Emanuel to Court: Throw Out Lucas Museum Lawsuit

By Bill Cameron, WLS-AM News

(CHICAGO) Mayor Rahm Emanuel is going to court to try to save the Lucas Museum for Chicago.

Emanuel is asking the U.S. Court of Appeals to throw out the Friends of the Parks lawsuit that’s been blocking the Lucas Museum on a Soldier Field parking lot.

With George Lucas seriously looking at offers from other cities, the mayor is telling the court that time is off the essence.

Emanuel is also trying to isolate Friends of the Parks as the bad guys trying to spoil a billion dollar gem for the museum campus and shame them into making a deal to drop their lawsuit.

But if he loses, Emanuel told reporters it’s not a blow to him.

“I can’t stop you because you’ll say, in your way, this is my loss. Go ahead. I don’t really care how you do it,” Emanuel said. “Guess what? When your a mayor or an elected official, you’ve got to walk and chew gum. You’ve got to do them all. You don’t get to choose and pick and if you have an opportunity for nearly a billion dollars of economic development, you don’t just kind of be willy-nilly about it.”

@2016 WLS-AM News