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The company that has been trying to build a Wonderful World of Oz theme park near DeSoto has pulled the plug on the project and is encouraging investors to take legal action against Johnson County.

In a letter to investors obtained Thursday evening by the Journal-World, Oz Entertainment Co. Chairman Robert Kory wrote that the company ceased to exist Dec. 10 and that investors should be able to deduct their losses on their 2001 tax returns.

The wicked witch that killed the project, Kory wrote, was the Johnson County Commission, which in early October voted 3-1 to "decline further study" of the Oz proposal. Without the county's support, developers did not have access to state tax incentives and financing considered critical to the $860 million project to be located at the former Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant.

"The action by the (commission) is unconscionable," Kory said in his letter dated Dec. 10. "After having led us to believe over a two-year period that they would approve our project if we met all their specific demands, they abruptly tabled the project in executive session with no notice."

He singled out Commissioner Annabeth Surbaugh, writing that she changed her position for political gain and delayed the project by requiring feasibility studies and repayment of Oz debt to other municipal governments.

Surbaugh denied the accusations, saying she had hoped the project whose first stage was to include the theme park and resort with about 350 hotel rooms, conference center, golf course, RV park and campground would work.

"There was no attempt to stall it, and I feel that Mr. Kory knows that by the hours that I put in," she said.

If Oz had met its obligations, the study were completed and the results were satisfactory, Surbaugh said, she would have voted to move ahead with the project.

"That would have been the best way for me politically and in every other way," she said. "If I was going to nix the deal, I would have done it early on. If I'd known that I was going to be a 'no' vote, believe me I would have been a 'no' vote a lot earlier."

In the letter, Kory wrote that supporters and investors in the Kansas City area were "outraged."

"Many have suggested that we take legal action," he said in the letter.

The basis for such a claim, he wrote, would be legal documentation in which the Johnson County Commission approved the theme park earlier in the development process.

Oz Entertainment lacks the resources to pursue such a claim, he said in the letter, "but we have preserved all its records and we would assist any shareholder who wishes to bring such a claim."

Kory could not be reached for comment, and the phone number for a company spokeswoman was out of service.