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Chicago Tribune
August 9, 2002
By William Presecky
Tribune staff reporter.
Tribune staff reporter Karen Mellen contributed to this report
August 9, 2002
A former Kane County assistant state's attorney whose professional background also includes a two-year stint with
the Illinois Pollution Control Board has agreed to shepherd the legal fight a group of disaffected property owners
are preparing to wage against the state's newly designated Prairie Parkway corridor protection map.
Attorney Timothy P. Dwyer, 40, of St. Charles said Thursday that he expects to file a federal lawsuit in Chicago
on behalf of several property owners in the nearly 36-mile corridor within the next three to four weeks.
Dwyer has agreed to represent the group for free, said Jan Strasma, a spokesman for Citizens Against the Sprawlway,
a Kane County-based citizens group opposed to the planned outer-belt expressway.
Strasma said the more than 160 property owners within the roughly 400-foot-wide corridor linking Interstate Highways
88 and 80 have been invited to meet with Dwyer on Aug. 20 to discuss the proposed lawsuit.
Dwyer was an assistant state's attorney in Kane County in the mid-1990s.
While working for Kane County, his primary duty was to pursue litigation against polluters and assist with various
landfill-related issues. Dwyer's private practice largely involves land-use cases, property rights issues and municipal
and environmental law.
Dwyer says he has no personal or indirect involvement in the corridor dispute.
"It's a really, really stupid idea," Dwyer said of the state's attempt to mark a highway corridor without
first showing a roadway will ever be needed.
"The statute that they're going on is, in my view, blatantly unconstitutional. They haven't established any
need and they're going to freeze people's property rights," Dwyer said.
In a taped appearance Wednesday on WTTW's "Chicago Tonight," Marvel Davis, whose generations-old Big
Rock Township farm sits in the path of the corridor, said property owners are eager to challenge the state's land-protection
process.
"We believe it is not constitutional to put a restriction on our land with no definite date when something
is going to happen," Davis said.
"We have a general feeling that we are going to need [an outer-belt expressway]," said state Transportation
Secretary Kirk Brown who, along with Kane County Board Chairman Mike McCoy (R-Aurora) and others, made up the WTTW
studio panel that debated the controversial plan.