As a high school boy in Naperville during the late 1960s, Robert Schillerstrom would stand on the Washington Street bridge spanning Interstate Highway 88 and gaze at the wide expanse of farmland around him.
“There was nothing out there–just the cars on I-88 and the cornfields,” the DuPage County Board chairman recalled.
Now that same spot yields a bird’s-eye view of DuPage County’s commercial development future: farmland rapidly being developed, traffic congestion causing increasing headaches, and high-technology companies undertaking huge expansions.
There are three major economic centers within the East West Corporate Corridor along I-88, said Mahender Vasandani, the county’s chief planner: Oak Brook to the east, Downer’s Grove/Lombard in the center and the Naperville/Warrenville area to the west. While Oak Brook and Downers Grove/Lombard are primarily retail and offices, the Naperville/Warrenville area of the corridor is growing with large corporations.
Development on the east end of the county could be more accurately called redevelopment, with very little land left to develop, said Bonnie Wood, executive director of the East West Corporate Corridor Association, a Lombard-based, not-for-profit association made up of companies and organizations along the corridor.
Primary growth in the corridor is following the population westward, and the area of the corridor expected to grow rapidly is west of Illinois Highway 53 to Eola Road.
Some of that growth is happening at a faster rate than anyone could predict, Wood said. A perfect example is the 659-acre Cantera development at Warrenville: What was expected to take 20 years will be built out in seven.
– East of Illinois 53 in Lisle, the 26-acre Central Park II, an office-park development, is completed, and the 96-acre Esplanade at Locust Point in Downers Grove is 80 percent complete with office and commercial development, Vasandani said.
– West of Illinois 53, along Warrenville Road near Naperville Road, a $250 million expansion of Lucent Technologies Inc., the giant telecommunications equipment manufacturer, is expected to bring at least 2,000 high-technology jobs to the area.
– Tellabs plans a $75 million expansion with an 800,000-square-foot facility just south of the tollway and west of Raymond Drive in Naperville, adding 2,300 employees by 2001.
– Northern Illinois University intends to open a $20 million, 113-square-foot facility along Diehl Road near the Naperville exit of the East-West tollway, by next fall.
– Nicor Inc. has announced intentions to develop its property near Illinois Highway 59 into an office and hotel campus.
– The Butterfield Center for Business and Industry, 900 acres between the tollway and Butterfield Road in Aurora, just west of Illinois 59, is about 50 percent complete, said Sherman Jenkins, executive director of the Aurora Economic Development Commission.
– The White Oak business park, west of Eola Road along the tollway, is another commercial development that is quickly growing farther west in eastern Kane County, he said.
“I think the reputation is that there is development and growth taking place in the corridor and that it’s a desirable place to be,” Schillerstrom said. “In that way, the area is feeding off itself.”
The main problem plaguing development has been transportation.
“It’s access, to be quite frank,” Schillerstrom said.
“The Naperville/Warrenville Road intersection with the tollway ramps was developed as much as 30 years ago. Growth since then has been phenomenal. If you go through there now at peak hours, it’s a pretty scary intersection.”
The County Board in November approved a $1.66 million engineering contract for improvement of the area. Plans to relocate tollway ramps, widen stretches of Warrenville and Naperville Roads and build a north-south road that would allow eastbound tollway traffic to exit to Diehl Road, could carry a price tag of $62 million.
“The state has promised to be good to us. We are going in the right direction in transportation,” Schillerstrom said.
This is not the only roadway causing concern.
“We were a bedroom community for most of our history,” said Schillerstrom, of Naperville. “Now more people work in DuPage than leave the county to work.”
Work that was done to improve north-south roads on the east end of the county in the 1980s is now needed on the west end, he said, including continuing the north-south Eola Road through the east side of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
“I would rather have these problems than not have them,” said Wood, who founded the association 15 years ago. “If you have congestion, you have a vibrant economy.”
Jenkins said that from the Aurora development commission’s perspective there are few, if any, problems plaguing development.
“It’s increasing as we speak,” he said. “It’s developing all the way to Orchard Road.”
But an interchange at Eola Road would help eliminate the bottleneck at Illinois 59, he said.
Companies need to provide alternatives to employees that encourage car pooling and stagger work times to ease congestion problems, Wood said.
“We need the elected officials to realize a financial commitment to the infrastructure, and to be more interactive with the corporate community,” she said. “Elected officials pay attention to the homeowners, but they also need to pay attention to the corporate tax dollars.”
The corridor is growing in a much different way now, she said. For instance, more of the business transacted is worldwide.
“We’re seeing a growth in companies being developed by people under 40 who have 5 to 10 years’ experience, take a good idea and start their own business,” Wood said. “We have the large corporate expansions, but the true business expansion opportunities are in the smaller business.”
“We have the work that draws skilled workers to these jobs in DuPage–that’s not a problem,” Schillerstrom said. “We do have a problem sometimes with getting unskilled workers in because the cost of living is such that sometimes they work in the county but can’t afford to live in DuPage County. We have to have ways so people can come in and work. That’s why we also have to look to certain areas for affordable housing. It’s a problem–I don’t think it’s a gigantic problem.
“Most of the development in DuPage is boosting the image of high-tech, and DuPage rightfully has the image of a high-tech center. High-tech is a very good anchor as we go into the 21st Century.”
Schillerstrom added, “We are seeing a growth in small business as well. In the 15 years I’ve been practicing law here I’ve seen a tremendous growth in law practices alone. When you have growth in big business, you have a growth in small business as well.”
The reason the corridor will continue vibrant growth is because the same things that drew people to the county 20 years ago are still here, Schillerstrom said. People want good jobs, but they also want a low crime rate, open space and good schools.
“The key,” he said, “is to attract the development while protecting the quality of life in the area.”
The next year will bring no less than an additional 10,000 jobs to the corridor between Illinois Highways 53 and 59, Wood believes.
“These are jobs that cause other jobs,” she said.
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For more information on the East West Corporate Corridor Association, call 630-691-8718 or visit the Web site at www.ewcca.org.
