Tutera Group’s Mission Chateau project goes before Prairie Village Planning Commission tonight

• Lynn Collins
• Signs like this that oppose Mission Chateau line some of Prairie Village’s streets

The first substantive vote on a controversial senior-living-community proposal may occur Tuesday night when the Prairie Village Planning Commission meets to discuss the Mission Chateau project.

Now that construction on Wal-Mart-anchored Mission Gateway, in Mission, is under way, the large senior-living and nursing community slated for the shuttered Mission Valley Middle School site, at 8500 Mission, is the biggest development pickle in northeast Johnson County.

Mission Chateau pits the well-heeled Tutera Group, a locally based developer of senior-living communities in the Midwest and elsewhere, against an increasingly well-organized neighborhood group trying to fend off a project that they feel is too large and too obtrusive for a former school site so close to a surrounding neighborhood.