accounts because their home state has law prohibiting same
send the infidels a lawyer to get dome federal court attorney fees for a civil rights case alleging violation of the us constitution's commerce clause...
Epstein teaches in the land of dead nyc otb where the boss told the company attorney you ain't nothing but a high priced fucking errand boy
Chicago Betrays the Public Trust for Obama
Meanwhile, the San Diego City Council arbitrarily stops the Bottini family from building on its land.
Politics often allow the strong to trample the weak. That’s what happened in two land-use cases on which I am lead counsel. Superficially the cases have little in common, but they show how unfettered discretion lets cities block small projects that are sound and authorize large ones that are unwise.
The first case, Protect Our Parks v. Chicago, is a challenge mounted by a parks-advocacy group to block the construction of the massive Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park on the city’s South Side. Jackson Park is a 500-acre 19th-century masterpiece designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. The presidential center wants to build a 225-foot-high building in a narrow space between a lagoon and a busy local street. The plan requires Chicago to close Cornell Avenue, a six-lane road that carries traffic through the park from the South Side to the Chicago Loop. Closing down this and other roads—but opening up no other—would cost the city at least $147 million in hard cash over the life of the project, and permanently disrupt neighborhoods, while trapping thousands of commuters in traffic snarls.
The presidential center plans to carve out 19.3 acres of the park, which the city will turn over to the Obama Foundation for 99 years. The price? Ten dollars. The city also has agreed to pick up all the costs of remediation in the event that the center requires extra structural support—likely given the watery location. Jackson Park’s eastern border is Lake Michigan.
In her deposition, Eleanor Gorski of the Chicago Department of Planning and Development acknowledged that the Obama Foundation’s internal assessment had pronounced Washington Park, lying to the west, a superior site. Washington Park has more empty space. Building there would cause less disruption and allow better access to main thoroughfares. Although designated Chicago’s point person on the project, Ms. Gorski admitted she knew of no study that investigated the costs and benefits of building in Jackson Park. Nonetheless, the city insists on describing the closing of a main road as an “enhancement” giving pedestrians and cyclists “unimpeded” access to the Lake Michigan shore. Traffic dislocations are largely ignored. And the city never explains why an Obama Presidential Center in Washington Park or any other site in Chicago wouldn’t be as beneficial to the city in jobs and tourism.
Chicago’s handling of the presidential center violates the venerable public-trust doctrine, under which a municipality owes a duty of loyalty and care to its citizens analogous to a corporation’s duty to its shareholders. Cities must follow transparent procedures and work to maximize residents’ gains, not give huge public handouts to politically powerful private entities. Chicago officials should, in fact, feel a higher duty to provide fair value to the public because of the huge conflict of interest raised by the longstanding relationship between the Obama family and the city.
In February, the federal district court in Chicago ruled against Protect Our Parks. I am now asking the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn that decision because it failed to face up to the procedural and substantive infirmities of the deal.
The second case, Bottini v. San Diego, involves a futile eight-year effort by private landowners to construct an ordinary single-family home on a 7,000-square-foot lot zoned for that purpose. Unlike the Obamas, the Bottinis have no political clout. They have been grossly mistreated by the San Diego City Council and local antigrowth forces. The council first regarded a dilapidated house on the site as a public nuisance and then, preposterously, as a historic landmark. After the house was ripped down, the council denied the Bottinis’ permit application and overrode the favorable recommendation of town planners, who concluded that the Bottinis’ proposed single-family home was exempt from environmental review under California law.
The California Court of Appeal acknowledged these errors. But years went by and the court never ordered the city either to compensate the Bottinis or issue them a building permit. The crowning blow came when the appellate court held that the Bottinis couldn’t show that they had the requisite “particularized investment-backed expectations” when they purchased the property because they didn’t know whether the old structure needed to be rehabilitated or demolished. Hence, the city didn’t have to allow the Bottinis to build an ordinary single family home on a $4 million lot that still lies vacant.
The California Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal on this issue, but after the Bottinis and I submitted our brief, the justices unanimously decided that their decision to hear the case had been “improvidently granted,” without asking the city to reply.
Our petition for review by the U.S. Supreme Court stresses that federal law requires a comparison of the owner’s loss and the public’s putative environmental gains. In Penn Central v. New York (1978), the city successfully blocked a railroad company’s effort to build a large tower above Grand Central Terminal. The justices concluded that this did not constitute a taking because Penn Central continued to earn a “reasonable return” from its existing facility and the public benefited from unobstructed views of Park Avenue. The Bottinis, by contrast, will be wiped out, even though San Diego lacks any environmental justification for keeping their land unimproved.
One might think the courts would provide more protection to private owners who want to build on their own land than to private parties that want to build on public land. The Supreme Court needs to protect little owners from the endless delays and abuses of the permitting process, just as the Seventh Circuit should make sure that powerful political interests don’t run roughshod over the rights of ordinary citizens.
Mr. Epstein is a law professor at New York University, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.
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