A Boone County judge is considering whether to add American Airlines to a lawsuit between two residents and the City of Columbia.
Mark Winter and Richard Shanks are suing the city after Columbia entered an agreement with American Airlines to pay the company $750,000 in taxpayer money if American didn’t meet a year-end revenue goal as part of an arrangement for adding more flights to and from Columbia.
Tony Napolitanio, a senior attorney at conservative think tank the Goldwater Institute, said in an email that the lawsuit is “fundamentally about taxpayers asking their city to follow the constitutional limits on how it spends public money, and we have maintained from the outset that American Airlines does not need to be a party to resolve that question.”
The city argued in court that because American Airlines would be affected by the court’s declaration, it should be added into the lawsuit.
The court will reconvene next week to hear to hear Judge Benjamin Miller’s decision.
