The city of Prairie Village has asked the Johnson County District Court to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a resident challenging the city’s recently approved $30 million municipal complex project.
The city is also asking a judge to hold an expedited hearing, arguing that the lawsuit is preventing the city from issuing bonds for the project ahead of another key vote by the city council.
On Tuesday, the city filed both motions in response to the June 19 lawsuit by resident Marc Vianello, who is seeking to stop the city from proceeding with the much-discussed municipal complex project without a public vote.
The city argues that Vianello “lacks standing” to bring the legal challenge.
“The city of Prairie Village filed a motion to dismiss Mr. Vianello’s petition and is asking the court for an expedited hearing because of the potential for losses due to fluctuating bond rates and increased construction costs,” Ashley Freburg, the city’s public information officer, said in a statement to the Post Thursday.
Vianello’s attorney Frederick Edmunds of Overland Park-based Edmunds Law Office LLC did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.
A closer look at the project
For years, the city has been working on ideas to upgrade its aging city hall and police department along Mission Road.
After numerous city council meetings and decisions, the city council last month took two key votes moving the project forward.
The city is now on track to build a new city hall at 7820 Mission Road, the current site of a church, and expand the police department at the existing municipal complex facility.
The project totals $30 million, with $23 million slated to go towards the new city hall (including $4.5 million to purchase the church property). The other $7 million budgeted the project is meant for the police department renovation and expansion.
In June, the city council in two separate 9-2 votes approved the project and the process to issue bonds to pay for it. A vote to accept a bid for those bonds is anticipated to come before the city council in August.
Resident pushback ramps up
Vianello filed his lawsuit to stop the city from moving forward with the project in June, but by then, resident pushback had been on the rise for months.
At city council meetings this year, the new municipal complex has become some public commenters’ latest fixation after years of tense council meetings regarding housing and zoning policy.
Pushback to the municipal complex project is being driven by many of the same opponents who organized in opposition to the city’s efforts to discuss affordable housing and possible zoning changes.
A dark money group calling itself Preserve Prairie Village, whose members and funders have remained obscured, began circulating mailers this spring calling for the project to be taken to a public vote. Some of the early mailers warned that because of the municipal complex project, Prairie Village “risks becoming an urban core.”
In the weeks after the original mailers started appearing at Prairie Village homes, yard signs also began popping up with the message, “Let Prairie Village vote.”
Those signs appear to be distributed by PV United, the same resident-led group that opposed the city’s housing efforts in 2022 and 2023.
City argues “lack of standing” in lawsuit
In its motion to dismiss Vianello’s lawsuit, the city argues that he lacks proper standing to sue over the municipal complex issue, saying Vianello will suffer no special harms by the project going forward.
“Plaintiff’s personal dislike of the bond, the process used to approve the bond, and the laws that designate that a vote be taken by elected officials, does not make Plaintiff’s alleged damages different from those of the public in general,” the city’s motion says.
The city also argues that Vianello’s challenge of the city’s charter ordinance 28, which gives the city the power to issue bonds without a public vote, comes almost a decade too late. That ordinance was approved in 2016 and was an update to an earlier 2009 ordinance.
Additionally, the city argues that without an expedited hearing, the bond market and construction industry could change, potentially meaning “immense increased costs to” the city for financing the new municipal complex.
The city added that without an expedited hearing, the city “would be indefinitely prevented from making an offering of bonds.”
“Allowing one unhappy taxpayer to stop a city from moving forward on an affirmative vote could halt all government initiatives, tying them up for potentially years of litigation,” the motion reads.
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