KSHB 41 reporter Ryan Gamboa covers Miami County in Kansas and Cass County in Missouri. He also covers agricultural topics. This story came from out Let's Talk Spring Hill event on Tuesday. Jeff Axmann also reached out to Ryan with his concerns. Share your story idea with Ryan.
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The Powell Observatory is continuing a years-long search for a new home in Miami County, Kansas.
Since 1985, the Astronomical Society of Kansas City has set up shop in Louisburg as a tourism partner.
"When we opened up in 1985, Louisburg was about 1,700 people," said Rick Henderson with the Astronomical Society of Kansas City. "Louisburg is close to 6,000 now. Johnson County development is a lot closer than it was back in those days."
The Powell Observatory is operated by volunteers, and the ASKC is a nonprofit organization.
The Gary C. Ruisinger Telescope was also built by volunteers, and can take in 11,000 times the light of the naked eye.
Henderson provided KSHB 41 with some images of the Horsehead Nebula in the Constellation Orion, which is 1,375 light-years from Earth.
But the Ruisinger Telescope is experiencing challenges with competing light pollution from Louisburg and development in Johnson County.
"We’re being blinded, and we’re losing the capability to see what we used to be able to see out here," Henderson explained. "It cannot tell the difference between a nebula, a galaxy, a headlight, a baseball field light, or parking lot lights."
Lewis Young Park, the current home of Powell Observatory in Louisburg, has also changed. Athletic fields and a tractor pull stadium cause additional light pollution for the club on weekends when they open up the telescope.
Henderson says Miami County and Louisburg are good partners, but the environmental changes around them are forcing a long-term move.
"We want to stay in Miami County," he said.
That move is proposed at W. 395th Street and Cold Water Springs Road, about 20 minutes southeast of its current location. It's about a half-mile west of Drexel, Missouri.
Development plans show an expanded facility with greater classroom space and an outdoor amphitheater for educational gatherings.
This location sits directly behind Jeff Axmann's home, a longtime Miami County resident.
"This really is the first development pressure we’ve had with it from Johnson County," Axmann said. "A lot of it comes down to safety. We have a really bad intersection up here, increased traffic, the fact that a lot of this happens at night and well into midnight and later."
Axmann led the charge on a Protest Petition, gathering signatures from nearly 90% of homeowners within 1,000 feet of the proposed site.
The protest petition, which was deemed valid, would force a super-majority vote from the Miami County Commission. The standard vote of approval is three out of five commissioners; The protest petition requires four.
At the April 29 meeting, Henderson pleaded his case to the Board of County Commissioners.
The commission voted 3 to 5 not to approve the Powell Observatory's Conditional Use Permit.
It was a win for Axmann and his neighbors.
A week later, at the May 6 meeting, the commission went into a closed Executive Session for about 25 minutes.
When they returned, District 2 Commissioner Paul Scruggs made a motion to reconsider the vote.
"After I made that vote, I made a couple mistakes," Scruggs said on Wednesday. "I didn't research the subject, I didn't visit the property. I didn't see all the dynamics I used to vote in the first place."
At the previous meeting, Scruggs had concerns with the rural character of the area, including traffic issues, and also this project not aligning with the Comprehensive Plan.
The Commission passed the motion to reconsider.
"I'd like to know what changed people's minds?" Axmann said. "How does anybody think it's right? Seven days later, you can just change your vote. I cannot for the life of me trust our legislative body if this can happen."
Axmann said if he and his neighbors missed their deadline for the protest petition, they would not have been granted any grace.
"As citizens, we don't get an opportunity to miss a deadline, we don’t get to go back and get a redo. We had a set amount of time to fight the petition," Axmann said. "Had we missed that deadline, it wouldn't have accepted it," he said. "Citizens need to stand up to the government and say, just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should do it."
KSHB 41 reached out to Miami County for a statement regarding the process behind this decision.
Miami County has received some resident concerns over actions taken by the Board of County Commissioners at its May 6, 2026 meeting to reconsider an April 29, 2026 vote on the conditional use permit application from the Astronomical Society of Kansas City, Inc. to construct an observatory at 359th Street and Coldwater Springs Road. The concerns expressed center on reopening a vote previously taken and the application of Robert’s Rules of Order. Robert’s Rules of Order governs the reconsideration of matters that have been finally decided. The same-session requirement exists to prevent a board from reopening and relitigating questions it has already conclusively resolved. That situation is simply not present here. At the original meeting, the Board voted 3-2 in favor of adopting the planning commission’s recommendation to approve the conditional use permit. That vote, however, failed to achieve the 3/4 supermajority required by both the County Zoning Regulations and K.S.A. 12-757(d) due to the filing of a valid protest petition. No further action was taken. The Board did not vote to deny the application, did not vote to override the planning commission’s recommendation and did not return the matter to the planning commission with a statement of reasons. The Board adjourned without having completed any of the three statutorily prescribed acts available to it.
Under the County’s Zoning Regulations and K.S.A. 12-757(d), the Board’s authority over a conditional use permit application is not discharged by an attempt to act. It is discharged only by completing one of three specific statutory options. Because the Board completed none of them, the application remained an open and unresolved matter of business before the Board when it convened at its subsequent meeting. The Board was not voting to reconsider a final decision because there was no final decision to reconsider. It was instead addressing a matter that had never left its docket. The subsequent motion was simply a continuation of the Board’s ongoing statutory obligation to act on a pending application, not a parliamentary reconsideration of a concluded proceeding. Robert’s Rules’ same-session requirement for motions to reconsider is therefore inapplicable because the procedural posture never called for a motion to reconsider in the first place.
This interpretation is firmly grounded in the law governing the exhaustion of a public body’s decisional authority. The exhaustion doctrine holds that a board’s power over a matter is spent only upon a complete and final exercise of that authority, not upon an incomplete attempt that falls short of the legal threshold required for valid action. Dal Maso v. Board of County Comm’rs of Prince George’s County, 182 Md. 200 (1943); see also 37 Am. Jur. § 150; 62 C.J.S. Municipal Corporations § 294. Where a board has yet to render a legally sufficient final decision, it retains jurisdiction to do so. State ex rel. Hunzicker v. Pulliam, 168 Okla. 632 (1934). A vote that fails to meet a jurisdictional voting threshold, like the supermajority required by operation of a valid protest petition, is legally insufficient to constitute final action in any direction. The Board neither approved nor denied this application. It attempted to approve, fell short of the required threshold and adjourned with its statutory duty unfulfilled. The Board’s decision at the subsequent meeting to re-notice the matter and formally schedule reconsideration of the issue was the Board fulfilling its legal obligation to render a decision it had yet to make.
Henderson and his team are preparing for another weekend of member and non-member viewings.
Typically, they can bring in a few hundred people on a busy weekend or during a major celestial event.
The big draw to the Powell Observatory and the group's mission is to preserve the dark southern skies.
According to Henderson, the northern cosmos remains the same throughout the year, while the southern skies offer different views that could be once in a lifetime for people.
He reiterated that the events they host are not rowdy, they embrace the quiet and dark skies to receive the best views.
While the future of the Powell Observatory's new home remains in the hands of the Miami County Commission, remaining in the area is a top priority.
"Miami County and Louisburg have been good to us. We’ve been here for 41 years," Henderson added. "We want to stay in Miami County."
Henderson encouraged those who are concerned or have questions about what they do to come visit.
"I'm actually not even opposed to the Observatory," Axmann said. "It's pretty cool. I just don't think its cool right here."
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