12th & Main

City Market in the Running

2011-06-21T08:09:00.000-05:00

The contest City Market for its 150-year tradition of consistently providing local residents with locally-grown produce.

News from City Hall
City of Kansas City, Mo.
www.kcmo.org
CONTACT: City Communications Office, 816-513-1349
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: June 16, 2011

City Market a contestant in America's Favorite Farmers' Market Contest

The City of Kansas City, Mo., encourages residents to vote for the City Market in the 2011 America's Favorite Farmers' Market Contest. The contest, hosted annually by American Farmland Trust, picked the City Market as a contestant for its 150-year tradition of consistently providing local residents with locally-grown produce. More than 140 vendors sell their locally grown produce, meats, eggs, baked goods, honey, jams and more at the market.

Residents can vote for their favorite farmers' market at www.farmland.org/vote by Aug. 31.The online contest challenges farmers' markets nationwide to rally support from their communities. One large, medium, small and boutique-sized farmers' market will win this year's title of "America's Favorite Farmers' Market." Winners will also be featured on award-winning food site Epicurious.com and will receive prize packages from American Farmland Trust and its partners.

The America's Favorite Farmers' Market Contest is a part of American Farmland Trust's No Farms No Food campaign, which raises awareness of the dangers of farmland loss by connecting it to food. The American Farmland Trust is the nation's leading conservation organization dedicated to saving America's farm and ranch land, promoting environmentally-sound farming practices and supporting a sustainable future for farms.

The City Market is open seven days a week. Its Farmers' Market is open Saturday from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. and Sunday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. For more information on the City Market, visit www.thecitymarket.org.

The City Market has been owned and operated by the City of Kansas City, Mo., since 1857. It is currently managed by Copaken Brooks.

Media inquiries on this topic should be directed to Claude Page, division manager in the City Planning and Development Department, at 816-513-2894, or Paige Powers, marketing and events manager at Copaken Brooks, at ppowers@copaken-brooks.com.

2011-06-14T21:11:00.000-05:00

I discovered this while poking around for updates about Mike Sanders commuter rail plan. By 2015, 88 percent of metro area residents aged 65-79 will have poor access to transportation. This is a particular concern for seniors who do not drive. A new report from Transportation for America outlines several policy options that it hopes Congress will adopt this summer.

Not Good Neighbors

2011-05-24T08:01:00.002-05:00

Update: A friend tells me there's a petition signing table set up in front of Half Price Books in Westport (map). The circulators have permission to be on the property. The anti circulators do not. You can sign the petition free of harassment.

If this is how they react to a disagreement, then I don't want them in my community.

Do I plan to sign the petition against the Highwoods Plaza project? Frankly, this wasn't even a question for me. I haven't decided whether to vote for the measure if it does get on the ballot. As I said a few weeks ago, I'm conflicted about the project. But I'm almost always happy to sign a petition. I'm almost always happy to let the voters weigh in on an issue affecting the future of my home.

Which is why I was annoyed by the the "decline to sign" mailer that arrived in my mailbox last week. You probably got one too, a red flyer urging citizens of the city to not sign the petition of the citizens group opposing Highwoods' proposed Plaza redevelopment. But I could live with the flyer. Highwoods has as much of a right to free speech as anyone.

What I learned next left me at a loss for words. As reported by both Michael Mahoney and the Star, Highwoods has hired people to shadow the petition circulators to discourage signing.

At the very least this behavior is questionable. At what point does this discouragement become harassment? I'm sure the lawyers at Husch Blackwell, the law firm spearheading the Highwoods counter measure know how to draw a legal line between discouraging and harassing. It's not the legal line that will matter to most people. It's the moral one. Will the targets of the discouragement recognize it as acceptable just because it's legal? Will they even know that it's legal?

Legal or not, the response bothers me. For better or for worse, Highwoods is a member of this community. If this is how they react to a disagreement, then I don't want them in my community.

Google Agreement

2011-05-20T07:38:00.001-05:00

Update: Michael Mahoney's 20 Pounds of Headlines gives us a little insight into how the Google deal went down and what the big picture is.

I haven't had a chance to read it myself, but thought I'd share the link to Kansas City's agreement with Google for installing an ultra-high speed fiber network.

Local Civil War

2011-05-18T05:51:00.001-05:00

One of my favorite urban issues blog, Urbanophile recently posted an editorial about the incentive border wars being waged in several parts of the Midwest. The article by Richard C. Longworth, Senior Fellow at The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, makes several points I've been trying to make for years on this blog for years, but comes at it with a better set of credentials

One fact from this story that should not surprise anyone, least of all me, is that there are more places in America looking for relocations than there are companies looking to relocate. "A University of Illinois study showed that there are some 300 significant corporate relocations in the United States every year, and about 15,000 different economic development organizations — state, county and local — competing for them." We're in a loosing game and the longer we refuse to acknowledge that the more we will loose. The alternative? Read the post.

Returning Councilman

2011-05-16T08:07:00.001-05:00

This week my attention was drawn to the latest edition of "The Hyde Parker", the newsletter of the Hyde Park Neighborhood Association, specifically an article about returning City Council Member Jim Glover.

Glover addresses a number of issues that are recurring concerns of this blog. So I would like to respond to what he has to say. I realize, Mr. Glover, that you don't know who I am. So there's no reason you should listen to what I have to say. I hope you'll take this as food for thought and realize there are others in your district who agree with my opinions.

Glover favors a systematic partnership with realtors and neighborhood groups to use economic data to both change perceptions and highlight the value of urban living. "Much of the real estate industry is still showing Johnson County when people move here. We've all suffered because of it."

I agree in principal, though I hope this partnership is not too overly balanced in favor of realtors. I've long felt that one of the problems with local government isn't local government per se. It's that business interests have paid representatives who show up to every meeting while citizens only show up when there is a crisis. Often that's the only time they can. There are other problems of course. But that's another post.

"The key to improving property values west of Troost is to effectively address perceptions and issues to the east."

Once again, I agree. The political key to this is avoiding the gentrification issue, the specter of the affluent pushing out the poor. Provisions for low income housing in dispersed apartment complexes is a good start (more on this later).

Thanks to low property values, people of modest means are sometimes property owners in blighted areas. Contrary to popular belief many of these folks do their best to maintain their properties. These people should be able to stay in their properties if the area around them gentrifies. It might dilute some of the class friction that the West side had when it started to gentrify. If Missouri doesn't have a homesteading law, will you lobby for one? Will you put this on the city's legislative priorities for the next session?

