ABOUT EVANSTON

The City Council's decision to accept the proposal for the
Northwestern University "visitor center" parking garage was an
incredibly bad decision on all counts.

Our Lake Shore Park beachscape is one of the town's chief amenities,
along with our abiding diversity.  It exists only because the
residents have risen up en masse when it was threatened with
development.  These are some of the reasons:

1. Conversion of public park recreational greenspace to a multistory
concrete structure mainly for cars is extremely poor land use
management.  NU has many acres of parking lots, any one of which could
be used as a base for this new structure.

2. Converting public greenspace space to a construction to benefit a
private entity, however meritorious that entity, is an inappropriate
act by elected public representatives and is irresponsible to our
citizenry.  They are not NU trustees or administrators but town
functionaries and have no business letting public resources depart the
public sphere.

3.  Forcing the proposal through despite its rejection by the Planning
Commission, despite the significant opposition from town citizens, and
the absence of the representative for the ward in question, verges on
the abuse of public responsibility.

In the discussion after this debacle, many of the town's residents
have been discussing the need for a thorough sweeping out of office of
the aldermen who carried out this cavalier act.  People are now going
and calling about the recruit fresh faces to be candidates for these
positions and will support them vigorously in the campaigns to come.