NorthPoint busy but not building yet

They’re dishing the dirt – not moving it – more than four months since Joliet approved NorthPoint Development’s Compass Global Logistics Hub.

You may remember the many days of public hearings and meetings concerning the annexation for the 1,360-acre industrial park that was the bane of Elwood and Manhattan.

You may not remember Gov. JB Pritzker’s name being mentioned.

At least I don’t, although it may have slipped in here or there in the hours of debate.

But since then, it seems like it’s all Pritzker’s fault for NorthPoint not being built yet, and it’s all up to him to build it.

At least that’s what U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Chicago, keeps saying, as he did recently in a column in the Chicago Sun-Times.

What’s Bobby Rush got to do with it?

Bobby Rush represents the village of Elwood, which was an oddity of political map drawing since it was done back the last time congressional maps were drawn and is even more so now.

The interests of Rush, who doesn’t need Elwood to get elected, and that of Elwood are directly at odds when it comes to NorthPoint.

Rush is demanding that the governor get out of the way of NorthPoint, an obstacle to the project that had never been mentioned before it was approved by Joliet. The governor is in the way because he’s not stepping in and taking over public property in Elwood so as to put a local road under state control and make it serve the purpose of NorthPoint, which wants to use it for a bridge it has to build to meet the conditions of the Joliet annexation.

NorthPoint representatives always said during the public hearings that they planned to work out their issues with Elwood, which is in court with the developer to stop the bridge. They didn’t mention, not that I remember, that they would do it via Pritzker taking over just enough of Elwood to make the bridge possible.

Neither, as I remember, did Elwood officials during their vigorous arguments against NorthPoint mention Pritzker.

But Elwood Mayor Doug Jenco issued a public statement last week thanking the governor “for putting community concerns before corporate interests” without specifying exactly how the governor has done that, although one can presume he is thanking the governor for not doing what Rush, the duly elected congressional representative of the village of Elwood, said in column just a week earlier that the governor should do.

Meanwhile, curiously enough, back in Kansas, NorthPoint is running into static from rural residents objecting to plans to expand the Logistics Park Kansas City in Edgerton. The controversy, as reported by the Kansas City Star, sounds a lot like the controversy here over NorthPoint.

Except that so far, the Kansas City Star has not published a column by Bobby Rush on behalf of NorthPoint.