Friends of the Parks fires back on Rahm/Lucas attempted land grab
Friends of the Parks Executive Director Juanita Irizarry | Sun-Times file photo
Chicago lost the Lucas museum because movie mogul George Lucas “wanted his way or the highway” and Mayor Rahm Emanuel enabled him by creating the “false expectation” that City Hall could deliver an “illegal” lakefront site, Friends of the Parks said Tuesday.
“From the beginning, there should have been a real process to get the Lucas museum on an appropriate site west of Lake Shore Drive. If not, then don’t waste all of our time,” Friends of the Parks Executive Director Juanita Irizarry told the Chicago Sun-Times in her first in-depth interview since Lucas pulled the plug on the Chicago project.
“The mayor was always going to give Mr. Lucas his way. There were never any negotiations in good faith with Friends of the Parks other than what Mr. Lucas wanted,” she said. “The
mayor created a false expectation when he promised Mr. Lucas and city residents a museum on a site that was not legal.”
Emanuel has accused Friends of the Parks of costing Chicago a $743 million private investment that would have been the largest philanthropic gift in the city’s history. He facetiously accused the parks advocacy group of saddling the city with “the most important parking lot in the country.”
Irizarry fired back Tuesday.
She contended the “fix was in” from the beginning to give Lucas the lakefront site he demanded and that the mayor’s site selection committee merely went through the motions of ratifying the site near Soldier Field.
When Friends of the Parks rewrote the script by filing a lawsuit kept alive by a federal judge who sympathized with the group’s central argument, the mayor and his minions tried to run roughshod over the group, Irizarry said.
“This administration’s approach was one of bullying Friends of the Parks all the way. I’m not ready to speak to all of the ways in which they did that. But I have 18,000 pages of discovery documents and reason to believe the city never intended there to be a true public participation process,” Irizarry said.
“The mayor asked us to negotiate. The first time we came back with terms to discuss, they accused us of extortion,” she said. “That goes to show they really weren’t interested in negotiating. Negotiations are a series of conversations until the parties come up with something they can agree on. But they summarily dismissed us. Mr. Lucas wanted his way or the highway.”
The billionaire filmmaker of “Star Wars” fame pulled the plug on his legacy project on Friday, ending a two-year controversy that began when Chicago picked up the ball fumbled by Lucas’ hometown of San Francisco.
The final straw appeared to be Friends of the Parks’ 11th-hour demand for 5 percent of revenue from the one museum that was not going to receive a taxpayer subsidy.
Days earlier, Emanuel’s handpicked Chicago Park District Board President Jesse Ruiz had labeled that demand “nothing short of extortion” and warned that it would be the “final nail in the coffin” of efforts to keep the coveted project in Chicago.
“No one benefits from continuing their seemingly unending litigation to protect a parking lot,” Lucas was quoted as saying in a statement issued Friday. “The actions initiated by Friends of Parks and their recent attempts to extract concessions from the city have effectively overridden approvals received from numerous democratically elected bodies of government.”
Irizarry categorically denied the extortion claim.
She said the demand for 5 percent of museum revenue was a starting point for negotiations, only after Emanuel offered to demolish the above-ground portion of McCormick Place East to make way for the Lucas museum.
That plan went nowhere in Springfield because it called for borrowing $1.2 billion and extending the life of five tourism taxes to replace the lost convention space.
“We believe neighborhood parks throughout the city need improvement and capital investment. All of those capital improvements have been held up by the [state] budget stalemate,” Irizarry said.
“It was not about extortion. It was about taking the Lucases up on their supposed offer to invest in the black and brown communities of Chicago,” she said. “The mayor was talking about raising taxes to save the Lucas museum. We were asking that Lucas put aside dollars — not from a tax, but in a fund for ongoing maintenance in neighborhood parks. Many people had come to us and asked that Lucas be asked to invest in parks across the city. We thought that was a great place to start a conversation.”
During the two-year saga, the mayor and his minions ridiculed the group as “Friends of the Parking Lot.” They tried to portray Friends of the Parks as a mercurial and unreliable negotiating partner “at war with themselves.”
Irizarry acknowledged that there were internal debates among board members. But she maintained that the group was united in its resolve to protect the lakefront, uphold the public trust doctrine and prevent “the beginning of a domino effect” of development east of Lake Shore Drive.
“There will always be people who don’t understand or agree, but our members and donations have been surging in the midst of this battle. We will survive,” she said.
Irizarry said she feels not an ounce of guilt or responsibility for the unhappy ending. But, she said, “We do wish Mr. Lucas would have taken us up on our offer to build the museum on another site.”
