The lawsuit follows a nasty public dispute in the fall between village officials and the Slinkmans, who accused the village of targeting their three apartment buildings in the 9300 block of Harlem Avenue for code violations because the buildings have many minority tenants. <\/p>\n
The dispute stems from a conversation Mike Slinkman said he had with Deetjen in October 2007, when the Slinkmans were seeking a property tax break in exchange for pledging to spend money on improvements at Colonial Court. <\/p>\n
During that meeting, Slinkman said the village manager made racially charged comments about his tenants. <\/p>\n
Deetjen said he remembered the meeting but flatly denied making any racially motivated comments. <\/p>\n
Citing unfamiliarity with the lawsuit, Deetjen refused comment Thursday. <\/p>\n
At a September village board meeting, Streit rushed to the defense of Deetjen, then lashed out at the Slinkmans for being “absentee landlords” who “overburdened” the police department with hundreds of calls to the complex over the past two years. <\/p>\n
Streit added that he’d discovered 17 sex offender registrations at the complex, but a review of the Illinois State Police sex offender registry at the time showed 23 registered sex offenders in Oak Lawn, none of whom resided at Colonial Court. <\/p>\n
And Police Chief Bill Villanova later denied that his officers were overburdened by calls to the complex, according to the complaint. <\/p>\n
Asked about being named in the lawsuit, Streit said “it’s disappointing,” adding that the allegations are “baseless.” <\/p>\n
“He’s wasting everyone’s time with this frivolous lawsuit,” he said. <\/p>\n
The Slinkmans believe Streit’s allegations were rooted in private conversations among village officials – at least two of whom the landlords had never met – which they said amounts to a conspiracy. <\/p>\n
“There is an ongoing pattern of intimidation,” said the Slinkmans’ attorney, Tony Peraica, who’s also a Cook County commissioner. “All of them have conspired.” <\/p>\n
The lawsuit also alleges Deetjen disparaged the landlords at an Oct. 13, 2009, village board meeting, during which he presided over a slideshow outlining a multitude of code violations, including charges the Slinkmans pumped raw sewage onto the lawn of the complex and failed to fix faulty smoke detectors. <\/p>\n
Village officials have long maintained that their beef with the Slinkmans isn’t personal. <\/p>\n
They say it’s about an apartment complex that has garnered multiple code violations for infractions such as loose tiles, leaky faucets and broken stove burners – problems the lawsuit says mostly have been fixed. <\/p>\n
The seven-count lawsuit seeks in excess of $500,000 in damages for lost business, attorney fees and punitive, Peraica said. <\/p>\n
Mike Slinkman has been a thorn in the side of some village officials through his appearances at board meetings and by holding court in a lawn chair outside village hall, disseminating old South Florida newspaper stories about Deetjen. <\/p>\n
He said he would’ve settled for an investigation into the October 2007 meeting with Deetjen, which never happened. <\/p>\n
“I didn’t ask for this,” he said. “They used their powers to try to ruin me.” <\/p>\n
Trustee Jerry Hurckes (1st), who oversees the district in which Colonial Court is situated, said the complex “has cleaned up and gotten better. <\/p>\n
“But I don’t know what the end game is. I know it’s going to cost attorneys’ fees and time and effort of the village,” he said. “There’s no doubt about it, it’s gotten out of hand.” <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Distributed via Chicago Press Release Services<\/a><\/p>\n Making good on a longstanding threat, a pair of landlords are suing Oak Lawn officials for allegedly conspiring to make false and malicious claims against them and their Colonial Court Apartments complex. Mike and Mark Slinkman filed their federal lawsuit Wednesday against the village, singling out village manager Larry Deetjen, health and safety inspector Jean […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-338495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338495\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/img><\/a>
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