Member changes likely coming to airport board

Staff members from Wheeling and Prospect Heights might no longer sit on the board of the airport that the two towns own.

At a joint meeting Tuesday, the Prospect Heights City Council and the Wheeling village board decided to take their administrator and manager, respectively, off the Chicago Executive Airport board. Both towns will independently have to vote in that change.

Both municipalities will decide on their own who to place on the board, with Wheeling leaning toward a current board member acting as liaison and Prospect Heights touting the possibility of a resident.

The board currently has four slots for residents -- two each from each town -- and two spots for the manager and administrator. Both towns collectively choose a chairman for the board.

Prospect Heights Mayor Pat Ludvigsen said it puts the managers in a situation where they are working for both the airport board and their own municipalities, which isn't necessarily fair.

"It's not good to have them be in that position," he said.

While members of the Wheeling board didn't necessarily unanimously agree that Village Manager Mark Rooney should no longer be on the board, they were fine with appointing a trustee to the position.

The two towns came together in a second joint meeting in an attempt to hammer out an airport intergovernmental agreement.

While some discussions -- such as the one about who should sit on the board -- were amiable, others brought flashbacks of the first joint meeting, where the two towns weren't able to agree on much.

Ludvigsen said he wanted the Chicago Executive Airport board to put off a decision for 30 days on a new fixed-base operator that it is scheduled to vote on today.

He said he didn't believe the board had properly considered enough proposals for development of 10 acres of land.

"Are we doing too much too fast?" said Bree Higgins, a Prospect Heights alderman.

However, Wheeling members of the board said the airport group was just doing its job.

The group did approve some changes to the intergovernmental agreement that were discussed at the prior meeting, including restrictions to the chairman and the rest of the airport board, rules for hiring and firing a chairman and the guidelines for determining the airport manager's job description.