Speaking of Troost, have you ever considered that the problem with said street isn't the street itself? Have you considered that it's the density east of Troost that's the problem. Have you seen how many vacant lots are over there? If everything else were equal—if the populations on either side of Troost were racially and economically homogeneous—any business that drew customers from the surrounding community would prefer Broadway or Main.

Regarding the Home Depot and Costco at Main and Linwood: A former American Institute of Architects KC chapter president denounced the the plan as a bricks and mortar dinosaur.

I'm with the architect on this one, though I'm not inclined to be too hard on you. You were probably told, "our way or nothing." Here's the thing. Many (most?) of us who live in midtown want a more urban environment. I'm using 'urban' in the sense of 'human scale' and 'walkable', not in the sense of tenement slums. There are cities that are as much as twenty years ahead of us in revitalizing their historic areas. Surely there are business entities who already know how to function in an urban environment. May I suggest that next time you attempt something like the Main and Linwood area, that you seek out these companies instead?

Regarding Main and Linwood, Glover said, "It's one of the few TIF's we've had that pays for itself."

Bravo! Fewer incentives. More like that one.

"Glover says he'll be pushing to have the E-tax revenue specifically and formally dedicated to ongoing utility infrastructure and maintenance.

I would also allow it's use for emergency services. Then it would fund the services that non-residents use or may possibly use. I would also start developing a long term plan to live without it. I voted for the E-tax, and have even defended it. But I think it's days are numbered.

Regarding section 8 housing on Armour Boulevard: "We should find the best way to create a diverse, more dispersed housing mix."

I've believed this for years. Concentrated poverty leads to higher aggregate crime rates. When people hear that they don't hear all the words. What they hear is 'poverty leads to crime'. This is a complicated issue. It goes without saying that criminals are frequently from the lower classes. That does not mean that everyone from the lower classes is a criminal. For whatever reason, the concentration of the lower classes reduces the conditions that inhibit criminal behavior. I've spoken to many in midtown who understand the fine distinctions. The affluent in less mixed parts of the city do not. Which is why I say I hope you can pull it off, but I'm not betting on it.

In conclusion, Councilman Glover, I wish you luck in the next four years.

Small Businesses Not Defended

2011-05-14T06:00:00.000-05:00

Earlier this week I stumbled on a commentary by Stacy Mitchell, a researcher with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Her editorial, published in Business Week last August, brings to light the work of two small business lobbying groups that actually helps large corporations. I'm posting the link now because this is an issue that needs much more attention.

Moving Forward or Sideways?

2011-05-09T06:36:00.080-05:00

Update: A reader brought to my attention the fact that the Neptune, the Plaza building that Highwoods wants to replace is only a few decades old. Read carefully. My concern is for the whole Plaza, the whole economic ecosystem. Stewardship means concern for the sappling as much as for the aging oak.

One of the few things done by our new City Council last week was to reverse the previous Mayor's veto of the proposed Highwoods project on the Plaza. (Outgoing councils tend not to leave business hanging over the break. That's why Thursday's meeting was mainly introductions of new ordinances.) I have to admit, I'm completely conflicted about this project. There's no way to have my cake and eat it too. I'm inclined to applaud any project that happens without help from city hall. My problem is with the proposed project itself.

First, a little history. The debate has had me thinking about the historic buildings we've lost since World War II and the reasons we lost them.

Second Board of Trade Building--Demolished for a parking lot.
Emmery Bird Thayer Department Store Building--Demolished for a parking lot.
Main Street Shopping District, 8th Street to 12th Street--Some were demolished for parking, some to realign Main and Delaware in a more auto friendly alignment. Still others were demolished in the name of redevelopment. (These first three bullets were all supposed to keep downtown relevant in a suburbanizing age. We decry them in part because we know what their planners didn't: the long term results.)
12th and Vine--Demolished for urban renewal. The intersection doesn't even exist any more. We had to put up a plaque marking where it WAS so that out-of-towners can find it.
18th and Vine--Neglected for decades, before a plastic makeover.
Quality Hill's 19th century Homes--Demolished for urban renewal.
Southern half of Coats House Hotel--A fire that arguably resulted from neglect.
Original Home of Disney Studios--It stands, but it's gutted and neglected.
Playmore Ballroom (One of our three important jazz era ballrooms)--Unknown reasons.

Aside from the obvious that we keep destroying our own history, notice that about half of these were done in the name of improvement. I'll come back to this point later.

The Plaza has operated continuously and vibrantly since J.C. Nichols established it in 1922. However kitschy some may find its deliberate imitation of Seville, Spain, it has one quality that takes decades to duplicate. Unlike the glib urbanist developments at Zona Rosa and the Power and Light District, the Plaza is the product of many minds over many decades. This gives it a texture and richness that is unique in the metro and perhaps for hundred of miles in any direction. To my mind it ameliorates the kitsch. Time and more minds could enhance this effect if it is properly cared for. More to the point, it has suffered no period of neglect, nor have its "improvements" been destructive ones. But that could change. Which brings me back to Highwoods.

Consider: the Highwoods portfolio, a collection of commercial and industrial properties in ten cities, contains only one other retail location--an unremarkable mixed use building nestled between two highways in Winston-Salem North Carolina. Aside from the odd skyscraper here and there they don't have many urban properties either. None of their other properties are landmarks. None are residential. In short, Highwoods doesn't own anything even remotely like the Country Club Plaza.

We may talk about maintaining the plaza, and I have no doubt that is the intention on all sides. My list of destroyed areas, particularly those done with the intent of helping the city, is a warning to the proponents of the project, particularly Highwoods. I would like to ask their decision makers, is the proposed office building an attempt at maintaining the Plaza or is it a corporate attempt to put our square peg into your round hole? Are you moving forward, or sideways to something that will ultimately destroy the very thing that makes the Plaza real estate valuable? Are you, Highwoods willing to learn how to properly manage the Plaza or are you going to treat it like the forgettable and disposable buildings in the rest of your holdings? I don't want to find that twenty years from now the Plaza has been replaced with nondescript highrises and a plaque that says, "Here WAS the world's first shopping district designed with cars in mind." So I'm asking you, Highwoods, tread carefully.

Do I want more business and jobs in Kansas City? Yes. Do I want to get that business without giving away the tax base? Yes. So please understand, Highwoods, you have something unique and worth maintaining.

The Origins of S p r a w l

2011-04-28T08:35:00.000-05:00

The Urbanophile recently reposted an excellent article from 2009 on the origins and problems of sprawl. He summarizes many things that I've alluded to here over the years. Since I've never gotten around to putting all this information in one place, here's an alternative.

