New update on campus sale

Photo by Ken Larson

RECAP of legal issues (to the best of our knowledge), with News below:

On June 26th, the Hiawatha Institute for Indigenous Knowledge (HIIK) brought a lawsuit against Wells, challenging the college’s termination of their Purchase and Sale Agreement (PSA), which had been announced in January and approved by the Attorney General and Cayuga County Supreme Court in April.

The College responded to this suit on July 17th, and on July 27th, the College filed a Notice of Motion to have HIIK’s lawsuit dismissed. The Court is scheduled to hear this motion on September 8th.

Clint Halftown’s Cayuga Nation has until October 8 to pursue an appeal of the courts’ denials of their February motion to intervene in the (now terminated?) PSA with HIIK.

In May, Harriet Higgins’s Minerva Institute filed suit against Wells College (naming HIIK as a respondent). The Minerva Institute was scheduled for an in-person status update in court on July 29th. The public was not permitted to attend. (HIIK’s attorney was present, presumably because the Minerva Instiute had named HIIK as a respondent in her suit against Wells College.)

NEWS:

On August 11th, the Minerva Institute withdrew its suit against Wells College and HIIK. On August 12th, Ed Thompson, the head of the Syracuse Office of the Attorney General (and Tim Mulvey’s boss?) filed to appear in matter of the lawsuit that was withdrawn the previous day.

In an email to the Village of Aurora (which the Wells Legacy Society acquired via FOIL), Ms. Higgins stated on July 15 that she had a signed PSA for the campus and had a closing date set for August 17th.

You may read the email here.