Prairie Village council seats draw focus

The makeup of the Prairie Village City Council could be in for a shakeup following the general city election on April 5.

Three Prairie Village City Council seats will be contested in this year’s election. Ward 1 incumbent Ashley Weaver is facing a challenge from Lee Duong; Ward 2 incumbent Ruth Hopkins is running against Serena Schermoly, and Ward 5 incumbent David Morrison will face Courtney McFadden.

Ward 3 incumbent Andrew Wang, Ward 4 incumbent Brooke Morehead and Ward 6 incumbent Ted Odell will all be re-elected after attracting no challengers.

Ward 1

In Ward 1, Ashley Weaver, a 39-year-old stay-at-home mother, said she has done a good job during her first term demonstrating her enthusiasm for the city. She said she would maintain a balanced city budget while helping the council continue to provide new infrastructure, maintenance for parks and other amenities, a respectful approach to development and transparency.

“I made a commitment to Ward 1 that I would work hard to represent the best interest of our city and our ward,” she said.

Weaver said she has largely been pleased with a proposed set of housing design guidelines the city is developing to restrict property owners from tearing down older single-family homes and replacing them with houses much larger and out of character with the surrounding neighborhoods.

City staff has held three public meetings to get residents’ input on the proposed rules, which would scale homes to the size of the lot, enforce new setbacks, reduce maximum building heights and control certain design elements to break up the featureless “mass” of a house’s front and sides, among other changes.

“I thought it was pretty well put together,” Weaver said, adding that she still wants to get feedback from the public and other council members.

Some residents have pushed for greater control of building materials and architectural design, a move Weaver said she wouldn’t necessarily oppose but that she warned could come with additional legal and staff costs.

Her opponent, Lee Duong, is a 39-year-old physician at the Kansas City Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

The daughter of Vietnamese refugees, she said she is running as a way to give back to the friends and neighbors who helped her family as they were getting established in this country.

She said that she wants to promote community activism and get residents more involved in government, especially younger people, because she said that would help ensure the council provides better representation.

She also said the city needs to do more to get public input on future transportation and bike trail projects. While she said she supports walking/biking trails, she said projects that would require reducing traffic lanes need close analysis on their effect on safety and public approval.

As for the housing design guidelines, she said she’s heard both from residents who favor limiting the size of homes built next to theirs and those who support new construction, especially if it removes houses that had been allowed to deteriorate. Ultimately, she said the rules may be too restrictive on the individual needs and tastes of homeowners.

“We need to have more education and more discussion so we can arrive at a set of regulations that people really understand and can agree on,” Duong said.

She also said she supported the city’s plan to put its trash hauling contract out for bid after 14 years because of a rash of resident complaints. But she said she would want to ensure a new hauler could offer the same services provided by the current contractor, Deffenbaugh Industries, and had a plan to handle the transition to reduce inconvenience to residents.

Ward 2

Ward 2 Councilwoman Ruth Hopkins is the council’s longest-serving member, having been first elected 24 years ago. The 61-year-old medical technologist at Research Medical Center said that longevity has given her good connections with staff as well as elected officials and personnel at the county, state and federal levels.

“I think all of my involvement makes me able to see the issues on many different levels,” Hopkins said.

She said her main focus is keeping the city budget under control, which she said is increasingly difficult as Kansas lawmakers place greater limits on how cities in the state can generate and spend revenue. In particular, she said the city must continue maintaining its streets, respond to resident requests for additional walking and biking trails and plan for the eventual removal of hundreds of city trees damaged by the emerald ash borer.

She said she wants to continue working on the development of the Meadowbrook Park off Nall Avenue as well as her work on a committee inventorying and maintaining statuary decorating the city’s many street islands.

Hopkins said she doesn’t want the housing design guidelines to stop growth in Prairie Village. She said she hoped public input would help create guidelines that can protect neighborhood character but still give individual property owners the ability to replace or expand homes that have become obsolete.