Trade

2011-04-15T07:53:00.002-05:00

It's easy to forget that Kansas City exists largely because of trade. We've long been the second largest rail hub in the nation. This was also once one of the most important markets for beef. America's Main Street and First Avenue, I-70 and I-35 cross in the middle of our downtown, making this a good location for intermodal hubs.

How many know that wheat is still bought and sold at the Kansas City Board of Trade? I didn't. In looking for new sources of local news I discovered a press release from said entity announcing the tenth straight month of record trading volume. It's not sexy, I know. But at least it's home grown (pardon the pun).

CEO's Letter

2011-04-13T08:02:00.000-05:00

Earlier this week, seventeen area business executives signed a letter to Governors Brownback and Nixon. I'm posting a link to this letter because I could not agree more with what these men are saying. I might add that the erosion of the tax base may ultimately be detrimental to these businesses. Aside from the state of local infrastructure, on which businesses directly depend, a declining tax base also means a decline in the quality of life. If an employees quality of life declines he'll search for greener pastures. How long before his former employers follow?

No Free Lunch

2011-04-11T07:26:00.003-05:00

There would be similar effects on the temporarily poor aka young people starting out aka our future.

I had not planned to do two taxation posts in a row, particularly since the e-tax vote has passed. Taxation itself will continue to be a topic of public debate, and a comment to my last post challenged a premise that I still think is correct. There's also a lesson about taxation which I'll get to later.

My premise was that if the e-tax goes away, the necessary increases in property taxes and utility fees will make housing more expensive and push the poor into the surrounding suburbs. I was thinking mainly of the chronically poor, but there would be similar effects on the temporarily poor aka young people starting out in life aka our future.

To understand why I think this, consider a parallel that at first glance would seem to not be parallel at all. In 1990 the Federal government decided to tax producers of luxury boats, not the kind average folks buy for weekends at the lake, but sea-going vessels with the then starting price of $60,000. The tax was steep--$10,000 per boat. Boat makers attempted to pass part of this tax to their customers. In response their customers bought used boats, or bought them from Europe, or went without.

Here's the two sequences side by side:

Tax Levied	Boat production	Increased property tax and utility fees
Tax Passed On	Increase in the price of boats	Increase in the price of housing
Resulting Movement	Drop in demand for boats	Drop in demand for housing

Changes in tax policy are always sold to voters as the thing that will solve some problem. The opponents usually tell me that the world will come to an end if the change is made. Common sense should tell me that the change may not be all it's cracked up to be. Common sense should also tell me that said change will always have a down side, even if the world doesn't come to an end. You can't get something for nothing. Or as Robert Heinlein linked to say, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

What's Regressive?

2011-04-06T07:40:00.001-05:00

So the earnings tax passed by a big margin. E-tax supporter Woody Cozad opted for a hissy fit rather than a graceful exit. One sentence in particular got my attention:

If they choose to continue this regressive tax then this is not the end of this campaign; it’s just the intermission.

Specifically the word 'regressive' started the gears. The other context where that word is used is in describing the effects of replacing the income tax with a sales tax. Regressive in that case is the opposite of progressive, wherein higher incomes are taxed at higher rates.

Anyway, that connection made me ponder the possible effect on lower incomes if the e-tax had not passed. For those of you just tuning in, without the e-tax city officials would have to cover the cost of emergency services and other such things by raising other taxes, specifically property taxes and utility fees. (By the way, Mr. Cozad, those are costs that businesses would also pay.) These other taxes and fees would raise the on-going cost of property ownership in the city. This in turn would raise rents, making our cheapest housing more expensive. This would tend to drive the poor into the surrounding burbs.

That is why I'm asking the question: what's regressive?

Two Coats House Hotels?

2011-01-31T07:20:00.003-06:00

It's been bothering me or a long time. The photographs of the Coats House Hotel from the 19th century don't look like the building that's there now. I'm not talking about the Southern half that burned on January 28, 1978. The structure in the 19th century images has a top floor with a mansard roof. The modern structure has turrets and bay windows. I didn't see how they could possibly be the same building, but the text accompanying any photographs treats them as the same building.

Then last week I found this photograph on Missouri Valley Special Collection website. It shows both building's side by side.

Could it Be...?

2011-01-22T10:19:00.000-06:00

I was hoping someone would comment on my previous post, a tweet from state Senator Jolie Justus in Jefferson City. It appears that the KCATA didn't send anyone to the Senate Appropriations Committee to request money for transit.

St. Louis did.

I guess there was no comment because no one was surprised. Kansas City leaders have a history of being asleep at the wheel. It's also possible that the ATA folks didn't think the hearing was worth their time with the Republicans in such complete control in Jefferson City.

There is another possibility I'd like to put on the whiteboard. I present this in the spirit of brainstorming, fully aware that I haven't looked for evidence pro or con.

Does the KCATA get significant pressure to not ask for money? I'm going to call this possible. Local bigwigs routinely take stands against transit. Elected leaders recently tried to take money from a dedicated transit tax for traffic lights. In other words, people who are against transit are in good positions to make life difficult for the KCATA.

I ask, if anyone has evidence pro or con, post a comment?

2011-01-19T09:11:00.001-06:00

joliejustus: St. Louis Metro testified in Senate Appropriations, requesting support for public transit. KCATA wasn't here. They must be fat w/ cash.

A Few Census Numbers

2011-01-07T08:23:00.001-06:00

The New York Times put an interactive map letting you explore Census Data by racial and ethnic group. Enjoy.

After posting I realized the app also included income, housing, and education data. FYI

Your Money. Your Voice. YOUR Mayor.

2011-01-05T22:16:00.001-06:00

I'd love to have this for my Kansas City history collection fifty years from now. In the present I can't justify giving money to a mayor that I think needs to leave office. Several weeks ago I spotted this add in the window of Funkhouser's campaign office outside the City Market. The campaign slogan is ironic given that Funkhouser, so far, has the highest average donation rate in the Mayor's race.

County Budget

2011-01-04T08:28:00.000-06:00

These items just landed in my inbox.

Keep it Closed

2011-01-03T15:34:00.000-06:00

After a year that kept me away from local issues more than I would like, I've been trying to reengage. To get started, I've been sorting through pictures I took that never seemed to make it onto the blog. Here's the first batch.

I've been driving around midtown daily for almost six years now, looking at its visible problems. Increasingly the sore thumb is the number of buildings open to the elements. Is there a way for city codes to prioritize by infraction? Specifically, can we insist, baring everything else, that property owners keep their buildings closed to the elements? Yeah, I know codes can barely keep on top of everything. All the more reason to prioritize.

