Mayor D'Arcy Talks Bo Dome, Truck Traffic, Repairing Relationships

JOLIET —One of businessman Terry D'Arcy's visions for his first term as mayor of Joliet involved turning the city's old industrial steel mill along Collins Street into a youth sports mega complex, operated by two-sport legend Bo Jackson, who played outfield for the Kansas City Royals and was a star running back for the Los Angeles Raiders.

During last week's in-depth interview at City Hall, D'Arcy fielded a host of questions from Joliet Patch about his first year as mayor, what his plans for 2024 entail and what's the current state of his efforts to bring Bo Jackson to Joliet to open a Bo Jackson Dome at the abandoned U.S. Steel plant on the city's northeast side.

Joliet Patch: "With 2024 here, now that you have one year under your belt, what are your thoughts about specific projects or developments that you would like to see the city of Joliet accomplish now?"

Mayor D'Arcy: "I think that I ran on a few things, and I'll say this, one of the things was to try and repurpose the old U.S. Steel plant. And unfortunately, they're in the midst of a buyout. They have been pretty much for a year. Right now, there's a Japanese company that's trying to buy them, so there's no conversation with their real estate people because they can't do anything. So that's still on my radar.

"The truck traffic, the regional truck traffic plan, is another big thing we want to accomplish. The long term comprehensive plan, we want to get that thing going and we will. In the next few weeks, we're going to introduce the beginning of it at a Council meeting. But we want to make sure we understand what we're going to do long term with the light industrial and the warehousing that's coming here. We need to figure out how to control it. I know there's the closed loop that's going to be ... trying to keep some of that stuff off Route 53, obviously, and through some of our city streets that are state controlled. Those are big things for us.

"Stabilizing and getting really good people in the city. We're in the midst of a search for an economic development leader, big position. We're in the midst of looking for a community development leader. We need good people at those top-level positions, so we're working on that right now, and we've got some really good candidates we're going to zero in on. Soon we'll be introducing people."

Joliet Patch: "Can you talk about things you're really proud of that the residents or the city can look back on. Things you or your administration accomplished over the past year?"

Mayor D'Arcy: "Well, first of all, I would say that the understanding and the relationship we're going to have with the Evergreen Terrace project was very vital and important to the city. It took up a lot of energy, but Cesar Cardenas, myself and Rod Tonelli spent a lot of time on that. That was one of the most vital things we did.

"Something else the city was lacking was a relationship with our county, state and federal leadership. We seemed to have knocked the bridge out between everybody, so we've rebuilt all of the relationships from the county to the state to the federal levels so that we can work together as a regional partner, and I'm going to say, we've rekindled the relationship with our communities of Will County as well, so we engage in Will County Governmental League. Because we look at Joliet, Joliet is 21 percent of Will County, so our job is to be the lighthouse of the county to make sure that we all work together as a region, because we need regional solutions to one of the biggest problems that I see in that's truck traffic. Truck traffic has diminished the quality of life for good parts of our city. It's diminished the quality of life for our downtown.

"We've got 80,000 pound rigs flying down most of our streets downtown, and how do we revitalize the downtown like that? So, we've worked really hard ... met with Omer Osman, head of IDOT, our state legislators to work together to come up with a long term solution for truck traffic for the region. The lifts right now, I'm told, are 1.2 million lifts at the Intermodal and at some point they're going to be 2.2 million lifts. And so we have to find a way now to funnel that traffic away from the arteries that affect the quality of life of our residents. And so the Houbolt Road Bridge is great, but there's still other ways in and out of that park that are detrimental to the community, like (Route) 53, coming up 53 to Laraway Road. When a train stops on Laraway Road, trucks back up to Route 80 and the residents are stuck in line waiting to get to their homes. That's not fair, so the regional truck traffic plan is paramount to the future. A big part of what we want to do."

Related Joliet Patch coverage from this week:

Terry D'Arcy's First Year As Mayor Of Joliet: How Did It Go?

New Joliet Railroad Museum, Here's How It Looks: Photo Gallery

Bill Murray, Veecks To Make Joliet Slammers Summer's Hottest Ticket