Progress Made Toward Little Egypt Oasis

The drive to develop the Little Egypt Oasis on top of Interstate 57 at West Frankfort continues through the planning and engineering phases.

Overpass owner and developer Scott Williams sent out an update earlier this week. On Monday he met with representatives of both the Illinois Department of Transportation as well as the Federal High Administration. The meeting "went well," he reported.

The preliminary engineering findings and drawings for the Access Justification Report (AJR) were reviewed. This was the first meeting that included FHWA and was a big step forward in the process. As each segment of the AJR is created it will be submitted for comments and when the complete AJR is created it will be submitted to FHWA for conceptual approval.

The conceptual approval, if all goes well, will take about 4 to 6 months and the study that will follow will take 12 to 18 months. So the project is moving forward but still has a long way to go.

The moves comes after the initial kickoff meeting for the Access Justification Report last November.

The Little Egypt Oasis would make major changes in the interstate interchange and open up hundreds of acres for development. The key point of the plan would include using the railroad overpass as the site of the main development. An early stage would be building of a truck stop on the west side of the highway.

New Hotels For Marion, Mount Vernon

With the Drury chain focusing on a major new project in Mount Vernon the company took the rare step of actually placing some of their undeveloped acreage for sale. The chain has long been known for sitting on property until the time is right for development.

Recently in Marion, they turned over part of their land for the new Panera's and was in negotiation with America's Best Inns to buy and demolish that property for another well-known chain restaurant. That deal did not materialize.

Now they've placed three acres up for sale located behind their hotel and Panera's that fronts 17th Street (Morgan Ave.), and it looks like there's another developer eyeing it for a new hotel and apartments that would cater to professionals and workers who need longer-term stays.

As of last week no building permits had been issued with the city.

Drury's three acres would make a good fit for such a development. There are nine restuarants in that block or just across the streets that surround it, as well as a liquor store. Gold's Gym is just a short walk away as is Rent One Park up on The Hill.

Meanwhile work progresses in Mount Vernon for Drury Inn's new $22 million development on the northeast side of the main interstate interchange. Drury has knocked down its long-time three-story inn, a gas station next door, and as of late last month when the picture below was taken, was in the process of knocking down the Thrifty Inn and the former Best Western Inn, which had been closed for years.

The old rooms wiped out will be replaced by a seven-story hotel similar to the built in the last few years at O'Fallon, Illinois. In addition the company will create space for two new restuarants yet to be publicly identified. Plans also call for additional retail space as well.

The old Best Western hotel was one of the two original major hotels in Mount Vernon after the opening of Interstate 57. Ralph Gray, brother of U.S. Rep. Ken Gray, and developer of the Gray Plaza motel chain, built the hotel in 1967-68 as a 101-room Ramada Inn.

Gray announced the $1.1 million project at the time he opened his new Ramada Inn in Marion. Both hotels were designed to be identical. While the Mount Vernon languished in recent decades hidden behind a row of pine trees planted on the Thrifty Inn property, the Marion hotel has survived as a budget motel under a variety of franchises.

The hotels originally included a cocktail lounge, coffee shop and a banquet room large enough for 150 people. An ornate curved staircase to the a second floor was a major feature in the lobbies. Each guest room included "piped-in-music, color television and air conditioning" and were "decorated in three color schemes, gold, green and blue," according to an article in the July 23, 1967, edition of the Southern Illinoisan.

Fracking Cuts Unemployment to 0.7 Percent

Oil gusher at Robinson,
Illinois, in 1907.

The Chicago Tribune had a front page feature story Sunday about the oil boom in North Dakota which mentioned, fairly high up in the story, the potential in Southern Illinois.

There's been a lot of debate, most of it one-sided and hysterical, about the negative impacts of fracking, usually from people who don't realize our state's oil industry has been using the technique since the 1950s.

What's new is the combination of fracking, far deeper drilling as well as the development of horizontal drilling. I did a series of articles last year for The Daily Register in Harrisburg about the potential.

Those opposed to it certainly haven't swayed me. It would be better if some of their leading spokespeople weren't opposed to our petroleum-based civilization in the first place. I get it. You don't like oil. Go back to your cave. There aren't any real alternatives except for coal and natural gas which for the former you like even less.

My favorite complaint is that it would hurt tourism. In actuality, only to the extent that it would drive up room rates and eliminate vacancies. Neither of those, mind you, would bother hotel operators.

But the best reason to support a resurgence in our oil industry is the jobs that come with it. There's a story in today's paper about Illinois fighting with Iowa over a $1.2 billion new anhydrous ammonia plant.

