After nearly five hours of passionate debate and intense disagreement, the Urbana City Council has finally come to a compromise.

Urbana’s 800 block of Main Street is now deemed an historical district.

Council member Brandon Bowersox says he’s glad that some sort of compromise was reached.

var UniqueNameFO = { movie:”https://www.dailyillini.com/media/paper736/interactive/0s7zj064.swf”, width:”200″, height:”230″, majorversion:”8″, build:”0″, xi:”true” };

UFO.create(UniqueNameFO, “di_inline_flash”);

“I’m glad we could find some compromise to move ahead and keep neighbors encouraged if they want to keep working to improve their neighborhood and their homes,” Bowersox said. “It’s not a great compromise I’m disappointed that more properties had to be moved to non-contributing which gives them less historic review.”

In order to create this historic district, council members had to move some contributing properties into a non-contributing category. Of the 14 properties, seven are now considered contributing and seven are non-contributing.

Urbana property owner Carl Long is not in favor of the district and waited hours to hear the fate of his property.

“I’m happy we were able to find a compromise, but I’m upset that the original motion was not passed three weeks ago,” Long said. “It just seems like we did a lot of dancing around in there, and I don’t know if it’s the politics or personal vendettas against people, but it just seemed like poor political form.”

The five hours of debate did get heated when council members Heather Stevenson and Danielle Chynoweth voiced very different opinions about the rights of property owners. At one point Stevenson actually walked out of the meeting.

The heat started two weeks ago, when a vote from Robert Lewis, originally rejecting the historic district, was taken back.

For more about the Urbana City Council, check out previous stories using our DailyIllini.com story archive.