A veteran DuPage County administrator was hired Wednesday as the first full-time executive director of the nascent high-technology research park that officials hope to build at DuPage Airport in West Chicago.
Jack Tenison, deputy administrator for county government in DuPage and the county’s longtime personnel chief, will take over April 1 as the $135,000-a-year director of a project that has been slow to take shape since it was proposed more than three years ago by U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.).
Tenison’s appointment appears to be an attempt by the board of the not-for-profit corporation overseeing the development of the facility to end some of the friction between county officials and the DuPage Airport Authority. The airport authority is the separate government agency that operates the airfield.
County Administrator Donald Zeilenga had been the unpaid interim executive director of the so-called DuPage County Technology Park since June.
Some of the airport authority’s representatives on the five-member Technology Park Board had grumbled privately about Zeilenga and an apparent lack of communication between him and the airport authority. Tensions were evident at a tech board meeting last year, though County Board Chairman Robert Schillerstrom, who also heads the tech board, said those tensions played no role in the decision to hire Tenison.
In appointing a full-time director, Schillerstrom said the tech board “wanted to send a message to everyone that we are very, very serious about this.”
The research park would be built on all or a portion of the 840 acres of vacant land owned by the airport along Roosevelt Road and Fabyan Parkway.
The project’s goal is to bring together a variety of federal programs and research expertise in a facility that would support small and medium-size firms working to develop commercial uses for emerging technologies. The project would link resources from nearby Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory in southeast DuPage, the state’s major universities and private companies.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Defense Department already are funding programs at the airport that transfer technologies developed through federally funded research to the private sector.
A $34 million state grant under the Illinois FIRST program would pay for planning the park and construction.
“It’s an exciting project,” said Tenison, who is taking early retirement from the county post. “I think this will be the largest economic development activity in the county and in this region.”
Tenison’s salary would be paid initially from the proceeds of a $500,000 loan from the county to the research park that was approved last month by the County Board. But Schillerstrom said the tech board is looking for additional sources of funding.
Zeilenga said he would have been willing to stay on as interim director, but was not interested in stepping down as county administrator to take a full-time job as research park chief.
