The fight to save Bell Bowl Prairie is over as Rockford airport construction resumes

By Kevin Haas
Rock River Current
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ROCKFORD — The 18-month fight to save Bell Bowl Prairie has come to an end.

Bulldozers started plowing a path through the dry gravel prairie before dawn this morning as work resumed on a $50 million cargo expansion for the Chicago Rockford International Airport.

“The bulldozer used lights before the sun rose to begin stripping the prairie down,” Andrea Wallace Noble, a naturalist who has supported efforts to save the prairie, told the Rock River Current around 7:30 a.m. “It started with one pass, and now they’ve been going for an hour and a half and they’ve cleared so much more than they need for a road.”

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Several supporters of the effort to save the prairie held vigil overnight in anticipation that construction could resume today. The Federal Aviation Administration had cleared the way for construction to resume after it determined in its assessment that no endangered species would be harmed and the project would have no significant impact on the environment.

The FAA also noted that 6 acres of the prairie will remain after construction, including more than 3 acres of high-quality prairie. But supporters of the prairie say that fragments a fragile ecosystem, and the road should have been rerouted to spare the prairie.

“It’s a travesty that our Endangered Species Act wasn’t enough to protect the many endangered species that we’ve documented on this prairie,” Noble said.

The rusty patched bumble bee, a federally endangered species which had been found on the site, was the initial reason construction was paused in summer 2021.

A new assessment was conducted and late last week the FAA gave the OK for construction to resume. The Natural Land Institute attempted to sue to stop the work, but its motion was denied this week.

The FAA’s rules would have prohibited the airport of doing any excavation work between March 15 and October 15, which is the bee’s foraging season. But Noble said the work likely disturbed the bee’s underground hibernacula, where the bee lies dormant during winter.

“It’s very likely that they just rolled up the hibernacula of the rusty patched bumblebee queens and destroyed those colonies today,” Noble said.

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David Stocker was among the small group that stayed in watch overnight near the corner of Beltline Road and Cessna Drive. He said a bulldozer started to make its initial strip across the prairie before 6 a.m.

“It feels like we’re the group of people that stand outside the prison hoping for a last-minute reprieve of an execution,” Stocker said. “This prairie committed no crime, it had the misfortune of having all this progress and modernity, which simply can’t stop itself, happen all around it.”

The cargo expansion is estimated to create hundreds of construction jobs and generate up to 600 permanent jobs at the airport, which has been one of the region’s biggest economic engines. The Rockford airport has been among the fastest-growing cargo operations in the world, and it ranks among the top airports in the country for cargo weight landed.

Advocates for saving the prairie said they wanted the expansion project to move forward because of its importance for the region’s economy. However, they wanted the airport to reroute the road so that the land would be preserved as the airport expands.

“There’s this tremendous failure of imagination and the utter refusal of the airport board, even the city, to support alternative proposals and ideas that through dialogue could have given the prairie a chance to live on,” Stocker said. “I wish they had listened, and I wish there could have been a compromise.”

The Rev. Frank Langholf, pastor of Emmanuel Lutheran Church, said he and others were grieving the loss of the prairie. The Natural Land Institute said Wednesday that its last-resort efforts would be to translocate patches of prairie sod, but that doesn’t compare with preserving its natural state.

“Even if you could transplant plants and creatures, you can’t replace the gravel prairie. It won’t work. It’s been destroyed,” said Langholf, who arrived at the airport at 6 a.m. today to look on as construction resumed.

He said while this fight is over, there is more work to do elsewhere to preserve remaining natural land. He said the Greater Rockford Airport Authority, the board that governs the airport, should have listened to the Natural Land Institute’s alternative design plans.

“There were already plans available if everybody had been invited to the table, but we were not invited to the table,” Langholf said. “This didn’t have to happen.”

This article is by Kevin Haas. Email him at khaas@rockrivercurrent.com or follow him on Twitter at @KevinMHaas or Instagram @thekevinhaas