Terminal 2 at O’Hare International Airport, which is slated to be torn down and rebuilt as the Global Terminal on Tuesday, April 9, 2024. A few years before Chicago reached an agreement with the city’s airlines to overhaul O’Hare International Airport, New York officials jump-started a rebuild of LaGuardia Airport.
The O’Hare overhaul, negotiated by then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2018, included a broad rebuilding and expansion of the airport. The heart of the project was replacing aging Terminal 2 with a gleaming new Global Terminal, and adding two satellite concourses. The following year the Port Authority approved an agreement with Delta Air Lines to rebuild, and largely pay for, another terminal, with work expected to be finished in 2024. By then, the total cost for the airport work was $8 billion.
Mitchell Moss, former director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University, said the project’s culmination came down to political will. When then-Vice President Joe Biden compared the airport to something that could be found in “a third-world country,” Cuomo was spurred to act. And the partnerships have long been met with skepticism in Illinois, Marlowe said. Plus, Chicago’s record of bringing the private sector into public infrastructure is questionable, he said. In an infamous 2008 deal, the city leased its parking meters to a private investment firm for an infusion of cash, and the firm recouped the cost and began profiting off the meters with decades left on the lease.
“We are not trying to overbuild at O’Hare, but we cannot under build, either,” the agency said in a statement. “A significant portion of the planned investment will replace aging and functionally obsolete terminal facilities, and Chicago must have airport infrastructure that allows us to remain a competitive economic center on the global stage both today and tomorrow.
But costs grew and delays mounted as the project endured through three mayors, two aviation department chiefs, the COVID-19 pandemic, and inflation. A change in the order of construction had been sought by airlines, who wanted to ensure the new terminal wasn’t threatened by future budget issues after the two satellites were built.
The aviation department later said the plan put forward to airlines earlier this month focused on “near-term flexibility while preserving long-term growth.”O’Hare is not the first airport to encounter budget overruns. For example, the same port authority that manages LaGuardia last year increased its funding authorization for work at John F. Kennedy International Airport by $1 billion, Bloomberg has reported.
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