The Neighbors Argued Themselves Out of Their Own Case

Tuesday was a bad day for the University Green Neighbors Association, and it was bad in an unusually self-inflicted way. A circuit judge denied the association’s emergency injunction from the bench that morning. The commission approved the zoning ordinance that afternoon, three to two. In between, the arguments the association made in the chamber did more damage to its own position than either defeat.

Start with what passed, because the ordinance is smaller than five months of alarm would suggest. Planning Director Jennifer Garcia confirmed the special-use designation does not change. The lot may now hold a park in addition to the overflow parking it was already allowed to hold, and a clause that would have reverted it to single-family zoning is gone. That is the whole of the change.

Then the concessions began.

The association’s attorney, Sylvia King, told commissioners that in court the city had acknowledged there is no money, no donor, and at least three years before anything could be built. She offered this as a reason to slow down. Consider what it does to the case she had just lost. If nothing can happen for three years, there was no emergency, and an emergency injunction was never warranted. Her own point, made a few hours late, is the reason the judge was right that morning.

Next, Lynn Guarch-Pardo presented a slideshow with 20 reasons to move the dog park to the Youth Center’s west parking lot on Segovia Street. Whether that site is any good, I have no idea, and neither does anyone else in the room, which is why Vice Mayor Anderson asked staff to study it. The site is not the point. The slideshow is.

Because after five months of opposition built on green space, process, and neighborhood character, the association’s own presentation concedes three things at once. That residents want a dog park. That the association had been quietly scouting locations for one. And that its objection to this particular lot is its distance from particular homes, since the pitch for Segovia leads with the fact that it borders no single-family houses. That last concern is a fair thing to hold. It is not what the campaign has been called for five months.

Which leaves the lawsuit. It does continue, as City Attorney Cristina Suarez confirmed, and no final judgment has been entered. Both statements are true, and neither means what it is being made to mean. The suit belongs to the association, filed with resident Jose Val Cohen, and its emergency motion asked the court to stop the exact vote that has now happened. The court said no. A city attorney declining to overstate an unresolved case is not a cliffhanger. It is a city attorney being careful.

What actually remains is what Aesop named when the suit was filed: a procedural pool noodle. Its best possible outcome, in total victory, is an order that the commission redo the process it completed on Tuesday. The record from that day shows a group that lost its injunction, lost the vote, and then talked its way out of the emergency, out of the green-space story, and off the ground it was standing on.

One thing is worth stating plainly, because it is easy to get backwards. This is not the city’s lawsuit. It was brought by the association against the city, which matters if you are keeping track of who is spending public money to defend a patch of grass and who is spending it to fight one.

The Segovia proposal now goes to staff, and staff should give it a genuine look. But a fully built case for an alternative location did not surface until after five months of litigation, a denied injunction, and a lost vote. That sequence says more about how this fight was run than any argument made inside it, and it says nearly everything about what the fight was for.