It’s hard to imagine a good idea getting more royally screwed up than the plan to redevelop the Hi-Way Theater, a project that should have been finished in 1992. The whole comedy of errors–the explanation for the latest blunder defies logic–reveals gross ineptitude on the part of city officials and their lawyers, suggesting that the Daley administration is incapable of completing a relatively straightforward neighborhood development project.

But for reasons that have never been explained, the city never told the county it planned to bid on the property. That October the county sold the Hi-Way at a scavenger sale for $19,500 to a developer named Romel Koktapeh.

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“We had lined up roughly $1 million worth of loans and grants in expectation of getting the building in October 1991,” says Meyer. “But after Koktapeh’s bid we had to go to our funders and say, ‘Sorry, but everything’s off.’”

On March 19 the planning department wrote Meyer a letter telling him the owner’s redemption period would expire June 12, that a court hearing would be held in July or August, and that the closing would be scheduled for September. “We called McNulty’s office all the time, and he never gave us any indications that there would be delays,” says Patricia Devine-Reed, executive director of the Boulevard Arts Center. “We planned to have a celebration in October because we were led to believe that’s when the paperwork would be completed and the building would be ours.”

The bad news came on February 3. McNulty wrote Meyer that the February 17 court date had been canceled–and it was the circuit court clerk’s fault. “We have discovered that [the clerk’s office] did not mail the notices . . . within the time frame prescribed by law,” McNulty wrote. “We delivered these notices to the clerk with as much as one week to go in the notice-service period. For some reason the clerk did not get around to mailing the notices until after the deadline had expired . . . . Although we certainly have no control over the Clerk of the Circuit Court, I apologize to you for any inconvenience that this may cause.”

“We have no record of them,” Kranz said. “And we time stamp every notice that comes into this office, and we give a receipt for every notice that goes out.”

Then last Friday McNulty called me. “I made a mistake,” he confessed. “The clerk was right.”