Good news! The Chicago City Council’s July 29th vote on a new Air Pollution Control Ordinance containing amendments severely restricting ecological burning in parks and forest preserves was deferred!

With only two days’ notice, Friends of the Parks and a number of other environmental organizations worked hard to get the word out to our constituencies, who responded powerfully.  We heard from many people all over the city who called their aldermen, contacted the Mayor’s office and wrote letters to editors. Great thanks to everyone who acted! Thanks also go to several Cook County Commissioners, especially Commissioner Suffredin, who helped to secure the support of a few key aldermen who agreed to speak out to defer the ordinance: Aldermen Tunney, Schulter and Schiller. If any of these are your alderman, please call and thank them for asking for the Air Pollution Control Ordinance to be deferred!

The issue is not dead yet – the ordinance will come up for a vote again, but we now have a little more time to work out better language regarding ecological burning in the city and to reach out to more aldermen to back us up when the ordinance is brought forward again. Friends of the Parks, Friends of the Forest Preserves, Sierra Club, Audubon, Openlands and several other environmental organizations are working together to strategize on next steps. We will likely ask for your help again to contact your alderman as we get closer to the vote. If you’d like to get involved, please contact Rebecca Blazer at BLAZERR@fotp.org or 312-857-2757 x17.

For more information about the Air Pollution Control Ordinance and how it could affect the health of our urban natural areas, you can read the following statement from FOTP, click on a link to the actual text of the proposed ordinance (see pages 9 & 10), and view maps of how much forest preserve land would be affected by the amendments in the ordinance. Also, check out our letter to the editor that was published in the online edition of the Chicago Tribune on 7/29: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/letters/chi-90729blazer_briefs,0,1185731.story . Please feel free to contact Rebecca if you have any further questions or comments.

Friends of the Parks’ Statement on Proposed Air Pollution Ordinance:

Health of Urban Natural Areas Threatened by Severe Restrictions on Ecological Controlled Burning

An air pollution ordinance came before the Chicago City Council on Wednesday, 7/29/09 that included a hasty, last-minute amendment that could severely threaten the health of both the Chicago Park District’s 50+ urban natural areas and several thousands of acres of Cook County Forest Preserves that lie within Chicago city limits.  The amendment, submitted by Alderman Doherty during the 7/21 meeting of the Energy, Environmental Protection & Public Utilities Committee, seeks to curtail ecological controlled burning in urban natural areas by requiring an absurdly large buffer – 200 yards, or the length of two football fields – between any residence and an area to be burned.

The amendment also prohibits all brushpile fires, and requires extreme notification procedures that could effectively eliminate controlled burning altogether, as burns can only be conducted when weather conditions meet a set of very strict requirements.

Many of you may already know that the fire-adapted woodlands, savannas and prairies of our region depend on periodic ecological controlled burns to keep out invasive plants, restore nutrients to the soil, germinate seeds and stimulate growth. This ordinance would condemn hundreds of acres of woodland, prairie & savanna that happen to fall within the 200-yard buffer area to a slow death by suffocation and starvation as aggressive invasive species take over.

The Forest Preserve District is extremely sensitive to the safety concerns of homeowners who live adjacent to forest preserves. The District rigorously follows the safety and notification procedures required by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, who issues the District’s burn permits. But the District has proven that it will also go beyond these requirements by providing additional safety and notification accommodations to neighboring residents who have expressed concerns. And it should be noted that the professional ecologists and land managers of the Forest Preserve District of Cook County (FPDCC) have been successfully conducting controlled burns in our forest preserves with excellent results for more than 30 years, with zero negative incidents.

Healthy natural areas are not a luxury. They provide essential ecosystem services that degraded natural areas cannot. The conservation community has good science showing that, compared to healthy ecosystems, degraded natural areas, such as those overrun with invasive species:
-    Cannot store as much stormwater,
-    Cannot sequester as much carbon dioxide out of the air and
-    Do not provide sufficient food and shelter for birds and other wildlife.

Although the 200-yard buffer may appear to be a minor concern in the context of this large, important ordinance – which is for the most part an excellent and necessary update of the Municipal Code – a limitation like the one proposed by Alderman Doherty would have real-life costs and consequences for the citizens of Chicago.

We urge the City Council to reject the provisions included in section 11-4-740 of the Air Pollution Control Ordinance that seek to shut down ecological burning in Chicago’s parks and preserves and instead support the original intent of the passage, which was to provide an exemption from the ordinance for those ecological restoration practices whose safety and notification practices are already regulated by the State of Illinois. 

Air Pollution Control Ordinance

Call Your Alderman Today!

Beaubien Woods (Buffered by Ordinance)
Dan Ryan Woods (Buffered by Ordinance)
Eggers Woods (Buffered by Ordinance)
North Branch (Buffered By Ordinance)

Contact Erma Tranter for more info at trantere@fotp.org