The City of Charlottesville and the Virginia Department of Transportation nominally won in a hearing today over a motion for a preliminary injunction, but the victory may be pyrrhic depending on what Judge Jay Swett decides during a hearing over the merits in May.
Though Swett denied the injunction filed by the Coalition to Preserve McIntire Park that would have halted work immediately on the Meadowcreek Parkway (MCP), he found that the group has standing to bring suit and will hear the merits of the case in late May.
“That is wide open,” said Swett, referring to the merits, where there is little case law to guide the court’s decision. “Basically, we are on new ground.”
The Coalition to Preserve McIntire Park, a loosely defined group that includes longtime MCP foes Rich Collins, Stratton Salidis and Peter Kleeman, contends that the city illegally granted VDOT a parcel for the county portion of the Meadowcreek Parkway. That parcel had been a softball field used by Charlottesville High School, but the city voted 3-2 in June 2008 to grant permanent and temporary easements to VDOT. The Coalition argues that that transfer was as a sale, and therefore required a three-fourths majority.
Among other reasons, Swett thought that at this point, with full blown construction going on at the site, an injunction wouldn’t be meaningful. "The harm has been done already," he said, wondering why the suit wasn’t filed many months earlier.
Read more about this case and the other legal arguments against the MCP in next week’s C-VILLE.