The American Civil Liberties Union calls it a classic SLAPP. And as friction builds between developers who seemingly want to carpet the North suburbs with housing plans and residents trying to protect their space, we were bound to get slapped sooner or later.

Two developers are suing Franklin Park and several of its officials for more than $2.4 million in losses they say were caused by opposition to their plan to build 21 townhouses on a 4.7-acre tract. What makes this lawsuit particularly intriguing is that it also names three dozen neighbors because they raised "frivolous objections" to the project.

Tom Harvey, one of the people named in the lawsuit, was stunned when he heard the news. "This is very stressful , to say the least," he said last week.

The developers, Rose Mance and Diane Wrobleski, say in their lawsuit that the township and residents caused unnecessary delays that cost them the development project. Although there was ultimately a court ruling in favor of the development, they ended up selling the site to another developer.

Witold Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said the lawsuit has the hallmarks of a classic SLAPP, an acronym that stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.

The term was coined in the early 1990s at the University of Denver Law School in a project that began tracking these kind of lawsuits nationwide. In Pennsylvania, property owners and environmentalists were largely the targets of SLAPPs by coal operators. But they are also commonly used by developers against local residents who raise objections and slow down or block a project, or as retaliation for daring to oppose them in the first place.

They obviously would have a chilling effect, making people think twice before standing up at the next supervisors or planning commission meeting, or putting their name to a petition opposing a development.

While most SLAPPs eventually are thrown out of court, it's usually not until after defendants spend thousands of dollars in litigation fees. If they want to recoup those fees, it normally means another trip to court to persuade a judge to have the loser pay the costs.

A few years ago, what the ACLU also called a classic SLAPP involved a lawsuit filed by the CVS Pharmacy chain against 16 defendants and the borough of Homestead as opposition mounted against plans for a CVS that would replace several buildings on Homestead's historic Eighth Avenue.

Filed in June 2000, the lawsuit languished until CVS ultimately pulled out of the project and sold the Eighth Avenue property to the county for potential development in December 2004. Even though there was no movement on the lawsuit, the fact that it was hanging over their heads made local officials and concerned residents hesitate to take any quick action on the issue.

SLAPPS are particularly scary for the ACLU because they strike at the heart of one of our most sacred tenants as a democracy -- the right to petition our government for change and our right to speak out on the actions of our government, whether it's the government in Washington, D.C., or the government that hires the town dog catcher.

The developers have a right to sue, and whether the three dozen residents should be a part of the lawsuit in Franklin Park will be decided by the courts. But seeking punitive damages from private citizens for exercising their First Amendment rights seems way out of line, a manipulation of the court system and a subversion of the democratic process.