For more than a year, a group of Westlake residents, business owners, industry leaders and community members — including people who walk, bike and drive — have been meeting regularly to work with designers and the city to craft a design plan for a safe Westlake bikeway that considers everyone’s needs.

The meetings and public process were sometimes difficult, with people seeing things very differently. But folks worked through the plans inch by inch and parking stall by parking stall. In the end, nobody got everything they wanted, but that’s exactly how compromise works. You can see their extensive meeting notes here.

So it came as awful news that Nautical Landing, a self-described “superyacht” marina and dealer, has filed a lawsuit anyway, undercutting all that community work and threatening to delay the project for at least a year. Their lawsuit is a slap in the face to Mayor Ed Murray — who helped bring people into the design committee rather than the courts — and to everyone who dedicated their time and energy to this process, which was created because community members made the awesome decision to drop their late 2013 lawsuit against the Bike Master Plan and work things out instead.

The Nautical Landing lawsuit has no legitimate beefs with the project (read the complaint in this PDF). It basically argues that the city has “prejudiced” the superyacht marina by not completing environmental review for 1.2 miles of bike lanes in a city-owned parking lot. It’s just a delay tactic by a company that clearly has the money to burn and would rather just pay to get their way than work it out with everyone else through the community design process.

A trial date has been set for June 2016. (more…)