Let’s put aside, for a moment, the question of whether a five-story apartment complex is the best use for the long-dormant dirt lot just north of the historic Hays Street Bridge.

Let’s temporarily agree not to get bogged down in the endless debate over whether the city reneged years ago on an agreement to create a public park on that 1.7-acre parcel of land.

Let’s just focus on what the city, or more specifically, City Manager Sheryl Sculley, is saying to the members of the community who have organized against the proposed apartment complex.

Last Friday, Sculley sent a letter to the project’s developer, Mitch Meyer of Loopy Limited, approving the mixed-use development, with conditions.

Those conditions concerned lighting, roofing, building facades and the amount of separation between the complex and the bridge. She also required that the final plan be presented to the Dignowity Hill Architecture Review Committee and the Design Review Committee of the city’s Historic and Design Review Commission (HDRC).

Consider the efforts of the development’s opponents.

They respected and observed the governing process. They rallied support for their cause, sat through long community meetings and successfully made their case — twice — before the HDRC, which rejected the project last December and a revised version of it earlier this month.

In the face of all that, with one letter, our city manager unilaterally throws out the results of that process and approves the development. She essentially tells members of the community that the public process for dealing with these kinds of issues is a sham, unless that process produces her preferred result.

Sculley is well within her rights to do this. The HDRC is merely an advisory body and the City Code gives the city manager the power to review and disregard the commission’s decisions. But this might not be the most inspiring civics lesson to impart in a city where it’s a constant struggle to get even 10 percent of eligible voters to show up for municipal elections.

“People don’t vote, not because of apathy, but because of despair,” said Amy Kastely, the lawyer representing the Hays Street Bridge Restoration Group, which opposes Sculley’s decision.

Kastely was one of the more than 50 residents who turned up for a Monday night vigil on the Hays Street Bridge. The crowd included Rick Treviño, the school teacher who is locked in a Democratic runoff battle in U.S. District 23; Mario Salas and Keith Toney, former East Side council members; and Graciela Sanchez, director of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center.

Protesters carried signs proclaiming “This Is Class Warfare,” “Culture Over Gentrification” and “You’re Not Just Developing This Bridge, You’re Burning One.”

Treviño, an unabashed Bernie Sanders progressive, said, “It’s just crazy to see power being catered towards the most privileged interest groups and developers in the city, on the backdrop of one of the poorest communities in the United States.”

It’s impossible to look at Sculley’s tentative approval of the project in a vacuum. This is a grass-roots fight that goes back 18 years, with Nettie Hinton and other East Siders working to save a dilapidated, old, wrought-iron trussed bridge that had been closed to traffic since 1982.

In January 2002, the bridge restoration effort received $2.9 million in federal funds. That left roughly $700,000 to complete the effort and the city basically dumped that burden on community activists, who worked like crazy to raise the needed funds.

Part of their fundraising effort was getting BudCo Ltd., the owners of the vacant lot north of the bridge, to donate it to the city in 2007, with the dream of creating a park there. The city turned around and sold it to Eugene Simor, the owner of Alamo Beer Co.

This was a blatant double-cross on the part of the city. The one time the issue was addressed in court, a Bexar County district court ruled in favor of the Restoration Group. (A 2017 reversal by the 4th Court of Appeals was not based on the substance of the district court ruling, but the question of the city’s immunity from lawsuit.)

It’s not hard to understand Sculley’s desire to broker a deal. She sees the possibility of development on a vacant piece of East Side property, which means investment, additional housing and a new revenue stream for the city.

Unfortunately, it also means that the city is once again telling bridge-restoration activists that their concerns are just an annoying inconvenience.