There are other issues. Aside from the obvious fact that closing buildings would discourage drug addicts from taking up residence, it would also slow the deterioration of the buildings, meaning they would cost less to rehab. Commercial buildings in particular should be closed. Jane Jacobs thought that un-rehabbed buildings were a boon to economic development because they provide cheap real estate for start-ups and mom-and-pops. I have yet to find a study supporting this view but it seems reasonable. For it to happen, the buildings need to be in better shape than what we have and the city needs to loose the habit of taking them by eminent domain and smashing them, or forcing property owners to tear them down for parking.

I make this all sound simpler than it really is. For this to be a viable plan we should have started this fifty or more years ago. Unfortunately for some buildings it may be too late. Examples include the two brick buildings (shown in the top photograph) on Main street across from Office Max and an apartment building (the middle photo) in Columbus Park. (Click on the photos to view larger versions of them.) One of the worst examples is in the last photo. This apartment building at 40th and Troost is one of a kind. Hundreds of colonnades have been renovated in recent years while this one crumbles.

Previously: Save the Cosby, More Destruction?

He Who Pays the Piper, Part II

2010-12-31T10:12:00.002-06:00

A few months back I stuck my nose into MEC filings for the 4th District candidates for City Council. I wanted to know two things: what was the average donation and what percentage of the donors are from Kansas City, Missouri? I'd expect that some donations would come from outside the city. I'd be concerned by any candidate who couldn't get donations from friends and relatives. What I'm looking for is someone with disproportionate support outside of the city. In a crowded primary it's possible for anyone to make it to the general.

Here's where the numbers stand. I was not surprised that Mike Burke has few donors and a high average or that Sly James is just the opposite. What was a surprise was that Mark Funkhouser, who buzzed into office as a supposed man of the people, has the fewest donors with the highest average. Jim Rowland's numbers stand out. He's the median for average donations and one off median for total donations. Yet he can only get 45% of his donations from Kansas City.

A few things to note. These numbers are from reports filed in the 2010 Calendar year. Money donations and in-kind donations are lumped together. Donations from the candidates themselves are excluded. This means that total donations may not match numbers reported in other media. Klein, Chastain, and Wheeler don't yet have anything to report.

Candidate	Total Donors	KC %	MO %	Average Donation	Total Donations
Mike Burke	119	66%	76%	$521.30	$62,034.80
Mark Funkhouser	47	79%	81%	$844.89	$39,710.00
Deb Hermann	311	75%	84%	$298.99	$92,986.61
Sly James	571	70%	78%	$234.63	$133,976.33
Jim Rowland	195	45%	64%	$302.88	$59,061.29

Legislative Priorities, 2011

2010-11-23T07:41:00.001-06:00

Last week the City Council passed its annual resolution listing its hopes for the upcoming legislative session. I haven't had time to review them myself. I post them anyway. Feel free to comment.

The City Council's legislative priorities and positions for matters before the 2011 session of the Missouri General Assembly

What Does the E-tax Vote Mean?

2010-11-14T11:18:00.002-06:00

While getting caught up on local news this morning, a blog post by Michael Mohoney caught my eye. On November 5, he reported that Jim Rowland, in firing shots at fellow mayoral candidates Deb Hermann and Mike Burke, called Northland voters uninformed in regards to the e-tax. At least, that's what it sounds like.

Frankly I've spent the last two weeks wondering if that were true. The only thing the e-tax vote changed for Kansas City and Saint Louis is the frequency of voting on the tax's renewal. Yet whenever I discussed the e-tax with somebody I found myself debating whether KC should even have an e-tax. I've pointed out this discrepancy to several people since the election. That's where the discussion ends, with my companions face screwed into a knot. I can read what they're thinking. "He's got to be wrong. Why can't I find the facts to prove it?"

New District Map

2010-10-08T08:27:00.000-05:00

It seems that after a decade and a half of the World Wide Web's existence, tradition media still doesn't take proper advantage of its capabilities. Case in point: a number of stories about the temporary redistricting of KCMO did not include a link to the winning map.

In case you were looking for it, you can find it here.

He Who Pays the Piper

2010-10-03T23:29:00.008-05:00

It was announced recently that Beth Gottstein has decided not to run for reelection. I'm not a big fan of Gottstein, but I don't think her would-be opponent, Anne McGregor is any smarter. Given that choice, I would likely have voted for experience.

With Gottstein out of the 4th District race, the choice is now between Anne McGregor and economic development executive John Crawford. I don't yet know much about Crawford. I know he filed a Statement of Committee Organization with the Missouri Ethics Commission last week. If the appellation "economic development executive" means what it usually does in Kansas City—"tax-payer backed real estate developer"—I probably won't like him either.

I digress. The mainstream media likes to report a campaign's donation's. Frankly I don't think the raw numbers have much value. A little extra number crunching can get figures that I think have more value. Between now and the municipals, I'll reporting these numbers on candidates for City Council and for Mayor. Today I'm starting with Anne McGregor. (Crawford has not been in the race long enough to have filed a report.) These numbers won't have context until I can calculate them for multiple candidates. I have to start somewhere.

Average Donation

This is a simple calculation, total dollars divided by the number of donations. In my view, this number suggests the economic status of the candidate's support base.

Since January 1, Anne McGregor has received $14,425.00 in donations. Subtracting the $5,250.00 that she herself donated, that leaves $9,175.00 from 102 donations, or an average of $89.95/per donation.

Kansas City Support

Looking through MEC filings during the last municipal elections, I saw what I felt was an alarming number of donations from outside Kansas City, Missouri, particularly from Johnson County. It's not that I think people outside the city don't have the right to donate. I worry that residents of another city have an inherent conflict of interest.

There is one caveat to this, however. All candidates will have donations from friends and relatives who don'y live in the area where they are running. This is as it should be. A candidate who can't get a donation from an old college roommate or a cousin is not someone I would want in public office.

Again, I've removed Anne's own donation from the numbers. Of her 102 donations, 87 are from residents of Kansas City, giving her a local support ratio of 83.65%.

Time to Pick Up the Ball Revisited

2010-09-08T06:23:00.000-05:00

I originally published this in May of last year. Given the events since, I thought it might be worth looking back at how we all felt a year ago. If I may gloat, my optimism was justified; The cynicism around me was not. If there's one thing I would change in this post it's my optimism about Spark Bookhart. I was disappointed in his unfortunate opposition to the school closings.

