Additional runways are a quality of life issue. Our region does not need additional negative impacts from the airport including more traffic congestion and more noise. O'Hare Airport is essentially constructed in suburban Chicago. The suburbs, not the City of Chicago, bear the brunt of O'Hare operations.

Chicago's dual, triple-parallel runway plan, if implemented, will have a vast majority of aircraft land and take-off in an eastwest direction over Elk Grove and portions of Cook and DuPage County. This change would cause an increase in noise pollution and raise safety concerns for the communities directly east and west of O'Hare and increase the breadth of noise, pollution, and safety impacts farther into Cook and DuPage County.

In addition, as planes turn, communities to the north and south of O'Hare will be impacted by noise, pollution, and safety concerns far in excess of what is currently experienced by those communities.

This reconfiguration along with additional terminals is estimated to allow O'Hare to handle up to 1,600,000 flights per year, up from its existing use of 900,000 flights per year. The airport was designed to handle 700,000 flights per year.

Elk Grove was planned and constructed to minimize the impact of the airport by locating industries on the eastern half of the community abutting the airport. Residential neighborhoods are buffered and located with sufficient distance from the airport to provide a high quality of life. Elk Grove also utilized expressways, highways, and a forest preserve to buffer existing flight paths from residential neighborhoods.

All of our planning was based on the airport's current configuration. Plans to add new runways or reconfigure runways will render our planning obsolete. New runways would effectively destroy the quality of life for our 35,000 residents and hundreds of thousands of residents around the airport.