The owner of an apartment building across from Wrigley Field is suing to block the Chicago Cubs‘ planned hotel construction on the grounds that the city council didn’t follow proper zoning rules, and that its approval of the project was “arbitrary and capricious.” Read the complaint here if you like; I don’t know enough about Chicago zoning law to say whether it has any merit, but given that the landlord is seeking just $6 million in damages on a $500 million project, this seems at worst something that can be settled out of court.
And anyway, that wasn’t even the craziest stadium-related lawsuit filed yesterday. That honor would go to Lehman Brothers suing the New York Giants over canceled interest-rate swap contracts that were used to hedge the team’s stadium bonds. Yes, that Lehman Brothers. Yes, I sort of understand what interest-rate swap contracts are. No, I don’t understand exactly what the lawsuit is over, though apparently it has to do with who had to pay whom how much when the interest rate swaps were cancelled because Lehman was suffering total existence failure; what’s left of Lehman thinks it’s owed $94 million plus interest, while the Giants think … well, the Reuters article in question doesn’t actually say what the Giants think. And given that it also says that Met Life Stadium is both wholly owned by the Giants, and also jointly owned by the Giants and Jets, neither of which is actually true (it’s owned by the state of New Jersey — hello, no property taxes! — and jointly operated by the two teams), maybe we’ll just have to wait for someone else to explain this. If we really care beyond “Giants being sued by zombie financial company.”