TRAVERSE CITY -- Amy Hardin occasionally awakens late at night and takes stock of her family's comfortable Acme Township home. Someday, she fears, it all could be gone.
Meijer Inc. and developers for the Village at Grand Traverse LLC sued Hardin's husband, Ronald Hardin, among four Acme planning commissioners the developers personally targeted in 2004.
Meijer in December dropped all of its personal lawsuits, but the Village did not.
"It's like an emotional water board (torture); you know nothing will probably ever come from it, but you don't know for sure," Amy Hardin said.
The suit originally was dismissed by Grand Traverse County Circuit Court Judge Philip E. Rodgers, reinstated on appeal, dismissed a second time by Rodgers, and appealed once again by the Village on Jan. 3.
When she learned the Village appealed the latest dismissal, Hardin said it gave her a "panic attack -- again."
"And it's not just our family, when you see the other families (of the defendants) you'll see the same look in their eyes as you'll see in our eyes of being stunned and frightened," Amy Hardin said.
That's exactly what so-called SLAPP suits are supposed to do, experts said.
"It's an attempt by a powerful entity to intimidate and bully someone who doesn't have the same resources," said Stephen Tuttle, a political consultant who has researched "SLAPP" suits, in Acme Township in particular, for Traverse City attorney Grant Parsons, who sued Meijer on behalf of township Treasurer William Boltres.
Boltres this month also filed suit against the Village developers, and alleged harassment, among other charges.
SLAPP suits, an acronym for "strategic lawsuits against public participation," are rarely won by the plaintiffs, but that's not the point of filing the suit, Tuttle said.
Faced with the cost and time of defending themselves, plus the emotional drain the threat of the suit poses, the intent, Tuttle maintains, is to make the defendants give up, shut up, and go away.
SLAPP suits usually are filed against individuals who are not part of government, such as neighbors or members of nonprofit organizations who oppose a particular project, Tuttle said. He considers the Village at Grand Traverse and Meijer suits SLAPP suits because they sought financial damages against individual township officials for doing the job they were elected or appointed to do.
The SLAPP practice is so prevalent that 24 states adopted specific laws to protect individuals from SLAPP claims, and two have included government decision-makers under that umbrella.
Michigan has not, but the situation in Acme Township has state Rep. Kevin Elsenheimer, R-Bellaire, working on legislation to stop SLAPPs in Michigan.
Elsenheimer, a lawyer who's defended townships across the state against SLAPPs, also helped draft major revisions to the state's zoning enabling act as a legislator. He's "not happy" to see developers try to manipulate that zoning act through SLAPPs.
"I'm concerned that part of the playbook is to use the suits to try and leverage against good planning and zoning, and to me that makes no sense and it should be unlawful," Elsenheimer said.
Elsenheimer said his primary intent is to protect government officials from SLAPPs, but "if it yields fruit we may go beyond this" and look to protect individual free speech rights for people who could be targeted by SLAPPs.
That's good news for Amy Hardin, who worries what will happen if the Village appeals its suit against individuals all the way to the state Supreme Court and wins.
"Think what that would do to every public official in Michigan," Hardin said. "It would mean forever every corporation could push people around."
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