There are people picking up the ball and running with it at a time when an ace quarterback has entered the field.

By now, you've all undoubtedly heard that we have a new school superintendent. While standing in line at the coffee shop this morning I heard a man say, "We know who the superintendent for the next year is going to be." I wanted to respond, but was at a loss for words. You can't argue with cynics, and there is some truth in what he said. The odds of success are low.

In spite of that, I'm cautiously optimistic. I've said for a while that the chief problem of the Kansas City School District is that there are too many people pointing at someone else saying, "Why don't you pick up the ball." Meanwhile, the ball just lays there, waiting for a snap, a kick . . . something.

Why am I optimistic? For starters, the unanimous support of the school board is a better starting place than the 5 to 3 vote for the last superintendent. My first impression of Covington is that he's a listener, a quality I don't often hear discussed when it comes to leaders. In a world as complex as ours, it's impossible for a leader to be an expert in all of the jobs under him. That's why I regard the ability to listen as being in the top ten essential skills of a leader.

There's also the matter of his history of working with the community. Stephanie Garcia, board president in Pueblo, Colorado where Covington currently works, told the Star, "The task of education is so great, you've got to get a community effort behind it." Efforts like Airick West's BE1! campaign and Spark Bookhart's "All Hands On" campaign have arrived at a time when citizen involvement in the public sphere is at a historic upturn. Both of these efforts are focused on students rather than on district politics.

In short, there are people picking up the ball and running with it at a time when an ace quarterback has entered the field. (I list Bookhart here because he has said from the beginning that school governance isn't the primary thrust of his work. Though these efforts are not yet public, friends tell me that Bookhart's group is working on several initiatives that directly support students and schools. As far as I know, the same can't be said of "Do the Right Thing.")

Will this cluster of events lead to a turnaround? I don't have a crystal ball. I can tell you what will prevent a turnaround. Finger pointing. Excessive focus on past mistakes. Using past mistakes as an excuse for not supporting worthwhile remedies in the present. Failure to pay attention, to attend public meetings, to scrutinize the actions of the current board and its new superintendent. Failure to support actions that support students. Failure to support students directly through mentoring, tutoring, community groups, etc.

I remember a once common bumper sticker that said something like, "If you don't vote, you can't complain." I'd say to anyone who cares about the future of the school district, If you don't have something constructive to contribute, keep quiet.

Did You Know?, Part II

2010-09-06T09:18:00.004-05:00

The first comment to my earlier post was from School Board President Airick Leonard West. It deserves it's own post.

Here are the "Did You Know" statements we used during Opportunity Knocks.DID YOU KNOW...

- that KCMSD has one of the best jazz bands in the region and one of the top in the nation?

Last year, members of Lincoln's jazz band were invited to play at Carnegie Hall along with other top high school bands from across the nation – twice. Several of the members were identified as top high school musicians in the State.

- that KCMSD has the best urban debate team in the region and one of the best in the nation?

Last year, the debate team from Central High won multiple urban debate tournaments and came away with the top prize at the national urban debate competition.

- that KCMSD's Superintendent was honored as the region's public administrator of the year?

Dr. Covington was named the local Public Administrator of the Year by the Greater Kansas City chapter of the American Society for Public Administration. The award recognizes outstanding performance in the practice or teaching of public administration.

- that KCMSD scholars can earn up to 60 college credits during high school -- that are completely paid for?

This fall every KCMSD high school will offer a full slate of AP and dual credit courses. At Southwest Early College Campus and ACE, scholars following the program fully are capable of earning up to 60 credits from UMKC or Penn Valley, respectively, prior to completing high school.

- that a KCMSD school is ranked among the top 100 high schools in the nation according to Newsweek Magazine?

Newsweek ranks all high schools – public and private – based on their college preparatory offerings. On that list, which came out this Spring, KCMSD's Lincoln College Preparatory Academy ranked #72 in the nation. More information is available at www.newsweek.com.

I covered this one in yesterday's post. You can find the Newsweek list at the top of the right-hand column. Notice that Lincoln Prep is first among the top ten high schools in the state. Our school beat Park Hill by a walloping 717 places. -Casey

- that two KCMSD 2010 graduates each earned over $350k in scholarships for college?

One of our scholars received the Gates Millennium Scholarship and is currently studying to become a medical doctor. More information is available at www.gmsp.org. Another of our scholars received a full ride to West Point. More information is available at www.usma.edu. Both scholarships are valued at more than $350k.

- that KCMSD scholars placed in the top 10 best in the nation at the SkillsUSA competition in June 2010

The SkillsUSA Championships is the showcase for the best career and technical students in the nation. Contests begin locally and continue through the state and national levels. In June, KCMSD teams came in 4th and 10th in the nation in audio/video production for radio and television. More information is available at www.skillsusa.org.

In short, the scholars of the KCMSD are doing remarkable things and deserve our support. These are just a few examples of what they can accomplish when the community stands behind them.

Did You Know?

2010-09-05T00:16:00.002-05:00

I hope they sent this bit of info to every real-estate agent in the metro.

Last week I found a hang tag on my front door making several claims about the Kansas City Missouri School District. The tag appears to have been put out jointly by a number of groups including the district itself, BE1, the local teachers union, the District Advisory Committee, and LINC. You probably got one too, so I decided to investigate the flyer's claims.

A KCMSD school is ranked among the top 100 best high schools in the nation according to Newsweek Magazine.

True—Lincoln College Prep ranked 73, up from 129 in 2009 and 916 in 2006. I've heard good things about Lincoln. Since the flyer didn't name the school I initially found the claim hard to believe. I hope they sent this bit of info to every real-estate agent in the metro.

Two KCMSD 2010 graduates each earned over $350K in scholarships to college.

Plausible—While I couldn't track down the two who earned $350K, I found at least one who made it into the six-figure range. It was announced in March that Westport High’s valedictorian Dominique Williams had earned a full ride scholarship to Claflin University worth $100,000.

I thought this was believable because talented people can come from anywhere. The corollary of that is that this student might have excelled in spite of the district rather than because of it. I'm not saying it played out like that. I'm just saying let's be realistic. If nothing else, this item underscores the need to support the district by supporting the students. Talent, at whatever level, needs to be nurtured.

KCMSD scholars placed in the top 10 best in the nation at the SkillsUSA competition in June 2010

Plausible—Alas, while the SkillsUSA winners list only showed the top three. Two Paseo Academy teams made it to the nationals. (Are you listening, real estate agents?)

