SANDPOINT — The city has tapped a Coeur d’Alene law firm to represent it in a legal duel over a prohibition against firearms at the Festival at Sandpoint, court records show.

Peter Erbland and Katharine Brereton of the Lake City Law Group have filed a notice appearance in the suit. Erbland recently successfully defended the city in a federal civil rights lawsuit over the shooting death of Jeanetta Riley outside Bonner General Health in 2014. Erbland successfully argued at a trial in U.S. District Court in August that Sandpoint Police officers acted appropriately when they fired on Riley, who was armed with a knife, refusing officers’ commands and moving toward them.

Bonner County filed suit against the city last month. The litigation challenges the city’s position that organizers of the annual waterfront concert series are free to enact their own security measures when they lease War Memorial Field every summer.

Idaho law forbids prohibitions against firearms on public lands. The city maintains the Festival, as a lessee, can draw up its own rules when it occupies the site.

Festival officials say they are supporters of the Second Amendment, although performing artists are insisting in contracts that organizers enact a ban on guns, knives and other weapons. The Festival is currently not a party to the litigation.

In other developments in the case 1st District Judge Barbara Buchanan, whose chambers are in Bonner County, has voluntarily disqualified herself from presiding in the matter. Under Idaho Rules of Civil Procedure, a presiding judge in an action may make a voluntary disqualification without stating any reason.

The case has been reassigned to Judge Lansing Haynes in Kootenai County, court records show.