As residents and local officials in Joliet and Will County debated a proposal for a new 1,300 acre office park, WBEZ put the size of the issue at hand in perspective:

The county is home to the largest inland port in North America and 3.5% of the nation’s GDP passes through here…

And $65 billion worth of products moves through Will County annually, according to the Will County Center for Economic Development.

In other words, this an important area for the current economy and the land use case has local, regional, and global implications. A few thoughts:

1. Joliet and neighboring communities might not want the additional facilities and trucks but having these facilities in this part of the metropolitan region might be good for 9+ million residents. Balancing local interests and metropolitan interests is not easy. And the Chicago region has a lot of railroad and shipping bottlenecks.
2. This is a symptom of larger economic changes as the economy became globalized, shipping goods across the country and on-time delivery became common, and Internet sales picked up. The effects may be local but Will County is part of a larger system.
3. The changes in Joliet over time are striking, The news story hinted at how the community, what social worker Graham Romeyn Taylor in Satellite Cities: A Study of Industrial Suburbs in 1915 would have called an “industrial suburb,” has changed:

“Three steel mills closed. Caterpillar went from 8,000 people to a little over a thousand. We had numerous manufacturing plants shuttered,” said John Grueling, president and CEO of the Will County Center for Economic Development.

No other county in Illinois has seen job growth like Will County. It’s the epicenter of transportation for goods that move across the region and country with North America’s largest inland port. Now another real estate company wants to expand in the area by developing a logistics business park, and its raising concerns about the future of the county.

In summary: local land use decisions can have big impacts.

(See an earlier post about how the Will County community of Elwood responded to a large intermodal facility.)