Whenever it is completed, the long-planned $1-billion extension could open up additional office development in the northeastern portion of the county, experts say. Building an airport on 23,000 acres near Peotone could continue the explosion of industrial development as air freight companies would join distribution firms relocating to what locally is considered the nation's crossroads.

The Republican junior senator told the Will Economic Network quarterly luncheon he will "try to find funding to extend I-355 once and for all to New Lenox." Joliet/Will County Center for Economic Development president and CEO John E. Greuling tells GlobeSt.com his group met with Fitzgerald Wednesday morning to sell him on the need for the extension, which could receive an environmental record of decision from the US Department of Transportation.

That bureaucratic hurdle is the last one, and right-of-way already has been acquired by the state, Greuling notes. However, the issue now is money for construction. "The challenge is to get the tollway authority, either with the current administration or the incoming governor's, to come to an agreement on raising tolls," he says, suggesting money should be raised now for much-needed tollway repairs as well as construction of the extension.

If money is found, Greuling estimates the extension should be complete by 2006. By then, the county could be on its way to changing its image in the real estate community.

"We in the real estate industry talk a lot about distribution when we talk about Will County," says Alter Group executive vice president Richard M. Gatto. Indeed, the county's current inventory is 66% warehouse and distribution space, 33% manufacturing space and 1% office space, adds Anita Quadrini, director of national development for the Skokie, IL-based built-to-suit specialist.

Will County has benefited from Corporate America's compression of the supply chain, as well as a location that puts it a day's drive from 55% of the US population, Gatto adds, and distribution will continue to be a part of the region's future. "If you want to be a player in the US and reach US consumers, you've got to go to Chicago," he says.

However, the I-355 extension will help satisfy the county's goal of becoming more than a distribution hub, Gatto says, comparing the stretch between Bolingbrook and New Lenox to the area the highway first served – Army Trail Road to the Stevenson Expressway. "What I-355 did was allow and complete a fill-in and opened up the East-West Corridor," Gatto says. "What it is going to help is residential and office growth."

The county saw a 40% population jump in the last decade and is projected to get another 800,000 residents by 2020, a number employers will find attractive, Gatto says.

The projected population growth also fuels arguments for the Peotone airport, dismissed by critics as being too far away from Downtown to be a viable transportation option. A compromise between Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and Governor George Ryan gave "support" to Peotone, but the emphasis was on O'Hare runway expansion, which Fitzgerald criticizes as too costly and potentially dangerous.

"I have a different perspective than the mayor of the city of Chicago," says Fitzgerald, whose mother was born and raised in Joliet but makes his home in northwest suburban Inverness. "He'd like to keep all economic development within his jurisdiction. It's not in our state's best interests to concentrate all of our state's economic development in a 7,000-acre site at O'Hare."

Fitzgerald urges Will Economic Network members to make the airport at Peotone and I-355 extension issues in the upcoming gubernatorial campaign. "I will be there every step of the way," Fitzgerald adds.