into the dump.
Mark McAlpine, Transport Development Group attorney and partner, said that the entire project hinges on approval of the landfill. He argued that the financial resources necessary to construct an estimated $200 million intermodel freight facility rest largely on the ability to get a landfill up and running.
The landfill would be constructed immediately west of the 982-acre Hoff Woods site where the National Cemetery System is developing a burial ground to serve veterans in the multi-state region around Chicago for the next 40 years.
Area veterans, shored up by a formal statement of opposition from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, have voiced opposition to the landfill.
In testimony before the Elwood Plan Commission, a senior VA official restated National Cemetery System Director Jerry Bowen’s opposition to the landfill on grounds that “the proximity of this mega-landfill to the national cemetery would detract from the serenity of these hallowed grounds.”
Though the VA opposes the landfill, it supports a 14 million-ton landfill being planned by Will County for a 455-acre site at the south end of the former 23,500-acre munitions complex.
Area conservation groups and both the present and former congressmen from the arsenal area, who spearheaded a mixed-reuse plan for the property including the 19,000-acre Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, also are formally opposed to the larger landfill.
A spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service, which is developing the park, said that the landfill proposal was too preliminary at this time for the agency to evaluate, much less have prepared a position for or against.