While researching this post I found that in May, Dr. Covington was named the top local public administrator by the Greater Kansas City chapter of the American Society for Public Administration. (Hey! Real estate agents, I'm talking to you.)

Business Retention

2010-08-31T07:37:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago, I noticed in the City Council minutes that we pledged $200,000 to support "enhanced business retention efforts" at the EDC. That money is being added to $400,000 in private contributions for the same purpose. I hope they're looking at more than just retention. To explain why, let me share a few stories I've heard over the last few years.

My spies around the city tell me that City Hall bureaucracy is the most horrendous to deal with in the entire metro area. I know a local entrepreneur, the proprietor of a small lunch place. She had teamed up with another restaurateur to start a side business. The side business was unique, perhaps even a bit forward thinking. After several months of fighting City Hall, they gave up. I can't tell you who this entrepreneur is, but more about that later.

This isn't the only such story I've heard. In recent years I've met a real-estate man who said the city's water department was a constant thorn in his side. I've met a renovator of old properties who gave up on Kansas City completely after years of frustration with the permitting process. I've met a landscaper who was frustrated with business licensing. Liquor control appears to be the worst of the lot. From the stories I've heard they give the impression they're still trying to take down the Pendergast machine.

Why have I never written about this before now? Because I can't back any of it up. None of these individuals will go on the record. No one has explained to me exactly why. It's a safe assumption that every business owner has the ambition to get bigger—a second store, a bigger facility, a better location. My guess is that no one wants to risk alienating people who stand between them and their ambitions.

(Why does Kansas City, Missouri not have it's own chamber of commerce? The Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce speaks for an 11 county region. Every other little burg in the metro has it's own chamber. There doesn't appear to be an organization that speaks for just the businesses in Kansas City, Missouri proper.)

Let me make one thing clear. This is not a put down of any individual employee of City Hall. When I hear from some of these entrepreneurs how much easier it is to open up shop in Olathe or Overland Park. It makes me think that the solution is higher up the City Hall ladder.

Flood Photos

2010-08-22T09:20:00.001-05:00

For those of you who are local history buffs, I recently stumbled on photos of the 1951 flood over at the United States Geographical Survey web site. Enjoy

What's Wrong with Troost, Part II

2010-08-02T06:48:00.001-05:00

Someone named Bridge from the KCATA has helpfully provided an explanation for the different designs of the planters along Troost. I am reposting her remarks for those who don't read comments to posts.

As I hope I made clear in my earlier post, I was only speculating about the reason for the difference. Although this difference turns out to have no bureaucratic implications, as I speculated, I stand by the questions it lead me to ask. Would it help Troost to no have so many political boundaries running down the middle of the street?

With regard to the rain gardens along Troost shown in the photos - these are being installed as part of KCATA’s Troost MAX project and were designed to meet the hydraulic conditions of each side of the street. One of the pictures is of a rain garden and the other is a landscape bed. They require different designs and aesthetic looks. There are minor differences that relate to the different flow conditions, but have nothing to do with council district boundaries.

These rain gardens will receive landscaping that will be similar on both sides of the street – just like the MAX stations being developed so as to have a uniform look throughout the Troost corridor. Both sides were designed under a single effort that included representatives that live in both council districts.

I think once the construction and plantings are completed, Metro customers and area residents will appreciate the beauty of the landscaping on both sides of the street.

River Town on Rails

2010-07-31T08:44:00.005-05:00

Heraclitus said you can't enter the same river twice. I say this because it's easy to get wistful when reading a book like Kansas City Street Scenes Featuring Kansas City Public Service PCC Cars by Ken Davis and Benjamin L. Bernhart. This short volume about our defunct street car system features mostly color and some black and white photographs of street cars in the waning years of the system. Although the book has issues, it's noteworthy for capturing views of the city not often seen in many of the other books of old photographs. I'll get to both issues in a moment.

As the title implies, this sixty-four page book focuses on the "Electric Railway President's Conference Committee" design of 1935 (what the "PCC" stands for). At the time, the street cars in common use in the United States followed the designs of the earliest street cars in the 1880's. The industry felt the need to modernize. The result was the streamlined Art Deco design of the PCC streetcar. (You can see one of these beautiful cars in the flesh. There's one on display in the parking lot behind Union Station.)

Kansas City's 184 PCC street cars were purchased in three lots between 1941 and 1947. Kansas City Public Service (KCPS), the predecessor of the KCATA operated these cars in Jackson County and Kansas City Kansas until the system's demise in the late 1950's.

The quality of the photos varies. But to do a book on something as particular as the PCC street cars is to do a book that contains at least a few snapshots by amateur photographers. The biggest problem with this book is that it needs a copy edit. Badly. I don't say this to quibble. It's what keeps me from recommending this book to people who don't already know Kansas City well. When Davis talks about watching the streetcars from the Winstead's parking lot as a boy in the 50's, then states that the location is West of the Plaza, I know that it's an editing mistake.

A good edit would surely have given Davis slightly more space for the pictures, a definite plus in a book such as this. The book also suffers from being slightly disorganized, a fault that forces him to repeat certain pieces of background information. The worst example of this is the three or four photos that separately describe the 1951 flood and its consequences for the KCPS system. Grouping these photos would have allowed Davis to explain the flood once and make the photos larger.

Residents from Midtown to Waldo will enjoy views of the city rarely covered by other books, like the unrecognizable 43rd and Main intersection shown on the back cover, or the glimpses of Waldo shown in a few of the photographs. Rail buffs will enjoy the pictures of the various maintenance cars used on the KCPS.

(An aside here regarding Mike Sander's Rapid Rail plan. One item rarely talked about in all the discussions regarding light rail is that a city can't have a rail line without maintenance equipment. By proposing a system that uses conventional rail maintenance costs can either be shared with freight systems or contracted out to them.)

If you already have a sizable collection about Kansas City history, you'll want to add this one for the niche it fills. If you're new to the subject, you should move on.

Response to Circo

2010-07-29T08:05:00.000-05:00

Cindy Circo seems to me to be one of the better people on the City Council. Admittedly, I haven't given her the scrutiny I've given the others. My impression is she does a better job of keeping her head screwed on straight. It saddened me this morning to discover that she's taking the party line defense of the Power & Light District. You can read the details of this defense over at her blog.

In case my comment to her post gets rejected by the comment moderator, here it is for your consumption:

With all due respect, Councilwoman, I think you are missing the point of the criticism. The criticism, at least in my case is not of the physical result. The criticism is of a business model that requires the tax payers to support a private enterprise for the next how many years. Your defense of the P&L is based on the assumption that a different business model could not have achieved the same physical result. It's an unprovable assumption.

