The Arizona Coyotes countersued Phoenix for $2.3 billion Tuesday in a response to the capital city's own lawsuit on March 28 that sought to upend the professional hockey team's massive development deal on Tempe Town Lake.
The project is set to go in front of Tempe voters on May 16. It involves building a hockey arena, an entertainment district and nearly 2,000 apartments on 46 acres of city-owned land west of Town Lake. The site has previously housed a landfill and sits about two miles from the Phoenix-owned Sky Harbor International Airport.
Phoenix spent the better part of 2022 arguing that the project would violate its decades-old agreement with Tempe that dictates how close housing can be to the airport, a policy meant to protect residents from excessive airplane noise and shield Sky Harbor from related litigation.