That's a lot of construction jobs but only 150 permanent jobs when it's built. They're talking 50,000 jobs if downstate Illinois starts to do its best imitation of North Dakota.

I knew it was serious last spring when U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, came to Harrisburg for a photo op following the Leap Day Tornado. A week earlier he had targeted the coal industry at a global warming news conference in Chicago.

I wanted to ask him about his comments. To his credit he didn't change them even though he was in the heart of coal country. He surprised me when he brought up oil and natural gas as replacements for the mining jobs.

I had been hearing about the possibilities of fracking coming to Illinois and a potential oil boom. I asked, "how big?" He wouldn't quantify an answer, but smiled, and made reference to North Dakota. It was around that time that North Dakota passed Alaska as the county's second largest oil-producing state.

And with that reference it's time to get back to Sunday's focus story.

Appropriately, the Trib's big story starts with a little one, how Andy Turco went from high school dropout in a series of dead-end jobs to a solid blue collar career. All he had to do was leave Chicago for the northern plains.

Then [Turco] talked to a buddy working here, in a barren corner of North Dakota, where an ugly-sounding word — fracking — has driven oil from the ground and pushed unemployment down to 0.7 percent. That's right: seven-tenths of one percent.

Turco sold his car, hopped in a van and drove west.

Today, he's earning nearly six figures working about 90 hours a week on a drilling rig, one of many Chicago-area transplants who have joined thousands in a remote region experiencing an oil boom while much of the country tries to shake off a recession hangover.

"It is the best thing I ever did; no doubt about it," said Turco, 24, who arrived in Williston in October 2011. "I'm finally living an adult lifestyle, instead of a teenage dropout lifestyle."

And it's all thanks to fracking, short for hydraulic fracturing, a relatively new and controversial drilling technology in which highly pressurized water, sand and other substances are driven into oil-rich shale thousands of feet deep, creating cracks that release the oil deposits and send them up the well.

Read more about the developments here.

The Illinois General Assembly will be taking up state Rep. John Bradley's bill to regulate fracking. It will be the toughest regulatory oversight in the country. It's backed by both industry and the still-in-the-mainstream environmental groups.

Delta Grant to Improve Access to Walker's Bluff

Walker's Bluff likes to advertise they're the region's premiere entertainment destination, but actually getting there has never been easy.

Today's Southern Illinoisan notes that one of the new grants just announced from the Delta Regional Authority includes funds to upgrade the county line road that leads to the property.

Delta awarded more than $100,500 for improvements to Meridian Road in Williamson County as part of a $340,470 project for tourism asset expansion expected to create and retain 111 jobs.

The article doesn't name Walker's Bluff, but it's the only tourism asset in that area.

Street Machine Nationals Return to DuQuoin

The Street Machine Nationals will be returning to the DuQuoin State Fairgrounds this summer according to a story in yesterday's Southern Illinoisan.

The state and the sponsors have been negotiating since last November for what will be the 30th annual event that DuQuoin last hosted in 1998.

The three-day event from June 28-30 is expected to draw about 10,000 visitors to the city so make your hotel reservations now. This is the type of event that will fill rooms from Mount Vernon to Marion and Carbondale.

Fair Manager John Rednour said the event should generate a $3 to $4 million impact to the city and the surrounding region.

Interest in the event is already high, Rednour said.

“Our phones have been ringing off the hook. People want to know about the campgrounds, hotels. We’re expecting at least 10,000 the first year and that’s going to be great for Du Quoin and the surrounding area,” he said.

Romney Win = Boulder Creek on The Hill

At least that's what Marion Mayor Bob Butler seemed to be implying in an interview last week with WSIL-TV. It's also what he indicated in an interview I had with him last month.

The developers aren't crass enough to mention Mitt Romney by name, but based on what little the mayor is spilling and the simple facts that commentators nation-wide are repeating, many in America, particularly in the business sector are concerned that the country is not only going in the wrong direction, but could be going over a fiscal cliff with another recession very possible (as most of Europe is already in one).

The TV station quotes Butler as stating: "... most of the businesses interested in the space will wait until after the Presidential election to decide to build.

"If one candidate is elected president, they feel like one thing will happen in the economy. If another is elected perhaps they feel something else will happen," says Butler.

Considering that most of the businesses would be retailers it's understandable if they plan on waiting to see if a president is elected that actually supports the free markets, or one that believes in government control and slow growth.

Last month the discussion actually centered on one of the two major developers looking at the STAR bonds site who was waiting until after the election to make a decision.

