A federal appeals panel closed the door on the most recent attempt to halt conversion of part of Chicago’s Jackson Park into the Obama Presidential Center.
The U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion July 1, the latest ruling in a dispute that dates to the 2016 announcement from the Barack Obama Foundation regarding plans to build the South Side museum. The proposal drew vehement opposition from a citizen group organized as Protect Our Parks, which launched litigation against several defendants, including the city and its park district, state and federal officers, rooted largely in concerns about impact on the environment, the park and the surrounding neighborhood.
Last August, Associate Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett denied a petition from Protect Our Parks for an emergency order halting the project. Barrett, who earlier sat on the Seventh Circuit appeals panel and participated in decisions on the lawsuit, declined to forward the petition to the other eight justices for further consideration. U.S. District Judge John Blakey later denied the group’s request for a preliminary injunction.
Seventh Circuit Judge Diane Wood wrote the opinion on Protect Our Parks’ appeal of Blakey’s ruling; David Hamilton concurred. Though originally assigned to the case as well, Judge Michael Kanne died June 16 and didn’t participate in the decision.
Although Protect Our Parks was correct that the federal agencies named as defendants didn’t consider alternative museum sites while conducting environmental assessments, Wood wrote, that reality isn’t sufficient to impede progress.
“None of the federal defendants had anything to do with the site selection — it was the city that chose Jackson Park, and the federal agencies had (and have) no authority to move the project elsewhere,” Wood wrote. “Federal law does not require agencies to waste time and resources evaluating environmental effects that those agencies neither caused nor have the authority to change.”
Museum opponents have urged the Obama organization and city to consider other South Side sites that, they say, would greatly benefit from nearly $1 billion in economic investment earmarked for the OPC. Protect Our Parks accused city officials of effectively conspiring with the Obama Foundation to build in Jackson Park, which involves clearing more than 19 acres and the “wanton” destruction of about 800 trees.
The plan also would require closure or redirection of numerous roads through and around Jackson Park, and the widening of Stony Island Boulevard and Lakeshore Drive, to accommodate the expected increases in traffic resulting from visitors to the 12-story structure. The OPC would not be a traditional presidential library, but rather a museum and monument focused on Obama himself, operated by the Obama Foundation, with the goal of furthering the legacy and politics of America’s 44th President.
With respect to pursuit of a preliminary injunction, Wood wrote, despite deploying several legal theories, Protect Our Parks consistently failed to show its lawsuit might have a chance to succeed at trial, the first burden for convincing a court to temporarily halt the project.
Protect Our Parks, Wood continued, advanced “arguments about the agencies’ response to the procedural steps they took, not arguments about their failure to adhere to the required process.” In reality, the defendant federal agencies “were very thorough,” she continued, including a Tree Technical Memorandum cataloging the species of each tree to be removed and confirming the planned replacement on a one-to-one ratio, as well as a look at the project’s impact on bird migration.
“The record shows that the Park Service and Department of Transportation took the necessary hard look at the likely environmental consequences of the project before reaching their decisions,” Wood wrote.
The panel further rejected arguments the agencies disregarded Jackson Park’s historical and cultural resources and said claiming a failure to examine a Washington Park site was “fatally flawed.” No federal agency could dictate a building site to the private Obama Foundation, Wood wrote, and therefore Protect Our Parks can’t hold those entities responsible for not considering requests beyond the city’s Jackson Park plan.
Wood said the same logic applied to most of the other arguments, such as insisting the Department of Transportation Act compels the Highway Administration to seek alternative locations.
“Because the Highway Administration could not have compelled the city to locate the Center at a different site, it was neither arbitrary nor capricious for that agency to take the city’s decision to build the Center in Jackson Park as a given — not to mention the fact that choosing a site for and building the Center is not a transportation project,” Wood wrote.
The panel affirmed Judge Blakey’s denial of the preliminary injunction.
Protect Our Parks and other plaintiffs are represented in the action by attorneys Michael Rachlis, of Rachlis Duff & Peel, of Chicago; Thomas G. Gardiner and Catherine M. Keenan, of Gardiner Koch Weisberg & Wrona, of Chicago; and Richard Epstein, of Norwalk, Connecticut.