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my name is Eddy Garcia and i am the Owner and manager of Los Cazadores Mexican Restaurant in oak park. My minority small business is the latest victim of a village that is abusing the TIF for there greedy ways. my story is sort of complex because there is some fault of ours for not paying attention to what we were doing when this whole tragedy began. My father and i bought and founded Los Cazadores Mexican restaurant in February 2000. for the most part this was a very successful business and we were both being well compensated at the time, but some time between 2001 and 2003 an employee of the Village of Oak Park by the name of Michel Chen who was there Director of development came and began to talk to my father about his building. Mr. Chen was trying to convince my father to sell the building to the village because they are planning to make a huge redevelopment of the downtown district, now mind you that at the time the village did not need this particular building for the grand scheme. well it got to a point that Mr. Chen began to harass my father and threaten to use eminent domain if my father did not sell. in the meantime of all this that was going on the village began to get much more aggressive with my father using the health department as thugs to soften up my father. this was the last straw that broke the camels back, so my father sold to the village reluctantly and with certain conditions and those were :
1. That they would be the exclusive occupant of the property until the day that the bulldozer begins demolition.
2. The fee for the occupancy of the property would never rise above the amount the Garcia family paid their bank for mortgage.
3. If and when the demolition commenced the Garcia family would be allowed to strip the building of all its furniture and equipment to open somewhere else.
4. In case the redevelopment did not become a reality the building would be sold back to the Garcia family for the same amount it was sold to the village, as long as it was still occupied by the Garcia family.
all this is backed up by three former Trustees that were on the board when this Purchased was authorized by the village board. well the village did not go through with the development and held on to the property for five years and kept us on a month to month lease. we approached the village on several occasions to buy the building back as we understood it was our right to do so if the redevelopment did not go through. well after almost seven years the village decided to sell all of there properties due to a big three million deficit that they were experiencing with there budget. they told us that because they used TIF funds to buy our building that they could not sell it back to us and must put up for public bid. we participated in the bid process and we were the only ones that put a bid when on the very last day and hour that the public bid was to expire a lone development company from chicago called Preferred development LLC out bid us. this was strange because we are a free standing building with no value except that we have good frontage space on lake street. aside from the fact that Mike Chen used fraudulent inducement to force my father to sell they are abusing the TIF rules as i under stand them. they cannot buy property with a plan to redevelop the district and then change there minds about the plan or not go through with the original plan and remove small independent minority business like they are doing with my family business. well they did not do the project and are not selling back to us but are selling to another company to put some other form of retail. we are the original owners of this property and we continue to this day operating our small restaurant.
