Posted on 05/19/2018 7:33:25 PM PDT by Eddie01
Barack Obama made a habit of stealing private land to create more public parks. Now, in a highly ironic turn of events, public park activists have filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Chicago and the Chicago Park District to block construction of the planned Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park on the city’s South Side.
The Obama Presidential Center has been mired in controversy from the start. In March 2015, the Chicago City Council approved an ordinance for Chicago Park District land in Jackson Park to be transferred to the City of Chicago to lease to the Obama Foundation for use as the site of Obama’s official federal presidential library.
However, the Obama Foundation subsequently scrapped the federal presidential library in favor of a sprawling, non-federal presidential center, and moved the boundaries for the center further north and east than originally planned.
Protect Our Parks, Inc., which filed the lawsuit on Monday, cited this “institutional bait and switch” as just one of several reasons they should be granted a court order. As they argue in the lawsuit, public park land is “prohibited by law” from being turned over to a non-governmental private entity for private use. Because the Obama Foundation is a private organization and the land in Jackson Park is no longer being used for Obama’s official federal library, park activists have correctly pointed out that the transfer of land is indeed illegal.
Furthermore, the Obama Foundation will only be charged a “token amount of rent” for use of the land, and the Park District Act “does not authorize the Park District itself to transfer valuable public trust land for virtually no compensatory return.”
A federal lawsuit filed by a Chicago nonprofit accuses Obama center organizers of pulling an “institutional bait and switch” by shifting the center’s purpose away from being a true presidential library.
Park activists are not the only people opposed to the Obama Presidential Center, either. In January, over 100 faculty members at the University of Chicago signed a letter asking the Obama Foundation to build the center elsewhere, deeming the Jackson park location a “traffic jam in the making” that would provide no “development or economic benefits” to the surrounding area.
Indeed, there are others places on the South Side where the center could be built. Juanita Irizarry, executive director of Friends of the Parks, released a statement saying that, while the group is not involved with the lawsuit against the center, they nevertheless “disagree with the choice to locate it on public parkland rather than vacant land across the street from Washington Park.”
It seems pretty obvious that the Obama Foundation is on the wrong side of this one. Furthermore, not only is the entire situation highly ironic given Obama’s obsession with national parks, but Chicago’s official motto has been since 1830 Urbs in Horto, which means “City in a Garden,” honoring the city’s commitment to parkland.
But Obama has proven time and time again that he cares neither about history or the law as long as he makes himself look good.
I hope they keep fighting it indefinitely. It’s clear they want The Obama Temple to be their private club for after-hours “organizing” and partying.
Kinda like Slick Willie and his library penthouse apartment in lovely Little Rock.
THey should name it the “Obama Politburo Center”. More truthful than anything else he said.
Hint: IF you scratch Obama’s Chicago political ties and operations, you will find some very interesting characters that would fit perfectly into Mueller’s fake “Russian collusion” investigation.
There were plenty of real ones involved in Obama’s rise and the mainstream media has either ignored them or printed “fake” cover stories as to who they really are/were.
Hint, Hint: A couple of names to float your curiosity boat?
Canter; Rose; Davis; Palmer(s); Young; Cohen; Ayers and Dohrn (Cuban trained); Jarrett and her ex-husband’s family and even her family; and the dupes, Pritzker, Evans (Code Pink); Katz-Booth, Oglesby, Jones, etc.
Put it here:
https://marquettepark.cpdgolf.com
The ‘Obama Presidential Library’ is not even a real library, in sense of preserving and making available to the public the documents from the Obama White House. As you rightly point out, these documents belong to the public and cannot be simply given to a private entity.
Instead it will only make available ‘electronic’ copies of ‘selected documents’. There is no guarantee that these copies will be complete or even accurate. It also begs the question of why even bother to have a physical location if everything is going to be offered only electronically anyway. Why not just put up the Obama Presidential Website?
The real reason becomes clear with the reveal of the overall plan and its half billion dollar construction budget and the building’s huge size as a Soviet style monolith, and how it will be used to train young activists in community organizing and all of Obama’s other favorite shibboleths. (That level of overt political partisan activism is probably not allowed using public library funds.)
In short, this will be a monument to Obama the Man, not the Obama White House.
If I have this right the proposal is not for an official library but instead some monument to himself. Bold faced theft.
Yep. That’s the bait and switch.
The original proposal was for the publicly owned Obama Library.
That’s now morphed into the sprawling, privately owned Obama Presidential Center which is to be Obama’s personal mosque-like shrine and will serve as a radical leftist training camp.
His “presidential center” should be in a 8x6 cell in Leavenworth where he can maintain it
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.