Aurora Beacon-News
August 29, 2002
Managing growth: House speaker tells how he shepherded Oswego's boom
By John Zaremba
STAFF WRITER
OSWEGO &emdash; The old Oswego boy becomes a little confused when people talk about building a new post office. To him, the old brick building downtown is the new post office.
The old Oswego boy embraces memories of Sunday afternoons when all he could hear was the professional drag racers roaring down by Route 34, an old cow path he knew would fill out with homes and stores someday.
Fast forward about 25 years, put the old Oswego boy in the Illinois General Assembly, and he remembers when the state transportation chief came to Oswego and saw how badly the intersection of Route 34 and Boulder Hill Pass needed a stop light.
Most recently, he remembers Aug. 31, 2001 &emdash; the day he and dozens of local officials marked the opening of Oswego's Orchard Road bridge, a project that took 35 years to go from a thought to a plan to a reality. It also took $8.5 million, much of which the old Oswego boy plucked from Congress.
Dennis Hastert remembers the old country town he grew up in and later went on to represent in the state legislature and, now, the U.S. House of Representatives. He recalls the publicly funded projects that have come with the town's growth, and he told a crowd of business leaders and officials Tuesday night that teamwork on all levels of government &emdash; from Village Hall to Capitol Hill &emdash; is the key to allowing those improvements to continue.
Speaking to more than 100 local officials and business owners at the Oswego Economic Development Corp.'s annual meeting, Hastert, the speaker of the U.S House, spun tales of Oswego the former little country town, Oswego the current boom town, and Oswego the future bustling suburb.
"I see a vision for Oswego and Kendall County," he said.
It's the same vision he saw for such towns as Naperville, where not long ago he could put up a campaign sign in a farmer's field, only to return a few weeks or months later to see "three hundred houses and a church," he said.
His vision, as he told it, has three lynch pins: Oswego needs a rail system, the county needs more open space, and it needs highways and bridges.
All those developments are, in some sense, in progress.
Kendall County is in the second phase of a Metra feasibility study, and Oswego plans to have a Metra Park-n-Ride commuter station sometime next year. The Kendall County Forest Preserve will ask voters for a tax increase in November to preserve natural areas, and the Prairie Parkway, a project that Hastert admits he has taken "flaming arrows from the press" for advocating, was sited just a few weeks ago.
Hastert urged local government officials, most of whom were listening to him speak, to band together to make those things happen.
"Get things done because you have a community, you have a vision," he said. "We need to get things done."