Her opponent, Serena Schermoly, 44, has served as the vice chairwoman of the city’s arts council and as marketing officer for the Jazz Festival. She said she decided to run after attending several council meetings and feeling Hopkins wasn’t engaged enough on the issues.

She said the city needs to hold many more public meetings and increase public education efforts on the proposed housing design guidelines. She said many residents that she has spoken with are unaware of the guidelines or that they could affect not only new homes but also homeowners who are only remodeling.

“The residents need to fully understand the ramifications of all of it,” Schermoly said, adding that she hasn’t developed an opinion about the rules and would rely on public opinion.

She said she wants the city to revisit a request from residents along Tomahawk Road to reduce the speed limit. She said she also wants to re-evaluate the city’s $1.8 million economic development fund, which has gone largely untouched for several years and come up with a plan for how to use that money before it gets shifted to another use.

Schermoly also said that while she generally supported the trash hauling going out for bid, she wanted to know if the number of residents who have received poor service is truly significant and whether Deffenbaugh can address those problems before switching to a new company that isn’t as knowledgeable of the city.

Ward 5

Ward 5’s contest may be influenced not by council issues but by a court fight that technically is unresolved.

A Johnson County district judge in October 2013 removed David Morrison from the council in response to a 2012 incident: Morrison allowed a homeless friend to spend several nights in Prairie Village City Hall. The Kansas Court of Appeals reversed his ouster a year later, allowing him to return to the council. In the interim, then-Mayor Ron Shaffer appointed Courtney McFadden to fill the position.

Last fall, the Kansas Supreme Court overturned both the appellate and district court decisions, arguing both had used improper legal standards, and sent the case back to the district court for reconsideration. No further action has been taken in the case.

Morrison, who has admitted bad judgment in the incident but said he hasn’t been found guilty of anything, said he doesn’t think the controversy should cloud his re-election hopes.

“This was a political crusade, it cost me a lot of money and hassle, but I’m still standing and not deterred from my position,” said Morrison, 53, a senior direct marketing representative with Celebrity China.

He said he wants to see extensive changes to the proposed housing design guidelines, which he said would place too many restrictions on architectural choices and ultimately reduce the amount of redevelopment going on in Prairie Village.

“Preserving the charm of Prairie Village is not just maintaining what is current but also improving what the community has to offer,” he said.

Morrison said he also wants to push a plan for the city to buy its own streetlights, which it currently leases from Kansas City Power & Light, and replace them with low-energy bulbs, a combination he said could ultimately save the city money.

He would like to see the Shawnee Mission School District buy back the current Mission Chateau development site on Mission Road to build a new middle school. He would revise the city’s ethics code to prevent council members from receiving campaign contributions from those with financial interests before the council.

McFadden, a 40-year-old senior account manager at AT&T, said she thinks she did a good job during the year she was on the council and is banking on voters’ frustration with Morrison’s ouster to give her a full term. She also criticized Morrison for a legal fight he started with the city in 2008 when he filed a petition challenging a city ordinance allowing the city to use bond revenue for parks. The city sued to have the petition thrown out for not following the petition process, and Morrison appealed the case to the Kansas Supreme Court.

“There’s better ways for us to spend our money than that,” she said. “It’s time to move forward with somebody who’s willing to play by the rules in that regard.”

McFadden she said she had looked at the new tear-down rules but didn’t really have a strong opinion because the rules are more aimed at small lots, which are mostly on the opposite side of town from Ward 5.

McFadden said she wanted to make sure the Meadowbrook Park is developed successfully and will push for more walking and biking paths across the city that connect parks, shopping areas and schools. She said she also wants to maintain the city’s strong bond rating.

“Right now they’re doing a good job,” she said. “It’s really a matter of making sure we don’t mess that up.”

This story was originally published March 29, 2016 at 11:32 PM with the headline "Prairie Village council seats draw focus."