The strange saga of the latest Mission Chateau protest petition took yet another twist Friday, as the owners of a Mission Road home joined two neighbors in requesting to removal their names from the petition just before the deadline — at the same time another neighborhood resident officially requested that his name be kept on the petition.
The events now bring the total number of protest petition signees to renege to three, with their properties representing 47,766 square feet of the protest petition area. Property owners representing 20 percent of the square footage of the land within 200 feet the property must sign the petition for it to be valid and trigger a supermajority voting requirement at the Prairie Village city council.
The protest petition zone for the first Mission Chateau proposal was 721,803 square feet — so the properties that have requested removal from the new petition would have represented 6.6 percent of the area in the first protest zone.
The protest zone for the second proposal, however, will be considerably smaller, since the redrawing of the development boundaries eliminated eight homes along the southern boundary of the Mission Valley proposal from petition eligibility. Nothing will be certain until the city’s attorney has reviewed and validated the petition and its signatures, but given the smaller square footage, the property owners who have retracted their signatures may carry enough clout to scuttle the petition — delivering a victory to the Tutera Group as it looks to bring the proposal to the city council for a final vote in January.
That is, of course, assuming that a Johnson County judge doesn’t issue an order directing the city council to postpone the vote. A hearing in district court today will determine whether the five homeowners who sued the city a week and a half ago will get the temporary injunction they are seeking against city council consideration of the new Tutera plan.
