Things are getting ugly at the LMDC...(Newsday)

Families Seek to Oust LMDC Board Member

By Katia Hetter

Claiming a key downtown leader is opposing a World Trade Center site tomb for unknown remains, several families of Sept. 11 victims are calling for her resignation from the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. board.

In an effort to get Madelyn Wils, chair of Community Board 1 in lower Manhattan, to quit her LMDC post, they have organized an online petition.

"Wils' conduct have just really inflamed the families,” said petition organizer Thomas Meehan II, a New Jersey resident whose daughter Colleen, a Cantor Fitzgerald employee, was killed Sept. 11. "She has been conveying an image of 3,000 headstones, and that's certainly not what we're asking for.”

The families don't expect Wils, the only LMDC board appointee whose other jobs deals directly with Lower Manhattan residential life, to actually resign, said Meehan. But he hopes to draw more attention to their dispute.

Wils -- who doesn't plan to resign -- said the petitioners have never called her to ask if she is fighting the internment of the unidentified remains.

"I've been talking since December, saying that I will trust an artist with a vision that is chosen [for the memorial] to come up with solution,” said Wils.

The dispute may be irrelevant, because the LMDC's draft memorial guidelines call for a "a separate accessible space to serve as a final resting-place for the unidentified remains from the World Trade Center site.”

The agency doesn't plan to change those guidelines, according to LMDC sources.

That means that Community Board 1's resolution -- to encourage a symbolic tomb over a cemetery -- could be strictly symbolic. The board would prefer to see only a symbolic portion of the remains there.

The resolution, which passed Jan. 21, "states that the issue remains a sensitive one for Lower Manhattan residents, many of whom are survivors,” said Wils. Anything for the remains should lean more in "the symbolic direction of tomb of the unknown,” not a cemetery.

Officials have not identified remains for nearly half of nearly 2,800 people killed during the terrorist attacks on the trade center site.

They have got to learn to stop how to stop being so selfish and the site is NOT their's.

The vicitms has a right to protest the 3,000 tombstones, but we still haven't gotten the memorial plans set yet!!!!!!!

By the time they pick a winner for the memorial for THE WTC there will tons of arguments from political to who knows what.



[SIZE=14]WE NEED TO LEARN NOW TO COOPERATE WITH EACH OTHER ON THIS SITUATION!!!!!!!!!! OR WE WILL NEVER GET THINGS DONE AT ALL!!!!!!!!!!1

Welcome Ms Sanders. You're an invited guest on the Save the WTC Forums. made up of people who want to bring back the Twin Towers and express their scorn at the Libeskind design that was selected by bureaucratic pandering via the LMDC (Lower Manhattan Development Corporation) last February.