Track Record

ELPC has achieved a terrific series of victories. Some of these cases are the result of years of work by our public interest attorneys and environmental advocates. Your support helps enable ELPC's talented staff to take on more important cases and win.

2007: Winning a seven year legislative victory which places Illinois with the most advanced Renewable Energy Development and Energy Efficiency programs in the nation.  Illinois utilities are now required to purchase clean renewable energy, ramping up to 25% of electricity supply by 2025.

2007: Leading the national campaign to improve and expand the innovative clean energy development programs in the 2007 Farm Bill to increase incentives for wind power, biomass energy and energy efficiency projects for family farmers and rural small business.

2007: Advocating for improvements in rail service that resulted in almost doubling ridership in Illinois while our Midwest High Speed Rail team fought and saved a segment of the Detroit-Chicago rail line.

2007:  Protecting the Great Lakes by working in concert with our environmental colleagues to stop BP from increasing water pollution into Lake Michigan.  This success will hopefully set a precedence to raise environmental standards and use state-of-the-art pollution control technology for other potential oil refinery expansions in the Midwest.

2006: Working with Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and the Illinois EPA to develop and pass a
mercury pollution reduction rule that is one of the strongest in the nation, after building a
strong environmental and healthcare coalition to support the adoption of these new standards.

2006:  Persuading the Illinois Pollution Control Board to adop a stringent new rule limiting the
acceptable concentration of phosphorus in wastewater from most new or expanding city waste-
water and industrial plants.

2006:  Winning a decade-long legal victory to protect Sugar Creek, one of Illinois' last free-flowing
streams from an environmentally destructive and unnecessary dam proposed by the City of Marion.

2006: Spearheading efforts to develop a Midwest High Speed Rail Network, which saw major
progress this year as the Illinois General Assembly voted to nearly double funding for Amtrak in
Illinois, and Wisconsin broke ground on a new passenger rail station in anticipation of high speed
service along the Madison - Milwaukee - Chicago route.

2005:   Protecting almost 25,000 acres of Wisconsin’s Northwoods from excessive logging through successful emergency legal appeals in Federal District Court to three timber sales approved by the U.S. Forest Service.

2005:   Legally intervening in a federal lawsuit to force Dynegy Midwest Generation to put modern pollution controls on its old, highly polluting coal plants in Southern Illinois.

2004:   Leading the charge to draft, advocate and build an environmental business coalition and pass the new statewide Illinois Energy Efficient Commercial Building Act, a crucial step to improve energy efficiency in green buildings and avoid future pollution.

2004:   Stopping the sprawl-inducing and environmentally destructive Hartmann-Hammond Bridge in the nearly pristine Boardman River Valley in Traverse City, Michigan and promoting the Smart Roads Alternative instead.

2004:   Winning a 12-year campaign to promote better alternatives to the costly and wetlands-destroying Route 53 Tollroad expansion in Lake County, Illinois when the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority removed this proposed $1.3 billion tollroad from its 10-year transportation plan following public advocacy pressure by ELPC and our colleagues.

2004:   Spurring development of Illinois’ first wind power farms producing clean energy and leading the Midwest charge for clean renewable energy development now accelerating throughout the region. 

2003:  Making the Farm Bill’s new Clean Energy Development programs work on the ground – protecting federal funding for the key Section 9006 renewable energy and energy efficiency program against the Administration’s proposed cutbacks, and eco-business deal-making for the Midwest to gain two-thirds of the nation’s Section 9006 grant funds.

2003:   Engaging in emergency litigation to hold off two large environmentally destructive timber sales in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest in Northern Wisconsin that would destroy important clean water resources, biodiversity and habitat.

2003:   Ten years later, stalling two massive, sprawl-inducing outlying tollroads in Lake County and Will County, Illinois that were “done deals” when ELPC started work in 1993.

2002:   Protecting the vital Lake Calumet ecological restoration on the Southeast Side of Chicago from a proposed new 1,000-slip boat marina in the lake.

2002:   Promoting “smart growth” planning alternatives by stopping two proposed new outlying bypass roads around Petoskey and Traverse City, Michigan that would have exacerbated sprawl and destroyed farmland.

2002:   Spearheading creation and enactment of the innovative new Clean Energy Development programs in the 2002 Federal Farm Bill–a win-win-win for farmers, rural economic development and the environment.

2002:   Leading the legal charge for Illinois’ adoption of the best Clean Water Act “antidegradation” rules in the nation, which will keep our cleanest rivers clean, as we work to protect the Mississippi River as well.

2001:   Developing and marketing Repowering the Midwest – The Clean Energy Development Plan for the Heartland, the acclaimed regional blueprint for renewable energy development, less pollution and more jobs.  Followed by the release of Job Jolt – The Economic Impacts of Implementing Repowering the Midwest’s Clean Energy Development Plan.

2001:   Winning a key victory before the United States Supreme Court to halt a steel company’s punitive damages lawsuit against a grassroots citizens’ group that had brought a reasonable environmental enforcement action.

2000:   Stopping Detroit Edison’s attempt to restart the old and dirty Connors Creek coal plant in Detroit and encouraging its conversion to relatively cleaner natural gas, thus setting a new precedent in preventing more air pollution from old, mothballed coal plants.

2000:   Intervening with our Minnesota grassroots allies to obtain significant environmental quality benefits from Northern States Power Co. in return for dropping our opposition to its proposed merger with New Century Energies.

1999:   Creating the innovative new Illinois Clean Energy Community Foundation and driving its start-up to effectively leverage the $240 million in new assets to jump-start the development of energy efficiency and renewable resources in Illinois, which has historically relied almost entirely on polluting coal and nuclear plants. 

1999:   Protecting Bell Smith Springs National Natural Landmark in the Shawnee National Forest by winning an injunction to halt clearcutting on the ridge tops that would have caused soil erosion and destruction of this wild and special public parkland.

1999:   Leveraging $750 million for development of a Midwest high-speed rail network and gaining business, labor, civic and political support for the nine-state regional rail initiative.

1998:   Stopping the proposed “prison on the Savanna prairie” and thus protecting the largest unfragmented sand prairie habitat along the Mississippi River.

1998:  Spurring the shutdown of the troubled Zion 1 & 2 nuclear plants on the shores of Lake Michigan, the largest nuclear plant closure in the nation.

1997:   Reforming the tollway system.  Winning a landmark federal court environmental lawsuit requiring the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority to consider better alternatives to the proposed I-355 tollroad extension in Will County that would exacerbate sprawl and destroy natural resources.  Releasing the Crossroads study of better, faster and cheaper alternatives to the proposed Route 53 tollroad extension in Lake County.

1997:   Intervening and helping lead the charge to stop the “Primergy” merger of two Minnesota and Wisconsin utilities that would have produced both environmental harms and potentially higher consumer rates.

1996:   Leading the legal intervention to implement Minnesota’s environmental externalities statute that establishes environmental values, including carbon dioxide costs, to be used in utilities’ electricity resource planning.

1995:   Co-founding and leading the market-driven Chicagoland Recycled Paper Coalition with the Bank of America, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, City of Chicago, Commonwealth Edison and RR Donnelley & Sons Co.

1994:   Promoting the Common Sense Alternative of upgrading US 41 and I-70 and stalling the environmentally destructive I-69 highway in Indiana.

1994:   Leveraging our intervention in the Cinergy merger between two Indiana and Ohio utilities to negotiate a major new five-year energy efficiency initiative and then making it work.