What Metra's SouthEast Service Means for the Heights: Minutes With the Mayor

Patch gathered questions from readers, for  Mayor David Gonzalez. Now, Patch will regularly air a series of video responses to the questions readers voted as most pressing.

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In this segment, Gonzalez is answering a question about Metra's proposed SouthEast Service line and what the Chicago Heights city government is doing to prepare for it. 

His answer? Being proactive and scooping up delinquent properties.

Transcript:

It looks like were waiting on that SouthEast Metra line just like we're waiting on the Peotone Airport. The district for the SouthEast Metra line was signed in 2011 by Gov. Quinn, creating this district. They knew the importance of transportation in the South Suburbs to Chicago and what it does for jobs, what it does for housing, to be on that line and be able to go to work in Chicago or any of the other 20 communities that that line is going to serve. But the problem always comes down to the same problem I had in my administration when I came in: Where are you going to get the money from?

I mean, it's been approved and it's a $775 million project that's made up of federal money and state money. The federal money is there. It's ready to go. The problem is the State has to come up with about $250 (million) to $275 million out of the whole package. There's where the delays have been, because, obviously, it's no secret . . . the state's situation that they're in.

What they're looking for is: Can local communities come up with their fair share? The local communities those lines are going to serve can't come up with creating their own platforms and creating their own parking lots, so we have to start looking at private-public ventures in how we'd create it and also keep working with the State. I believe that as the state finances start getting better it's going to be a priority. It was a big priority back in March 2011 when all those legislators sat with Gov. Quinn and said "How important is this for us to get this line?"

Now, what we're doing on our side of the city is we're being very proactive, saying that it's going to come. I'm very confident that I'm going to be able to get on a train in Chicago Heights and go to Chicago before I get onto a plane in Peotone and go anywhere else. I'm more confident that it's going to happen a lot quicker. 

What we have to do is we have to be proactive and say we already know where the stop's going to be if it happens. Not if it happens, when it happens. Our job now as elected officials is let's look at all the area around that station. There's been so many delinquent properties that are so back in taxes.

What we did is we identified those pin numbers when we got here and submitted a no-cash bid to the County, saying we as a city want to take ownership of all these pin numbers around this area.

When it happens and it gets funded, we're going to have so many developers coming to us saying "We're interested in this property," "We're interested in this property for retail," "We're interested for housing." We don't want to be like, "Yeah, well it's got $200,000 to $300,000 worth of property taxes, it's going to take us a couple years to clean the liens." We're already cleaning those liens. We're already expecting that to happen.

So I think at the last round we took 30 pin numbers to the County around the downtown area, and we were able to get those deeds. Now the City actually has ownership of those properties, and as soon as that line comes in and gets funded by the State we're going to be able to work with developers real quick on handing over property, practically for a dollar or whatever it takes to get that development up and running.

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