By Nick Reiher

I remember sitting at a number of Elwood Village Board meetings nearly 10 years ago now, not feeling sorry for too many up on the dais.

They were getting hammered there and on social media for working with NorthPoint people on an agreement that would bring a large-scale warehouse development just east of them.

The center point (no pun intended) of this plan was a “closed loop” traffic pattern that would keep most trucks off Illinois 53, but also would cut through a significant portion of their town, and, as one resident said upon seeing the plan, “would change everything.”

Although the plan still exists, with some significant changes, the guy I felt a bit sorry for up on the dais during those contentious meetings was Dave Silverman, the attorney whose firm represented the village.

I’m not sure when I first met Dave. I knew his partners – George “Biff” Mahoney and former state rep Tom Cross – much better. George, Dave and I would have breakfast now and then, at an ungodly early hour, and Dave always was the healthy one.

I used to joke to the waitress that he would have “burnt toast and a rotten egg.” Stooges’ fans will get that one. And I would see him walking briskly on the track at Inwood in Joliet when I was a regular back then.

I thought, “It’s good he’s taking care of himself. That helps deal with the stress of all that NorthPoint stuff.”

But he represented, and still does, many public and private interests. One of them came to light a few years back.

The board of the Joliet Regional Port District had been working to solve the Federal Aviation Administration’s Sisyphean list of requirements for a grant and permission to build a permanent control tower at Lewis University Airport, which the district operates.

One of those tasks was to get buy-in, literally, from the other member agencies of the district, which consists of all territories in DuPage, Lockport, Joliet, Troy and Channahon townships.

Hat in hand, members of the district board would visit governmental agencies, including the Will County Board, asking for any financial help they could get toward convincing them to pitch in matching funds to help offset the FAA’s relatively low cap on grants for such towers.

There are 110,000 to 120,000 takeoffs and landings at the airport in Romeoville each year, Dave told a group of Will County officials, with diverse aircraft: small jets; small craft and those used by the growing Lewis University aviation program. More than 20,000 takeoffs and landings between the next-highest regional airport, Southern Illinois in Murphysboro, with 86,389, according to FAA statistics.

“And we have no traffic cop,” Silverman told the group of local and county officials. “We need a traffic cop.”

Meantime, the best they could do was Barney Fife, a temporary control tower in an RV, wheeled out solely for NASCAR weekends so drivers could fly in and helicopter over to the track.

The rest of the year, the growing number of companies using the airport, as well as the many Lewis flight students, had to depend on help from those in the airport office, when it was open, and their own wiles.

Ultimately, their work led former U.S. Rep. Dan Lipinski to ask his bud, Mike Madigan, to include most of the dough in the state’s recently approve $43 billion infrastructure program.

That may have been one of the best achievements Dave led for the district, but by no means the only one. He would have liked to work on a few more, but he got the word suddenly last month he was not reappointed to the district board.

That’s how it happens with the appointments, Dave told me during a recent breakfast enjoyed at a more humane hour, especially ones that come from the governor. Like when he was first appointed by the late George Ryan.

Your name gets whispered in a hallway or at a party, and the next thing you know, you get an email welcoming you to a board. There are hundreds of such volunteer appointments by the governor on myriad boards and commissions.

In this case, one source told me (since Dave never got the reason he wasn’t reappointed) is that the governor’s staff was looking at long-serving appointees, and decided to get some new blood. They don’t usually check achievements before doing so.

Certainly, then, no gold watch or even a thank you for your service. Just the government’s version of the Rapture.

Dave knows this is how it goes. And while disappointed to no longer be serving, he has enough to keep him busy, including representing Joliet Catholic Academy on the recently approved plans for the new stadium, and the controversial data center proposed for the south end of Joliet.

I expect there will be more than a few people at the Joliet meetings opposing this, just as they did NorthPoint. And I expect venom also will be directed toward Dave.

And I expect he will handle it with his usual aplomb and courtesy.

Thank you, Dave, for always being the voice of reason on whatever project you’re working.

See you at breakfast. But not too early.

Nick Reiher is editor of Farmers Weekly Review.