Just a few weeks after a court denied the Coalition to Preserve McIntire Park’s first injunction to stop the Meadowcreek Parkway, the group is stepping out again to protest another City Council vote.
This time, the coalition, represented by Bob Fenwick of the McIntire Park Preservation Committee, Rich Collins of the Sierra Club and Mala Cunningham and Randy Page, is seeking Attorney General Bill Mims’ opinion on what co-founder Fenwick called an illegal action. Fenwick, also founder of savemcintire.com, is contending that the 3-2 council vote that granted the ground lease for the YMCA to be built within McIntire Park is illegal.
On December 2007, the City Council granted the ground lease for the YMCA to build its facility on the east end of the park. Under the agreement, the YMCA would lease the land for $1 a year for the next 40 years.
According to a letter Fenwick and residents are sending to Mims, the 3-2 vote City Council took in 2007, violates the Commonwealth’s constitution: Article 7, section 9, cites that to dispose of public land, a locality is required a “super majority,”—or ¾— something, Fenwick says, the council did not have. “The city councilors did not have that super majority. They structured this disposition as a lease, instead of an outright sale,” said Fenwick.
Kurt Krueger, chairman of the YMCA Board and an attorney with McGuire Woods, says the vote is compliant with the Virginia constitution. “It’s a matter of public record … they can try to argue that’s illegal, but the plain fact of the matter is that’s a ground lease, and it’s for 40 years, and therefore it is compliant with Article 7, section 9 of the Virginia constitution,” he says. “The underlying land remains the city’s property.”
Councilor David Brown, who, with Mayor Dave Norris and former councilor Kevin Lynch, voted to ground the lease, says the legality of the vote is an issue that did not come up at the 2007 meeting. “Nobody raised this issue at the time,” he says. “I think the constitution specifically says that you can lease land, that you can’t convey land, and you can’t sell land without a super majority, but that you can lease it with three votes.”
However, Fenwick contends that the lease was structured “to circumvent” that provision of the state constitution. “This is not a 40-year lease, this is a lease forever,” he said. But Brown counters. “It’s a lease for 40 years, certainly we were not trying to circumvent any law.”
Ultimately, Cunningham said that the coalition’s goal is to educate residents “to really know that is going on,” she said. “We are not against the YMCA at all … but we don’t support the destruction of McIntire Park and we just go back to that famous song, ‘paved paradise and put up a parking lot.’ We’ve got to avoid paving paradise.”
Krueger disagrees. “We are on the developed side of McIntire Park,” he says. “We are going to be in the corner of the developed side of the park that’s against the existing fire station and the bypass. So, we are not destroying the park.”
