FWY Update

From Fix Wilson Yard:

Happy New Year!  With the start of the New Year, we'd like to thank you for your past support and summarize our current focus and how we arrived at it.

At our last update meeting in November, we announced that we had filed a non-suit, which means that we withdrew our lawsuit while retaining the right to re-file it without bias within one year. This decision was not an easy one to make and came after lengthy consultation with our attorneys. In the end, we determined that it was the best course of action based on the following factors:

1. Our attempts to initiate settlement talks with the city and Holsten were resoundingly rebuffed. We had hoped that the city and Holsten would embrace the settlement process as a goodwill effort to address neighborhood concerns about the development and heal the divide within our community. Instead, they refused to engage in any type of discussion.
2. Alderman Shiller's amendment to increase the Wilson Yard TIF budget by a whopping $54 million has opened the door to potential new avenues of litigation. To continue our legal fight while this process is still playing out would be extremely costly and beyond our financial means. While we have raised a tremendous amount of money for a grassroots community organization, our financial resources pale in comparison to those of the city and Holsten.

While we have taken a "time out" in our legal fight, we remain fully committed to fighting TIF abuse in our community. We are in the process of seeking to identify a not-for-profit watchdog group to help fund our future legal expenses. The announcement this week of a potential new TIF for redevelopment of the Maryville site underscores the importance of this effort.

We are very proud that our fight has helped elevate the TIF discussion well beyond Uptown's borders, and thank you greatly for your support in this effort.