Evanston resident and Feinberg Prof. Padma Rao, accompanied by her attorney Douglas Cannon, pressed forward at Monday’s City Council meeting to prevent residential development at the former site of Kendall College, 2408 Orrington Ave.
The resolution, which was tabled last month amid calls for more community discussion, passed in a unanimous vote after a citizen comment from Cannon. Although a separate measure ensures that a 350-year-old oak tree is preserved throughout the construction process, Rao said there is no built-in means of punishing the land’s developer, Smithfield Properties, if they eliminate that tree.
Without such legal language, she described the council’s actions as providing only “so-called protection” and having “no real teeth to it.”
Rao, who is a professor of clinical radiology at Feinberg, also added the council decision was “rammed through” and not backed by serious consideration of her and her attorney’s grievances.
“It’s amazing that the city is okay with … ‘Go ahead and kill all the trees on that land,'” she said. “They didn’t have any discussion. They didn’t discuss any of the concerns that me or my neighbors or attorney had raised.”
Smithfield purchased the Kendall block in 2006 and has since planned to construct 19 single-family lots. Initially, part of the land would be sectioned off to be used as public alleyways owned by the city – a “compromise neighbors were willing to live with” at the time, Rao said.
But now that the council and developer have agreed to proceed with the neighborhood, both the fate of the oak tree in the alleyways’ paths and the at least 25 trees in the vicinity are uncertain.
Rao first clashed with the city in 2007, when Evanston sued her for not paying a $632 special assessment tax related to a paving project that would have involved removing a tree on her condominium property. The dispute resulted in a three-year legal tug-of-war, and she has yet to pay the full figure.
This latest episode represents the city antagonizing her even further, Rao added.
“I don’t know if they enjoyed being in with court with me, but they’re acting like they did,” she said. “They’re like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it again.'”
