Improperly Secret Board Meeting Concerned Loan To Stalled Skokie Hotel

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“[Meyer’s] considering having non-union labor finish out the 8th floor,” he said. “That’s the rooftop sky bar, and so that’s not part of the Hilton product, so to speak, and so he has a little more flexibility, but that’s hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings.”

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Lockerby said village staff had also seen steep increases in the construction cost of the parking garage attached to the hotel project — its price tag had risen by $5 million to $18 million at the time of the meeting.

“So we have this parking garage, and we’re a partner with the hotel, and so there’s going to be an annual lease that he has to pay from that property for the parking,” the village manager said, noting that it all was part of the developer’s financial projections. “No surprises, but it is a suburban hotel with a parking garage expense, so that is a little bit of a potential financial hardship for the property.”

Without the loan, the village manager warned, Meyer’s hotel project would face likely delays.

“He likely would have to soft market it and involve a broker and go through a process, and that process could take weeks, it could take months, it could take more than a year,” Lockerby said.

“We’re attractive, we’ll be the last money in, and so when he puts the whole package together, then, if the board is so inclined, we’re ready to move,” he said. “He might not be able to get another equity partner to move.”

During last year’s closed-door discussion, Trustee Khem Khoeun correctly predicted that the public would bring up a potential conflict of interest involving the developer and its CEO, both of whom made financial contributions to ruling Skokie Caucus Party.

“My concern is just coming from the general public’s lack of understanding,” Khoeun said. “So any perceived conflicts of interests, where, you know, if they don’t understand this relationship, why we’re entering into this partnership, why we’re not leveraging more influence in the hotel development, and just anticipating that there’s going to be some public responses to this if they’re not informed or educated.”

Audio from the session shows the mayor and other village officials dismissed Trustee Keith Robinson’s request to direct some of the 12 percent interest contemplated from the loan, which would have come out to more than a half-million dollars annually, to affordable housing projects.

Despite the board’s authorization of a $4.5 million loan on April 3, 2023, the project stalled and, according to a village spokesperson, the funds had not been released and would “not be provided until the development team secures the additional financing needed to resume construction.”

Three days after the vote, Trustee James Johnson, the lone trustee outside of the Skokie Caucus Party, filed a request for review with the public access counselor at the attorney general’s office alleging a violation of the Illinois Open Meetings Act, or OMA.

The board’s representatives and Johnson submitted relevant materials to the attorney general’s office by May 2, 2023, at which point the office took more than eight months to issue its determination.

Teresa Lim, the supervising attorney of the office’s public access bureau, found that the board’s discussion related to the Hilton Homewood Suites development did not fall within the scope of the exemption it relied on to close the meeting to the public.

To close that meeting to the public, village officials relied on a provision of the OMA that permits closed discussions of the “purchase or lease of real property for the use of the public body, including meetings held for the purpose of discussing whether a particular parcel should be acquired.”

But the board “did not show that it discussed issues related to whether to acquire the property for the Village’s use,” Lim found in the Jan. 18 determination letter.

“Even if the terms of the agreement may be construed as the Village purchasing an ownership interest in the property, the property discussed by the Board is not ‘for the use of the’ Village,” Lim said.

Lim then requested that the village board release the audio and minutes from discussions of the project at the meeting.

Though it took more than a month for the board to do so, Mayor George Van Dusen wrote to Lim’s boss, Attorney General Kwame Raoul, a week after her determination letter to ask Raoul to reconsider her decision.

Van Dusen said Raoul’s office should have considered a different exemption than the one village officials cited when they closed the meeting to the public last year — one allowing for closed-door discussions of “the sale or purchase of securities, investments, or investment contracts.”

If the determination is upheld, the mayor argued, it will “create confusion” over the meaning of the investment-related Open Meetings Act exemption, which the village did not cite and which was not discussed by the attorney general’s office.

No update about the project was available from Meyer Tuesday afternoon. The village’s website now says “ownership of the project may ultimately be determined by the courts.”

Property records show numerous mechanics liens were filed against the property last year over unpaid construction-related bills, and the village and Meyer’s development company have been named as counter-defendants in a complaint due for case management Wednesday at the Daley Center.

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