By Linda F. Jarrett
In 1976, following a ribbon-cutting at a Granite City, Ill. company, three men met over coffee and rolls.
From this discussion sprang the idea of the Leadership Council Southwestern Illinois.
Ralph Korte, chairman of Korte Construction, Carl Mathias, then-executive director of Illinois Power and Light, and Jim O’Flynn, RCGA executive director, wanted to find a way to bring the Metro East under an umbrella much like the RCGA in St. Louis.
Ralph Korte, chairman of Korte Construction, Carl Mathias, then-executive director of Illinois Power and Light, and Jim O’Flynn, RCGA executive director, wanted to find a way to bring the Metro East under an umbrella much like the RCGA in St. Louis.
“We were having coffee and musing about the economic activity on the East Side,” Korte says. “We had tried several things similar to the RCGA, but knew there was no one spot to focus on with our competing communities.”
“Then,” he says, “Jim said these powerful words. ‘My board at the RCGA has authorized me to spend $50,000 a year to develop some kind of an organization on the east side to make this happen.’ That got our attention.”
Putting an Idea to Work
A good idea and “seed money” from the RCGA were in place. Now, how to organize?
Korte and Mathias agreed that the only way this idea could work was to nurture the concept on a neutral east side site.
“The only neutral and centrally located site was SIUE (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville),” Korte says. “If we could get it grounded there, no community could have dibs on it.”
With the location decided, the next step was to get a director in place. That person, Korte says, was SIUE President Earl Lazerson.
As it turned out, Lazerson and Mathias had been thinking about a consortium of sorts for quite some time.
“I felt then that I needed to get to work on what Carl and I had talked about,” Lazerson says. “He came to visit me in the summer of 1976 and he said one of his tasks was
to aid the community in terms of putting itself together.
“He said he thought that the University had to play a major role in this because there was no other institution in the area that people trusted,” Lazerson says.
Lazerson thought about Mathias’ proposal and for the next three years, they would meet and talk about the concept.
When Lazerson became president of SIUE in 1979, he decided the time was right to make a move, and he contacted Mathias again.
“My hope was that we could create an instrument that would permit businesses, labor, education and government to come together with the purpose of furthering the economic interests of the region,” Lazerson says.
“This would provide us with more of a voice at the table in Springfield, in particular, when deliberations took place in regard to infrastructure improvement, budget allocations, and things of that sort.”
Lazerson says he contacted individuals in the labor, education and business community whom he knew. “I talked my silly head off. I met with enough success so that we could get it started, and that was the important thing.
“There was a natural hesitancy on the part of many people to think that this was just a harebrained scheme that would go nowhere,” he says. “There were bad feelings concerning things that had happened in the past, so that corner had to be turned with a willingness to look ahead, not backwards.”
In 1983, Korte, along with about 20 or 25 other Metro-East leaders in the business, labor, and education fields received an invitation for a breakfast meeting.
“Earl Lazerson is a man of action,” Korte says. “Lazerson doesn’t talk about things, he does them.”
Jim O’Flynn was also at the breakfast meeting, with his start up funding commitment from the RCGA and according to Korte, the Leadership Council was born that morning.
As the Council continued to meet, the labor leaders, in particular, Lazerson says, became more involved, because they were concerned about job creation.
“To the best of my recollection,” he says. “In the early 1980s, there were over 400,000 manufacturing jobs that were lost in Illinois, so getting everyone together was something the labor folks were interested in.
“They understood that while they had their own interests to adhere to, they also understood that they would work things out in an amicable way that would contribute to the well-being of the whole region.”
In 1985, Mary Kane, then director of administrations for Madison County, and now, senior vice-president for Stifel Nicolaus, was selected to be executive director.
“People at that time were more insular,” she says. “They represented their own organizations and didn’t speak for the region as a whole. I think Earl, Carl and Ralph convinced Jim that one way to make that happen was to create a leadership council on the Illinois side of the river that would be a true organization of the leaders of the Metro East region that could gather consensus on critical issues.”
It Takes Money
to Make an Idea Work
O’Flynn believed so much in this organization and its goals to unify the southwest Illinois region that in 1985 he committed the RCGA to financially support the council for a multi-year period. Patrick McKeehan, the council’s executive director, says that the support by RCGA ended up totaling $164,000 over the subsequent 12 years.
Kane says that O’Flynn was “pretty excited” about getting the organization up and running and uniting the leaders in Madison and St. Clair counties.
“I believe the arrangement was over a multiple-year period on a declining scale, so that really was the impetus,” she says. “The theory was that the RCGA would be there in the beginning to help the Leadership Council get organized, come together, develop its own membership cadre, and go forward with its mission to achieve consensus.”
Another goal, she says, was to “better integrate the Metro East with the Metro West, because back in the mid-80s, there was very little integration. The river was a much greater significant barrier back then.”
The End Result
“Southwestern Illinois is entering an exciting phase in its development cycle as the level of investment continues to accelerate,” McKeehan says. “But those investments wouldn’t be coming to the Metro East if it weren’t for the groundwork laid by the Leadership Council working in conjunction with its diverse members and other allied organizations over the past quarter century.”
Although the names and faces change throughout the years, the legacy of those men continues to inspire and urge collaboration between the various groups to promote the betterment of Metro East.
All from three men and
a cup of coffee. |
