Ideas and Strategies for Renewal in the Calumet Region

Today, there are also several plans for the Calumet region on a smaller scale in which many people have invested time and hope, including SCDCom's Calumet Industrial Corridor Plan, Grand Calumet Task Force's Grand Calumet River Initiative, the Remedial Action Plan for Indiana Harbor, the CEPA Calumet Ecological Park proposal, Chicago Wilderness, and Indiana Development Forum's Quality of Life Initiative.

There are also several visions for the Calumet region which have been floated, including the Chicago area's home for material reuse and the place where urban areas demonstrate a way to co-exist with natural areas.

Some have proposed the creation and selling of a plan on the scale of the Burnham Plan for the Chicago Lake Shore, from the high-level civic leadership to the broad public education, including maps and materials for every household and schoolchild. However, most leaders in the region feel that that it would be best for a comprehensive planning process to evolve out of one of the current plans described above.

According to a the people interviewed for this report, the best opportunities to improve the economic, environmental, and social health of the Calumet Region are as follows:

Build on What is There
• Build upon the sprouts of revitalization already starting to grow, including both initiatives and in-place investments such as infrastructure capacity and material handling capacity.
• Bring people together in a way that allows them to work from their existing strengths.

Encourage Collaboration:
• Find a way for people to share information on specific projects on a timely basis so joint opportunities can be identified, including across the state line.
• Allow people to compare what they are doing, identify intersections, explore possible linkages that help them move forward, create a broader context for specific projects, and figure out whether there is synergy from linking up projects.
• Engage neutral parties to bring people together to build trust.
• Find the best opportunities for bi-state collaboration from among current options and others, including (1) Clean Cities Designation (working with NIPSCO, ComEd, NRPC and NIPC), (2) Sustainable Development Round Tables (partner with Indiana University Northwest), (3) Transportation management (reduce tolls, develop south-suburban highway, develop West-Lake commuter rail line), (4) studies of the combined bi-state region lakes and wetlands systems, (5) collaboration on brownfields efforts, (6) a 1999 bi-state conference on natural areas to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Henry Chandler Cowles seminal ecological writings, or (7) an economic forecast meeting for the Crescent corridor.¹⁶³ Other options are around the Calumet Ecological Park, or Rive r Corridor projects.
• Create a partnership to collect and centralize data on the region. Everyone has some of the pieces. No one has them all with overlays, etc. Include maps for the region, integrate economic and ecosystems studies, describe baseline characteristics of stocks of not beneficial substances, and inventory possible approaches to clean up and reuse.

Support and broaden the Southeast Chicago Industrial Corridor Projects
• Assist SCDCom's Calumet, Burnside and Pullman Industrial Corridor Projects.
• Take advantage of the growing involvement on the part of City/DPD in the region through corridor projects, infrastructure improvements and marketing.

Support The Grand Calumet River-Indiana Harbor Collaboration
• Involve more people in creating a better future for the Calumet region through the Grand Calumet River and Indiana Harbor-Shipping Canal corridor Visioning initiative facilitated by Grand Calumet Task Force in Northwest Indiana.
• Link with the West Branch of the Grand Calumet River extending into Illinois.

Leverage Brownfields Efforts
• The $50 million loan Chicago has for brownfields creates momentum and could provide an opening to articulate a broader strategy for the region. Everyone can win around brownfields redevelopment (including neighborhoods, businesses and the city). Brownfields offers an opportunity for consensus in policy making and for cooperative action on a site-by-site basis.
• Similarly, the 3-City Brownfields effort in Northwest Indiana may catalyze broader collaboration and redevelopment.
• Create some kind of regulatory flexibility for cleanups.
• Create a "Virtual" Center for the Study of Restoration Technology and Applications in the Calumet region, a university and research center consortium that uses the Calumet Region as a field lab and channels faculty and student interns into projects applying cutting edge technologies to create community jobs, clean up sites, and promote ecological restoration.
• Support Congressman Visclosky of Northwest Indiana who is promoting having environmental fines come back to a Trust Fund to clean up the region rather than go to the Treasury.
• Support Congressman Weller who is promoting brownfields redevelopment tax credits.

