Help Cha Cha Beauty & Barber Save Our Parking Lot and Allow Building Maintenance

Cha cha and the building had parking for decades. A new development comes in, restricts parking for Cha Cha unless the development is given free parking in Cha Cha's and the neighboring lot. How is Cha Cha or the owner of the building doing anything wrong? Lou and Chuck are clearly trying to extort the situation. I hope the paper shines a light on these guys. Go Cha Cha!

This is Louis Fortis. I would like to present the real story. Let me start off by saying that Cha Chas is a great neighborhood business.When we opened our apartment building on the corner of Willy Street and Paterson, at Cha Chas request, we gladly distributed Cha Chas marketing bags to all of our new tenants and we encourage to patronize them. However Kris Warren,their landlord through his family's business, is a different story. The concern is access to the parking lot behind Cha Chas which needs an access agreement through our property. Kris Warren is currently getting access by violating city rules on parking and accessing the parking with a cut-through from another one of his family's property holdings. For over a year, prior to construction of our project, we tried to work with Kris Warren. We tried to act as a good neighbor by advancing a solution that would enable his tenant, Cha Chas, access to the parking behind their building through our property in return for use of Warren property parking in the evenings, when it was not being used by Warren tenants, for the restaurant that would eventually be opening in the retail space of our building. This simple neighborly solution would benefit two neighborhood businesses as well as the entire neighborhood by reducing or eliminating any parking impact on neighborhood streets. Cha Chas employees and their customers would have easy, legal access to their parking lot through our property, while restaurant employees and customers would be able to access the Warren commercial property in the evening. Kris Warren continued to oppose this proposal and on the final afternoon of the last day for submission of our project to the city he demanded that we pay his family's business $5,000 and also provide access to his business to have the right to cross our property at no charge for their parking while at the same time refusing to allow the restaurant future access to parking in the Warren commercial lot a

This is a historical district and the building should be maintained in spite of the completely inappropriate development of The new building.

Less gentrification, more Cha-Cha!

This is outrageous! Who do these developers think they are trying to bully people?! They should have to pay a price for this obnoxious behavior.

Don't let a convict ruin a fantastic small neighborhood business.

Holding small business owners hostage for leverage on an un-built property is unacceptable. These developers have a long history of shady deals and should not be able to bully people to get what they want.

Please keep exisiting parking lot.

Willy street resident; signing this

Leave the lot as it has been. That's a no-brainer.

She NEEDS parking for her business.

Either we support local businesses or we don't. Either we maintain historic buildings or we don't. To use one to extort the exploitation is, quite frankly, despicable.

Chvala et al should not be granted access to existing lots on neighboring properties.

Condos kill Willy.

Who at the city can do anything about this? The city should stand up in these situations and enforce the conditional use that the developer promised the city and neighborhood rather than turning their backs and calling it a civil matter between small business owners. We need to keep a close eye on Chuck Chvala and Louis Fortis if they develop their other properties in our neighborhood (Plan B, Gateway, Red Caboose).

Please allow this wonderful landmark to keep access to the limited parking and maintenance spots available to it.

I support my local businesses to understand their needs. There are already too many developers on Williamson street. They keep messing up neighborhoods.

I'm with Cha Cha!

Gentrification needs to be tempered by the right of existing businesses to continue existing. Anything else is tyranny.

Gentrification should at least consider the areas residents (even though it generally pushes them out). What makes Madison special is that it treats people respectfully.