What's Wrong With Troost

2010-07-29T06:43:00.019-05:00

I didn't expect to write a post about redistricting until some time next year. Through a legal quirk I don't understand, new Kansas City district boundaries must be redrawn before next year's municipal elections even though official census figures won't be released until late next spring. One of the problems, I gather, is the Census Bureau's finding last year that Kansas City has gained more than 40,000 new residents since 2000. Here's the breakdown by current district:

District 1: Up 21,758
District 2: Up 16,055
District 3: Down 2,496

District 4: Up 2,234
District 5: Up 1,885
District 6: Up 1,317

Why the council has to redistrict is not what I want to talk about. Look closely at the pictures in this post. They're both sidewalk landscaping boxes. What you wouldn't guess from the photos is that they're directly across from each other on the same street, Troost, in fact. Why, then, do they have different designs?

Is it because they're in different council districts, that their designs were ordered by different paperwork processes? Did the individuals who made the design drawings know there was someone else making drawings for the opposite side of the street?

Maybe this has a completely innocuous explanation. After I noticed this, I started thinking about what it takes to do anything on Troost. I noticed years ago that district boundaries from State Senate all the way down to school board tend to follow Troost. What that means politically is that anyone who wants to do anything for Troost has to deal with twice as many policy makers as they would a half block to either side.

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not attributing everything that's wrong with Troost to the imaginary lines down the middle of the street. I'm saying that the extra burden is a hurdle that Troost doesn't need. There may even be cases where these lines were the straw that broke the camel's back.

Excess Capacity, Part II

2010-07-26T07:57:00.025-05:00

If more out-of-towners used the MAX, we might not need a new downtown hotel, and the Power & Light District might have better numbers.

Before reading this post, I suggest you scroll down and glance at "Undeveloped Redevelopment". There's some photos you should see. This location in Columbus Park is not unique. I can show you many tracts of empty land in areas originally developed before the Depression. These tracts illustrate the point I'm trying to make better than any number of words that I could write.

We have too much capacity that we're not using. Yet we think the solution to every problem is dedicated resources. Our poorest citizens don't have easy access to health food choices. Obviously, we need to bribe a national grocery store chain to build in one of those neighborhoods and we'll do it with the very tax money we're currently using to educate their children. We're behind the rest of the country on transit. Obviously, we need the most expensive solution: light rail. We're loosing conventions to other cities. Obviously, we need a new 1000 room hotel.

Bullshit. All of it.

I was recently looking at a summary of Mike Sanders' commuter rail plan. It does exactly what I'm proposing. In his own words we can build a commuter rail line "utilizing existing, out of service or abandoned rail or right of way for more than 70% of the region-wide system." This brings the cost of such a system down to $7.85 million a mile. Compare that to $58.2 million a mile for light rail. (I have to wonder if Chastain is driven more by an unconscious need for vindication than he is for a desire to help he city.)

Speaking of the downtown hotel, a few months ago, Mark Forsythe's now defunct blog suggested that a better use of taxpayer money might be to build a modern streetcar line down Main. His reasoning went something like this. Allegedly we need 1000 additional hotel rooms. There are 1400 hotel rooms in the Crown Center area. This would get us our additional hotel space and finally get us into fixed guideway transit. How many sales pitches do you know of for new taxes or Federal grants that can claim multiple purposes?

The city asked for, but did not get, stimulus fund for such a system. I have the distinct impression City Hall didn't put as much effort into that request as they have for the downtown hotel. I don't know the rules for the awarding of stimulus funds, but I have to ask if throwing Forsythe's hotel idea into the pot would have gotten us that funding or at least helped.

This discussion isn't merely academic. It's a fact that the MAX line already runs between the Convention Center complex and Crown Center. The Convention Center South stop, which is a quarter of a mile from the entrances to Municipal Auditorium and and Bartle Hall, has the single largest waiting kiosk on the entire Metro system. There's another MAX stop katty-corner from the front of Municipal Auditorium. Having ridden the MAX into downtown on numerous weekday mornings, it's my impression that there are no convention goers staying the Crown Center area.

Incidentally, if the two stops were combined at 14th and Wyandotte, riders would have more chances to see the Sprint Center and the Power & Light District from the bus. Mathematically, this only shaves 400 feet off the walk from the MAX line to either of those destinations. Psychologically, this is almost as good as altering the lines to stop right in front of them. Maybe, if more out-of-towners used the MAX, we might not need a new downtown hotel, and the Power & Light District might have better numbers.

Seen Around Town

2010-07-21T07:26:00.000-05:00

Yesterday afternoons deluge flooded a section of Westport road, stranding one motorist. I snapped this picture just after 6:00 P.M. last evening just before the water subsided. (Click the image to view a larger version of it.)

Save the Cosby

2010-07-14T07:28:00.003-05:00

While I've had my head in the sand, another historic building is flirting with destruction. You can read the details over at Toellner Tells it. I'll keep my eye open for any public meetings. In the meantime, please join the facebook group so that you can stay in the loop.

Incidentally, I have no doubt that midtowners are all over this and Gottstein and Marcason will be hearing from them in due course. Unfortunately, everything in the loop is part of the first district. That's Ed Ford and Russ Johnson. Ford is an at-large representative, which means he's answerable to the whole city. That means, midtown, don't forget to include him in your e-mails to City Hall. If you have friends in Platte County, ask them to contact Russ Johnson.

Undeveloped Redevelopment

2010-07-13T08:18:00.003-05:00

I don't know whether to file this under excess capacity or under broken dreams. As I was contemplating the follow up to my April 25 post, I happened to wander through Columbus park on my way to Habitat Restore.

In the area running roughly from 5th to 2nd, Campbell to Troost is a large tract of empty land in an area that should have structures dating back to the earliest days of the city. There should be something resembling a grid here. There is not. At some point in the recent past the buildings were torn down and new streets laid out along the lines of a modern suburb. The image at left is a case in point. It shows an empty cul-du-sac where there should be through streets.

The next photo shows Harrison as it makes a bend onto 4th Street. Notice all the unused, aging pavement. Notice the once new sidewalks. I know that development companies sometimes go out of business. But records show that most of this land is owned by the Housing Authority of Kansas City. I did a little poking in the county real estate records to try to find how long the authority has owned this land. So numerous are the authority's real estate transactions that he effort proved to be like finding a needle in a haystack.

