The City of Little Rock, Arkansas, filed a condemnation suit July 30 against a local landowner who is unwilling to sell a vacant building so that the property can be cleared to make way for the Bill Clinton presidential library.
Property-owner Eugene Pfeifer III has been an outspoken critic of the way the city is financing the purchase of 27.7 acres for the library. He led the opposition to the city’s recently failed sales tax proposal for parks and other projects and has vowed to defend his property from being cleared for the library. The city has appraised the property at $400,000 and is asking a county circuit court judge to approve the price and grant the condemnation.
Another critic of the library plan, Nora Harris, has vowed to take her opposition to the Arkansas Supreme Court. She maintains that the city has used a back-door scheme to tap the general fund to pay off library bonds. County authorities ruled in June that the funding plan is legal.
Little Rock’s Arkansas Times reported August 5 that President Clinton had chosen two well-known New York firms to design his presidential library: Polshek Partnership Architects will be lead architects of the building and Ralph Appelbaum Associates will design the exhibits.
Posted August 9, 1999.