GUESTWORK | Daniel Coultas
Most people in central Illinois haven’t heard about it, but the FutureGen Alliance is planning to build their 48,000-square-foot, $30 million visitor center in the heart of Community Park in Jacksonville.
FutureGen – a group of large coal companies – is constructing the so-called FutureGen Center mainly to house their visitor, research and training facilities. I cannot help but wonder why Jacksonville should have to give up five acres of park land for a group with a $1.6 billion budget and a plan that serves mainly private interests.
The deal sounds too good to be true:
FutureGen’s activities in the building will be tapered down beginning around eight years after construction, and after 20 years, either Jacksonville or Morgan County will own the building. So why not build it in a public park if, after all, the public will eventually own it? There are two main reasons sacrificing a significant portion of Jacksonville’s most beautiful park is misguided.
First, whether such a space will be financially and socially sustainable for Jacksonville has not been addressed nearly enough. Assuming the visitor center does “attract visitors from around the world,” as the city council and the county commissioners hope it will, how will a community of our size put such a building – originally configured as an impressive, perhaps excessive, way of showcasing the coal industry’s clean energy pursuits – to efficient, sustainable use after FutureGen abandons Morgan County?
Having the facility serve as a performing arts center while FutureGen occupies it and when ownership changes is one possibility, but it would have to be a wildly successful venue to cover the building’s overwhelming maintenance costs. Furthermore, the burden of constructing an arts center will fall largely on the public. The Department of Energy is contributing $1 billion to FutureGen, but those funds can be spent only to construct an auditorium, not a full-fledged theater. So to ensure that the facility can function as a suitable theater from the outset, local groups must raise a few million dollars to cover the additional costs.
If revenue from theater operations and renting out the office space is insufficient to sustain the $30 million facility, then what will happen? Will real estate taxes go up? Will money be siphoned from School District 117 to keep the building from falling into disrepair? Another option would be to sell it, thereby permanently divesting the public of access to and use of what was once a public park.
Second, the process of choosing Community Park involved no community input. Since FutureGen will lose any of the $1 billion from the DOE that isn’t spent before October 2015, the project is on a very tight timeline. City officials willingly adopted the project’s schedule, which meant finding five acres to give to FutureGen on short notice. Siting the center in Community Park was the fastest – and the most egregious – possible choice, so with absolutely no public notice or input and very little notice afforded even to the city council aldermen, a vote was cast doing just that.
That gets to my main problem with siting the FutureGen Center in Community Park. When something so fundamentally connected to the people as a public park is at stake, the people should be both informed and listened to long before any final decision is made.
If you live in Jacksonville and feel strongly either way, you should certainly take a moment to contact the mayor and your aldermen. And for everybody else, you should know that the Illinois Commerce Commission voted 3-2 to force Illinois electricity suppliers to subsidize FutureGen’s excessive costs by purchasing all of the power FutureGen generates. Be sure to visit the FutureGen Center to learn why your electric bill has gone up.
Daniel Coultas is a law student at Washington University in St. Louis. He plans to practice law in Jacksonville, his hometown, after he graduates in May 2015.
For a longer version of this op-ed article, go to www.illinoistimes.com.