If the Chicago region’s most important transportation planning body, which decides how to spend roughly $3 billion annually in federal and state money, were going to change the definition of the metropolitan area by bringing in a new suburban county, effectively robbing Cook County of precious transportation dollars, you’d think that everybody on the Cook County Board would, at the very least, have heard of the change.
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On June 9 CATS, which carries out the urban transportation planning process for the metropolitan area, is set to admit a representative of Kendall County, a rural county an hour west of the city, to its planning committee. That may not seem like earth-shattering news–just some bureaucratic tinkering on obscure planning maps. But the addition of Kendall County could have big consequences for Chicago and suburban Cook County. First there are the financial stakes: building roads that will turn Kendall County’s farmland into suburbs will be expensive, and some of the money will have to be diverted from Cook County. Then there’s the likelihood that as the outer-ring suburbs grow, the city will suffer. Take the recent CTA crisis, which followed a 1983 change in the region’s transit funding formula that favored commuters from the collar counties over residents in, say, Blue Island, Harvey, and Cicero. Facilitating the continued transfer of dollars and people from Chicago to the outer burbs could make the city into a development crescent, where jobs and businesses are concentrated in a C outside the city, leaving the center hollow.
But the proposal has gone entirely unreported in the local press, possibly because to even begin to understand what’s going on you need a crash course in the arcane alphabet soup that is regional planning. Ready?
Don Kopec, executive director of CATS, says the decision to add Kendall County is a reaction to its rapid growth rather than a plan to stimulate more. “We have to look out 20 years to say, where does it look like growth is going to be? Good planning is better than no planning at all.” He says the federal government requires CATS to absorb recently “urbanized” areas as dictated by the census. The CATS planning area already includes two and a half townships in the county, and with five of its nine townships now qualifying, Kopec says it makes the most sense to bring in the county as a whole. (The logic here seems a bit circular: since the growth is going to happen, you have to build the roads, but roads are what spur the growth.)
