But the 53-year-old financial planner — and hundreds of others like him who cherish their bucolic lifestyle — feel threatened by Overland Park.

The city wants to annex 15 square miles and extend its borders nearly to Miami County, the largest expansion in the city’s 47-year history.

Hundreds of angry landowners, including professional golfer Tom Watson, have packed hearing rooms in the past several months to tell the city the “land grab” is arrogant and robs them of a voice in their own future.

“It’s nothing more than suburban sprawl,” Pishny said with disdain. He sees it as a way for Overland Park to marginalize green space while perpetuating urban crowding and conformity.

But Overland Park contends more density actually means less sprawl.

Those disparate definitions of sprawl are sure to be an issue for Johnson County commissioners, who have the job of deciding whether the county’s largest city can grow 23 percent. A ruling is expected Feb. 21.

The term “suburban sprawl” has come to be a pejorative description for any growth pattern that someone dislikes, said Robert Puentes, a fellow with the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

“But all suburban growth is not sprawl,” he said.

Growth can be done in a way that protects open space, provides walkable neighborhoods and offers different housing options.

“But there is a tremendous frustration across the nation with one type of growth like you see in Overland Park — low density, single family, separate use, automobile dependent — a product that is overbuilt and is no longer in demand,” Puentes said.

No place for farms?

Critics tag Overland Park’s plan to manage growth as bad sprawl, creating all-too-familiar subdivisions full of strip centers and unimaginative architecture.

“There should be a place for farms in Johnson County,” Pishny said. “What’s wrong with having a horse?”

Nor do critics believe that growth is coming as fast as the city says.

With the real estate market in a “horrible recession” and the city showing an 18 percent vacant land rate, Overland Park is not at the “cusp of great development,” said Jim Orr, a lawyer for the critics. “This is too much, too soon.”

Pishny, secretary/treasurer of The “No” to Annexation Coalition, agrees. Ordinary people, he said, are shocked to learn that cities in Kansas can annex territory without the approval of the people who live there.

“When they hear a city can take over people and places without their say-so, they feel very scared,” Pishny said.

A Kansas legislator wants to change the law this year, requiring an affirmative vote of affected residents before an annexation can take place. But Overland Park officials think the idea is bad public policy that would end most annexations in Kansas.

City Manager John Nachbar and other annexation supporters offer a different view of what constitutes “bad sprawl,” which they say already is ingrained in Johnson County’s rural land-use plan.

For more than two decades, guidelines charting Johnson County’s growth have called for planners to be land stewards until the time is ripe for a city to develop and manage new territory. Until then, the county’s land-use plan generally calls for one house built on every 10 acres of land.