Resident Accuses City of Closed Door Planning for Kendall Site

Monday night’s City Council meeting marked the latest battle in round two of Padma Rao versus the City of Evanston.

This time around, Rao is up in arms over a plan that would kill near two-dozen trees in the Smithfield Properties-owned land where Kendall College once sat, 2408 Orrington Ave.

Rao is best known for her first tussle with the City when she refused to pay a $635 special tax assessment for the 2007 removal of a tree in the alley near her north-side condominium complex, citing her Hindu beliefs forbidding the needless killing of any living thing. The City reportedly spent $40,000 in legal fees during a series of appeals pursuing the payment before eventually walking away empty handed.

In recent months, Smithfield has announced plans to subdivide the Kendall site into 19 single-family plots, dedicating a portion of the property to the City for use as public alleys. However, one of those alleys just happened to run through the center of an oak tree estimated to be 200 to 350-years-old

Rao has protested the plan during recent City Council meetings. So when the resolution unanimously passed at Monday night’s meeting, it included both an amendment altering the alley to a one-way strip that avoided the old oak, and a contingency that developers use “commercially reasonable best efforts to protect the tree during construction.”

But Rao said she was not satisfied with the end result, noting that the oak tree was only protected during construction and not afterward, and lamenting the fact that many other trees, including a similarly-aged ash, were still marked for death.

“They talk about being ‘Tree City USA’ and they voted a death sentence to over two dozen trees,” said Rao, a resident of Evanston since 1986. “I’ll have to look at my legal options.”

Rao’s lawyer, Douglas R. Cannon, echoed her sentiments.

“We’re not ruling out any option,” Cannon said. “She’s not shy about suing the city.”

Additionally, Rao accused the City of lacking transparency during the decision-making process, saying they held unannounced, closed-door meetings with Smithfield and ignored her emails and phone calls.

Kevin O’Connor, a self-described community activist, went a step further, saying he overheard Ald. Judy Fiske (1st Ward) speaking with Smithfield’s lawyer, saying the resolution would be pushed through regardless of any heat brought on by residents during citizen comment.

“Anything on this agenda is the public business,” O’Connor said. “What it told me was that there was no transparency here, that this was worked out behind closed doors.”

Fiske said that while both she and the City Council had certainly been negotiating with the developer, everything was done out in the open, with public knowledge and with the best interest of residents in mind.

“Here we have the developer at Kendall, who has perfect legal authority to go and cut down every single tree on that private property that he wants to,” Fiske said. “We had absolutely no authority to ask him to [save trees] … because we had no leverage. We had nothing to offer him. It was just convincing him that this was the right thing to do. And we got him, not only to come back with a tree preservation plan, but also to save the oak trees and work out an agreement to save the one [old] oak tree in the [soon-to-be-built] alley.”

Smithfield reportedly almost filed a lawsuit against the City during negotiations based on a dispute over who would own the land the old oak sits upon, before the two sides reached a compromise. Under the agreement, the oak and surrounding land will become part of the bordering single-family plot, but the city will acquire the land at no cost to extend the alley should the tree somehow die.

Trees were a hot topic throughout Monday night’s meeting, as the City Council also approved an Elm Tree Injection Program schedule that will hasten the pace of inoculations. According to several residents who spoke at the meeting, the number of elm trees in Evanston has decreased significantly over the past two decades, from near 7,000 in 1995 to around 2,500 today.