Build on the Growing Regard for Calumet Region Open space
• Advocate for a positive outcome of the feasibility study exploring the proposal to connect the Indiana Dunes to the I&M Canal Corridor (which will include parts of the Cal Sag, Little Calumet, and Grand Calumet Rivers) and create a Calumet Ecological Park.
• At the same time, support work to preserve and connect specific smaller sites in the region, such as the efforts of Openlands Project at Indian Ridge Marsh or the Sherwin Williams site.
• Take advantage of the resources provided by U.S. EPA Strategic Enforcement Initiatives, especially the supplemental environmental projects effort, to undertake additional projects. Use the desire of industry to see the Indiana Harbor de-listed as an Area of Concern to negotiate restoration of habitat areas. Fund more wetlands restoration through mitigation because the State of Illinois has begun to require greater mitigation (2 times the area) than under Section 404 (1.5 times the area). Take advantage of the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant program people and grant resources to support strategic projects.
• Support the $100 million Little Calumet River Flood Control and Recreation Project under construction in Indiana between the state line and Gary. It will also benefit Illinois by preventing flooding and restoring wetlands (set-back levees will restore 788 acres of wetlands and protect other lands for recreation use). ¹⁶⁴ Increase collaboration between Illinois and Indiana on Little Calumet River initiatives.
• Bring together schools and universities in Chicago and Northwest Indiana as partners in community building and restoration. One example is the effort to develop Wheatley Carver Outdoor Lab Southeast of Altgeld Gardens.
• Because of the high cost of region-wide restoration, bring together people to try to figure out ways to create value for the Chicago metropolitan area from open space restoration in the Calumet region. Perhaps restoration of Calumet wetlands could be of value to the entire region for flood control as an alternative to capture of flood waters. The highest use of contaminated property may be to hold water. Alternatively, urge research efforts to figure out if leaching from the Calumet region into Lake Michigan poses a significant health risk. Then any strategy for protecting Lake Michigan would have to include cleaning up Calumet region.
• Prepare a rigorous study of the correlation between natural resource protection and economic prosperity.

Build Upon the Region's Transportation Assets
• Repair, expand, and make efficient for intermodal transportation the convergence of water, rail and road to take advantage of the growth in freight movement.
• Explore the potential to take advantage of the new federal thrust for ports development championed by NE-MW Institute's Dick Munson.
• Create a competition for figuring out how to use rights of way, cope with traffic, and eliminate congestion in the Calumet region.

Encourage Rapid Appropriate Development of Large Pieces of Cleaned up Industrial Land
• USX now has a relatively clean 600 acres and a development concept (it doesn't want to develop the property itself even though it is a big real estate developer).
• The Wisconsin Steel site is being remediated voluntarily by Navistar under the supervision of Illinois EPA, reclaiming more than 700 acres of former industrial property. There may be a sale of this site to a railroad for a major intermodal facility.
• Help along the marketing of the LTV site in Southeast Chicago.
• Find resources to beef up industrial property marketing tools.

Encourage Potential Corporate and University Leadership in the Bi-State Region
• Strengthen community-company connections so that companies participate in designing training and locals get good jobs.
• Try to get plant managers to make connections with their corporate leaders who might take civic leadership in the Calumet region. (For example, Inland Steel is headquartered in downtown Chicago and has its flagship plant in Northwest Indiana. Perhaps it might take a larger civic role in the bi-state Calumet region. It already plays a role in Northwest Indiana )
• Encourage universities and community colleges which serve the region to collaborate on adult training and school-to-work initiatives, perhaps even develop a training consortium with local businesses to retrain local employees, provide training techniques for managers, and help deal with regulatory compliance, pollution prevention.

Support Region-wide Efforts to Slow Urban Sprawl
• For example, in Northwest Indiana, interfaith organizing groups are advocating for northern development and the responsibility of the south to the north.

Simultaneously with these Specific Projects, Build Hope and Energy in the Region
• Collect and publish stories about progress.
• Help create momentum by showing that there are things happening and opportunities to connect to other things happening.
• Figure out a way to allow people to see the possibilities for the region.
• Make one very visible thing work.

Try to Improve the Image and Self-Image of The Region
• Support the Northwest Indiana Forum's Quality of Life Initiative which brings together chambers of commerce in a planning group to reach out to schools, service clubs, civic organizations, government agencies, etc. to come with a 1997 project to improve the image of the region. Perhaps do something similar in Illinois.
• Bring people together in Southeast Chicago around improving the image of the region to promote development and revitalization.
• Facilitate the flow of information about achievements in the past decade so that the broader community is aware of these achievements, either through an annual report or on the internet.¹⁶⁵
• To improve image, make sure people in and out of the region understand its natural resources through kiosks, signage, p.r., etc.
• Create a Gateways to the Region Initiative to make what people see when they drive through inviting.
• Remove the greatest visual barriers to seeing the qualities of the region: (1) Odor: are there a few key properties that should be the focus, maybe MWRD sludge beds; (2) Road-side ditches: now they look like jungles. Replace jungle with native plants. (3) Find a way to deal with wind blown dust.
• Create more maps and broadly accessible information.

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