This is regarding “Here’s your editorial, Mayor” (Editorial, Aug. 5). I take exception to the statement “No one in town has the temerity to question in public how [Mayor Richard Daley] runs the city.”
The Meigs Action Coalition has stood up for many years to question how the mayor runs the city. When others would have quit, we continue to work to educate the public on the vital importance to all the people of Chicago of a properly developed and managed Meigs Field.
We continue to work for the adoption of the plan “Parks and Planes: A Vision for Meigs Field and Northerly Island.” The plan presents a win-win compromise: reopening the airport, developing 18 acres of park-scape on the peninsula, creating a new aviation museum at the airport and providing about $100 million in federal funds to the cash-strapped Chicago Park District. It is a plan that could benefit all of Chicago’s neighborhood parks. It would also restore Meigs as an emergency preparedness and disaster relief asset.
Why do I as a non-pilot continue to fight City Hall? Because, in addition to the economic and aviation rationale for Meigs, I believe the med-evac community when it asserts that Meigs was a key part of its non-politicized disaster-response planning for the central business district of Chicago. Meigs is the only facility where airplanes, including C-130s and C-17s, and helicopters could be used together to respond to a disaster in the Loop.
As a city we should want to be as prepared as possible for any contingency.
But there is an opportunity now. Any plans to build an airport in Peotone and to reconfigure O’Hare International Airport should include rebuilding Meigs Field.
