Aldermen said they got most of what they wanted out of Tuesday’s settlement in the lawsuit between Northwestern and Evanston, but two community activists very close to the issue said they believe the city emerged from the suit as the obvious loser.
Tuesday’s settlement will remove 14 NU properties from the city’s preservation laws under the Northeast Evanston Historic District. The university will also make a $700,000 contribution to the city. The agreement, which will be signed by District Judge Marvin Aspen on Tuesday, shows that six of these 14 properties do not contribute to the historical value of the district.
Under Evanston’s preservation laws, the NU properties in the district were subject to review by the city’s Preservation Commission.
Judy Fiske,a member of the Northeast Evanston Historic District Association, said the settlement was a sign of NU’s power in the city — and she said this power has now been reinforced by legal precedent.
“In all fairness, this is what our legal system is based on, is precedent,” she said. “When you make an exemption for someone, you’ve got to make sure you know who’s coming along down the road.
“When the process is circumvented for one individual, then it’s got to be circumvented for everybody.”
But Ald. Arthur Newman (1st), who voted for the creation of the historic district in 2000, said some of the preservationists’ demands are somewhat unrealistic.
“The conduct of the Northeast Evanston Historic District Association has set preservation back,” he said. “It’s way too rigid and not sympathetic at all to aldermen who have to run an entire city.
“They look at this thing strictly from a preservation standpoint, and we look at it in terms of what we need to be doing as a city in terms of how we use resources and how we spend time.”
Mimi Peterson, co-chairwoman of the Fair Share Action Committee, said the city conceded too much in the settlement.
“There was nothing in the deal for the city,” said Peterson, whose committee seeks to obtain financial contributions to Evanston from NU. “The consent decree provides for Northwestern a new document they’ll be waving around for the next 100 years — besides their charter.”
Peterson also said the $700,000 didn’t nearly make up for the potential loss of city power.
“At the end of the day, they throw us $700,000, and the point is that Evanston gains nothing,” she said. “Seven-hundred-thousand dollars barely covers the legal fees, so we end up with a big fat zero.”
The Fair Share Action Committee put a nonbinding referendum on a March 2000 ballot that asked whether residents wanted the city to negotiate with NU about making more of a financial contribution to the city. Because of the timing of the referendum and the creation of the historic district, both Peterson and Ald. Steven Bernstein (4th) said the university saw the district as an attempt to extract money from its coffers.
“It was an accident — nobody planned it,” Bernstein said. “They just happened to peak together, and that was unfortunate. I think they still would have sued us.”
