A federal judge’s decision yesterday to allow a lawsuit against the City of Chicago and the Chicago Parks District to proceed will delay the progress of the Obama Presidential Center (OPC), which has been designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and landscape architects Michael Van Valkenburg Associates. Controversially sited on public land—Frederick Law Olmsted’s Jackson Park on the city’s South Side—the competition-winning scheme was legally challenged by the nonprofit Protect Our Parks organization on that grounds that public parkland has been improperly given over to a private foundation. Judge John Robert Blakey’s ruling denied the city’s request that the lawsuit be dismissed and determined that the plaintiffs had standing to sue because of local taxpayers’ rights to object to how public assets are used.
Several of Protect Our Parks objections were dismissed by the judge, however. These included First Amendment concerns regarding public resources being channeled into organizations (like the Obama Foundation) that could host and promote political speech. Additionally, the judge rejected the nonprofit’s claim that the presidential center’s plan would cause certain plaintiffs environmental and aesthetic harm.
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