No one is mentioning any names, whether it's presidential candidates or actual anchors to the proposed Boulder Creek at The Hill development. Either way we'll all know more in less than a month.

Developers Outline Plans for Marion's West Side

View Larger Map

I've been out of town and missed the news, but the Marion City Council moved forward on plans last week for a new 74-acre commercial office, retail and restaurant space development on the south side of Illinois Route 13 generally between Skyline Drive and the Burlington-Northern Railroad.

The site is owned by two locally-owned LLCs, Celeste Linha LLC and Cerrado LLC. Marion businessmen Ron Osman and Jim Reichert own the first one, and Osman is the principal investor in the second, according to an article in the Southern Illinoisan.

The largest tract south of Illinois Route 13 immediately west of Sam's Club has long shown disinterest in developing their property, at best only wanting to lease rather than sell. That has left the next tract across from Toys R' Us in a position of being unable to develop due to lack of access roads to Walton Way and Skyline Drive.

Now that IDOT is building the frontage road between those two roads and extending Marathon Drive south from the mall property to the new road, this property will have access. Owned by Phil Campbell, formerly of the old Campbell's Harley-Davidson dealership, now Black Diamond, he's been wanting to see this land developed ever since the Illinois Centre mall opened. Now he can.

The next tract to the west was the north end of the old Saluki National Golf Course fiasco from the early 1980s that sent the developer to jail. Many of the bodies of water visible in the satellite view date to the golf course. This is part of the 74 acres included in the redevelopment and I believe this is the Celeste Linha LLC property.

The fourth tract sits at the corner of Route 13 and Skyline and includes a large 35,000 sq. ft. building that Osman (Cerrado LLC) will tear down as part of the redevelopment. The building has been offices for Blue Cross/Blue Shield, a department store in the 1970s and was originally build as a furniture store in 1966 for Beiderman's Furniture, a national chain.

The St. Louis chain entered the Marion market in 1962 when it bought the Williams Furniture Store at 307-09 N. Market St., which had been in business for seven years. Today that location is the home of Bennie's Italian Foods.

Beiderman began work on the Skyline Drive location in 1966, in what was then an isolated commercial cluster at the intersection halfway between the interstate and Illinois Route 148. Lawrence Wohlwend had already been active in developing Westernaire Plaza at the intersection which included his Chrysler dealership where the current one remains. The new Beiderman store opened March 12, 1967. At the time it was one of the chain's 38 stores in the Midwest and one of 87 stores nationwide.

The city annexed the land the following month on April 5. The chain went under in 1974. A Valu-Store took its place and open in October 1976.

An effort earlier this decade at a new residential development on micro-sized lots drew the wrath of neighbors to the south and never materialized.

The Southern's story mentions that the city has agreed with taking out the railroad spur that crosses the old golf course property and will reimburse developers for a number of infrastructure costs with 75 percent of the city's 1 percent sales tax collected in the area.

The story did not mention any TIF monies being used, but the land, at least the Beiderman building is part of a TIF district. Demolition of the building, site preparation, and the construction of roads and utilities are all reimbursable expenses under TIFs.

Osman said the development has already been more than 20 years in the making, time which he's spent acquiring property and various tracts of land.

"It's kind of like giving birth to an elephant, it takes a long time," Osman said. "And it's still a long way from being done."

Work on the frontage road should be completed by the end of the year. Work will begin sometime on the new Illinois Route 13 overpass over Marathon Drive and the Burlington-Northern Railroad, despite the clear lack of enthusiasm for the project by anybody in City Hall, at the mall or just about anywhere else.

Mr. Koolz Opens Wednesday, Others to Follow

The latest Marion eatery, Mr. Koolz' Frozen Yogurt is scheduled to open at 9 a.m. Wednesday for those who need some dessert following breakfast.

The business owned by County Board Chairman Brent Gentry and managed by Babe Ann Hoover is located immediately north of Black Diamond Harley-Davidson in the south end of what's was the Stevens' building and now is named Parkway Plaza.

Three other restaurants are scheduled to open as well over the next two months. Logan's Roadhouse is set for Sept. 16 and a story in Sunday's Southern Illinoisan also noted another steakhouse will open later in the month.

Sammy’s Steakhouse will open in Marion Plaza at 1000 N. Carbon in the space formerly occupied by the short-lived Home Style Buffet and Nong Chen. The site is undergoing extensive renovations. Long-time Marion Chef Sammy Mankin will serve up the specials.

The Southern also reported that Panera Bread should open late in October next to Drury Inn.