Journal & Topics Media Group

ONCC Voting Members Limited To 11 For Now


Airplane coasts over Des Plaines en route to O’Hare International Airport.

Who gets a voice and a vote for what happens with overnight noise at O’Hare Airport? No extra people, it would appear after the Friday, June 7 meeting of the O’Hare Noise Compatibility Commission.

Park Ridge and Glenview had filed requests to expand the Fly Quiet Committee from 11 to 13 voting members, and several other suburbs had expressed interest, according to ONCC Chairman Arlene Juracek of Mount Prospect.

She appoints the committee’s voting members but does not have a vote on the Fly Quiet Committee.

ONCC members can speak before or after the committee meetings but only get a vote if something advances.

The rules and by-laws changes go through the ONCC’s governance committee. She referred the question on size back to that committee.

Karyn Robles from Schaumburg, vice-chair of the Fly Quiet Committee, and Bensenville delegate Evan Summers, who sits on Fly Quiet, made the decisions in governance.

“We voted to keep it at 11,” Robles said.

The argument was that expanding Fly Quiet would “jeopardize” the work of the committee, which has been working for several years to acquire technical expertise on airport operations.

Ernie Kosower from Park Ridge’s O’Hare Airport Commission, is one of several OAC members who represent the city at the early morning ONCC meetings.

There were other recommendations from governance, which were identified as adding leeway.

No school district ONCC members have been allowed on Fly Quiet, but in the rare chance that a school district representative might be able to offer useful information, this would now be possible.

Succession planning has been discussed in the governance meetings.

Elected officials serving on Fly Quiet are subject to being replaced in elections. Schiller Park’s Barbara Piltaver lost her mayoral election and a new village representative replaced her. Chicago Ald. John Arena lost in the 45th Ward race in February and has not been replaced yet.

Kosower proposed an amendment, seconded by 41st Ward representative Cathy Dunlap, to increase the Fly Quiet membership to 13 anyway.

The discussion that followed focused on the different interpretations of what constitutes fair representation.

Juracek spoke in a broader sense about the “huge learning curve” involved in acquiring the terminology and technical understanding.

Fly Quiet Chairman Joseph Annunzio, representing Niles, said he has no objection to adding two more.

Summers said they would risk putting all of Fly Quiet’s work in jeopardy if they added two more people to the committee.

Juracek’s approach in appointments had been to surround O’Hare with communities representing 360 degrees around the airport. If Des Plaines, Niles, Harwood Heights and the 41st and 45th wards of Chicago were on the committee, why couldn’t they represent Park Ridge without Park Ridge having a voice?

Itasca Mayor Jeff Pruyn said noise monitors in his western suburb had registered the most noise, so why didn’t he have a seat on Fly Quiet?

Dan Dwyer, who represents Fair Allocations in Runways (FAiR) as a non-voting representative on Fly Quiet, and Dunlap, who also chairs the Technology Committee, said the changes being introduced on the northern end of the airport during the final phases of the O’Hare Modernization Plan are going to put a heavier balance of night noise north of the core terminals.

There are issues of reduced taxiway access when the two northernmost runways block routes for planes traveling around the airport, of shorter runways requiring a steeper and louder ascent to take off, and the geographic positioning of Park Ridge and Rosemont at the northeast corner of the airport in paths of the diagonal and parallel rotations.

Kosower prefaced the vote on the amendment by noting that Park Ridge had not requested a Fly Quiet seat, but all the other committees (save the executive committee) have much larger memberships.

Voting in favor of the amendment were the 41st Ward, Des Plaines, Elmhurst, Glenview, Niles, Park Ridge, South Barrington, and school districts 64 (Park Ridge-Niles) and 207 (Maine Twp. high schools). The vote lost 29-9.

There are 43 communities and 22 school districts as ONCC members. At the end of the year, the intergovernmental agreements are due to be up for renewal.

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