It doesn’t look like much, a lunchbox of a dwelling made of crumbling red brick on the southwest corner of a 1-acre plot on Waukegan’s lakefront. A sign pasted to the door reads “Not approved for occupancy,” but Larry Martinovich calls it home.
Figuratively, Martinovich’s property sits at the center of a years-long dispute between him and the city that pits progress against an owner’s rights. Literally, it sits in the heart of the city’s waterfront, which officials see as vital to their revitalization plans.
Lake County Circuit Judge Stephen Walter heard arguments Tuesday in the eminent-domain lawsuit Waukegan filed last year against Martinovich. Walter is expected to rule Wednesday on the city’s authority to take the property at 11 W. Clayton St.
The case is one of three the city has lodged since 2003 against Martinovich, 55, a Serbian immigrant who purchased the land in the late 1980s. He rents out much of it as a boatyard and says he moved into the roughly 1,100-square-foot building on the property about 15 years ago, after he and his wife divorced.
The city has slated the industrial property for homes, shops, restaurants and parks as part of its 20-year revitalization effort.
State law allows a municipality to acquire blighted property through eminent domain to spur economic development.
Martinovich said he’s not against development, he just wants the right price from the city for his land–$750,000 by his estimation.
“I like to see the parks, the boats, the stores, the businesses, the nice shops, parks for kids to play and swim,” Martinovich said in a thick Slavic accent. “Fair market value, nothing more.”
Though complimentary of Martinovich’s persistence and pluck, city officials contend the property’s disrepair makes it a hazard and its environmental contamination is a public-health threat.
They offered a fraction of his asking price and contend he is now selfishly holding out for a big payday at the expense of progress.
“This has become almost the bane of my existence,” said city attorney Michael Blazer. “We made all kinds of effort to get this thing resolved. … In our view he has never acted in good faith.”
Tuesday’s hearing focused on whether the city’s $195,000 offer to Martinovich in separate federal environmental and building-code violation lawsuits constituted a good-faith offer for the land, as required by Illinois eminent-domain statutes.
On the stand, Martinovich, a burly man with close-cropped gray hair, said that when his attorney, William Seith, told him the proposal, he didn’t know it was an offer to buy his property. He thought it was a settlement for the two cases already filed against him.
But under Blazer’s cross-examination, Martinovich said that after he received the $195,000 proposal, he did research on recent redevelopment land sales, found the offer to him significantly lower and rejected it.
“That was a shame offer,” he said under oath. The judge ordered the comment stricken.
In addition to the nature of the offer, Celeste Cinquino, Martinovich’s lawyer in the eminent-domain case, argued that the city didn’t sufficiently inform her client that his property was in an area slated for development and that the ordinance it approved didn’t make the case that the property was blighted.
Blazer also represents the city in a federal environmental lawsuit filed in 2003 that calls for Martinovich to pay for the cleanup of dangerous chemicals and metals in the soil on his property, formerly the site of a brass foundry, ironworks factory and fuel depot.
Martinovich countersued, arguing that the city-owned property directly to the south, an abandoned factory with which his home shares a common wall, is highly contaminated with similar agents. He called for the city to pay for the cleanup at the property, 117 Dugan St.
The city also has sued Martinovich for violating building codes by living on the property, which is not zoned for residential use, said Anne Linn, an attorney for the city’s Building Department. In an affidavit last year, Building Commissioner John Jurkovac stated that the facility violated building codes with its “extensive exterior and interior deterioration.”
Initially, city officials said that by living in his building, Martinovich prevented them from tearing down and preparing a long-abandoned industrial site to the south for development.
Martinovich countersued again, saying an allowance for watchman’s quarters allowed him to live in his home.
The city began demolishing the next-door property this week. Linn said structural engineers had determined that the building could come down without affecting Martinovich’s building.
It was not immediately clear Tuesday how much Martinovich paid for the property and the exact year he bought it.
Martinovich, whose Serbian first name is Lazar, said he never expected the city he called home for more than 30 years to gang up on him to take his land.
“It’s a good country and it’s a good people,” said Martinovich, who came to the United States in 1971 and became a citizen. “But I don’t understand why these people are bothering me.”
Sitting on a milk crate in his dimly lit living room, where one wall is covered with photos of him with former U.S. presidents from the 1980s when he dabbled in Lake County Republican politics, Martinovich doesn’t deny that he bought the property intent on selling it for a profit, anticipating that the city eventually would try to develop its lakefront.
“I want to sell the property and go see the beautiful America,” he said.
———-
alwang@tribune.com
