U.S. Judge John Robert Blakey said in a written ruling that the environmental group Protect Our Parks has enough legal ground to bring some of its objections before him. Blakey did toss out parts of the lawsuit filed against the city of Chicago and the Park District.

The ruling to allow the suit to proceed is significant because it could delay construction for months, and potentially raise the question of whether the $500 million sprawling presidential campus can be built at all on lakefront property in Jackson Park.

A major point of contention has been whether Chicago has legal standing to build the Obama center on public park property to begin with.

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The matter is reminiscent of the court case that killed the $400 million museum proposed by “Star Wars” creator George Lucas. In that case, Lucas and his team didn’t wait for a judgment and decided to move his Museum of Narrative Art to Los Angeles.

In fact, the judge in the Obama Presidential Center case referred to the Lucas museum lawsuit the Chicago Park District, in his decision Tuesday when he wrote that Protect Our Parks has standing to sue under the so-called public trust doctrine. That essentially means Blakey agreed that as taxpayers, the group has the right to challenge how the public parkland is used.

If “the ‘public trust’ doctrine is to have any meaning or vitality at all, the members of the public, at least taxpayers who are the beneficiaries of that trust, must have the right and standing to enforce it,” the judge wrote, referring to a past decision in the Friends of the Parks suit, which itself was quoting from an earlier decision.

Blakey didn’t agree with the environmentalists’ on every point.

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