Mark Forsythe once wrote a well-reasoned blog entry calling for a "use it or loose it" land law. As attractive as that idea is to me, I think the discussion is moot in a state like Missouri. The bill would never make it out of committee. I wonder if there's a place for a use it or loose it law for government agencies like the housing authority. I don't know the pros and cons. I'm just asking the question. Given the state of infill in Columbus Park and the nearby City Market, I have to think that this land is an attractive development prospect for somebody.

Back in the Saddle

2010-07-10T10:03:00.000-05:00

I bumped into a friend of mine this morning. He asked me about my blog and why I hadn't touched it in so long. To be honest I've had some upheaval in my life recently and hadn't given it any thought in a while. He pointed out that it has been nearly three months since my last post and I would very likely need to rebuild my audience (such as it is).

Well, that lit a fire under me. I'm working on a few ideas and hope to have something posted in the near future.

Excess Capacity

2010-04-25T21:57:00.007-05:00

Any smart business owner would try to unload his or her excess capacity before increasing production.

This city is drowning in excess capacity. The school district has 17,000 students and an infrastructure for 60,000. We have streets with less than half the structures they were intended for. We have streets that are just as sparse by design. We have buss routes that run at half capacity. We have some of the shortest commutes of any large metropolitan area in the nation. Yet we're widening our arteries. We're twenty years behind the rest of the country when it comes to mixed-use developments. And after seventy years of single-use zoning, we have large sections of the city that have wide swings in usage within a single twenty-four hour period. To top it off, sitting in middle of the plane means we have a ridiculous amount of land making it cheaper for developers to build than reuse.

Any smart business owner would try to unload this excess capacity before increasing production. Why? Excess capacity is the product of investment already spent. The cost of unloading it is minimal compared to the cost of increasing production. (Does anybody remember if any of the business owners who've run for City Council or Mayor have ever made this a campaign issue? I don't remember every hearing it even though such candidates usually want to run City Hall like a business.)

Meanwhile, every time someone has a new idea in this town, city leaders try to find exclusive funding for it and it alone. Since we have all this excess capacity, shouldn't every project begin with this question: what are we already paying for that we could use? I was thinking about this when I heard this week that a sub committee of the Convention Hotel Steering Committee has voted 6 to 2 to recommend the block surrounding the Power and Light Building for the proposed 1000 room convention hotel.

By my calculations, we have room for at least 17 more conventions every year. That's not mentioning the fact that existing conventions have room to grow. The last time I made this point an anonymous poster said, "They're run by local churches, or they attract such small crowds they don't really affect the hotel industry." Regarding the first, 60-some percent of Americans are regular church goers. That's at least 180 million people. Yet I'm supposed to believe that a religious convention can't attract enough out of town attenders to help the local hotel industry? Regarding the second, how much would it cost for the Convention and Visitor's Bureau to help small conventions attract larger crowds? In other words, doesn't the anonymous comment support my point rather than rebut it?

Tomorrow, I'll discuss a few other ways that we might apply our excess capacity to the convention problem.

Go to Union Station

2010-04-23T10:20:00.003-05:00

I had an epiphany as I was standing in the grand hall at Union Station the other morning. Maybe I heard this somewhere and forgot it. That happens to me occasionally. I was looking across the concourse at the information booth on the West end, at the mathematical rows of tourist fliers in the pockets around its edges. Then it hit me. If I were a tourist, I shouldn't just be able to get pamphlets for things here. I should be able to get there from here.

Every tried to drive in a strange city? It's miserable, isn't it? I once spent an hour lost on the South side of D.C. My guide that day was a relative who had lived in a Maryland suburb for two years. What would have happened if I hadn't had a guide? A friend of mine once spent an hour trying to return a rental car in England because he couldn't find a way onto the one-way street where the garage's return entrance was located. He finally paid a hotel concierge £5 to return the car for him. (It was also my friend's first experience driving a stick, and on the left side of the road. My friend saw so many middle fingers that day that he thought the English might not be as unflappable as he was lead to believe.)

We may think that our City is easier to get around in than D.C. or London, but that's because we live here. About a year ago, my sister, who's lived in this area all 35 years of her life, called me in a panic because she couldn't navigate the one-way streets downtown to get her to the court house on time.

Imagine this: What if buses ran out of Union Station to all the tourist destinations in town? Someone asks a hotel clerk, "How do I get the Plaza?" Answer: "Go to Union Station." "How do I get to the River Market?" "Go to Union Station." "How do I get to the Power and Light District?" "Go to Union Station."

You might be asking, why other than avoiding getting lost is this a good solution? First, the buss pass is a day pass, which gets your parking validated. If you're done with the Jazz District sooner than planned, take the next bus back to Union Station, maybe have lunch there, and catch an outbound bus to the Plaza. We could also feed the system by making it stop near all the major hotels and by selling the bus passes in the hotels themselves.

Some of the destinations would be on the same lines. For example, a line that runs Union Station-P&L District-River Market would be in a good position to pick up Station Casino. A line out to 18th and Vine could pick up the Kansas City Museum in the Northeast.

Over time, we can increase capacity by adding destinations to existing lines. For example, imagine if we'd already had this in place several years. The recent opening of the money museum would have meant adding a stop on the hypothetical Plaza-Westport line.

I don't know if the numbers are there to support his idea. Every few years someone produces yet another transit or transportation study. Is it too much to ask that somebody look into this?

Seen Around Town

2010-04-11T10:17:00.004-05:00

It's been a long time since I did one of these. Usually these photos are things I just happened to catch. The fact is, lately I haven't been seeing things I thought were worthy of photographing. So I decided to spend some of our nicer spring weather looking for things to photograph. Here's a few items from the River Market area. (Click any of the pictures to view them at full size.)

One of my favorite things about summer is musicians in the City Market. Comments about their abilities aside, if the City or the market's management company ever tries to bar musicians in favor of piped in music, I'll be the first to protest. Street musicians are one of the charms of a major metropolis such as New York or London. On my last trip to Chicago I encountered a Jazz quartet on the sidewalk near the Wrigley building. There are few places where Kansas Citians can have encounters like that. In my experience the musicians in the River Market are better than the one's in Westport or the Plaza.

On a recent weekday I snapped this photo of a worker doing maintenance work on the Brown and Loe sign hanging over the market square. In case you've never noticed it, this is located on the market side of the building at 5th and Walnut, the one next to the City Market entrance. There is a smaller Brown and Low sign on the west side of the building, which I manipulated in Photoshop to create the generic "Kansas City" sign I use at the top of some of my posts.

Brown and Loe is a fruit and vegetable wholesaler. I say 'is' because I was surprised to find that they still exist. They don't have a web site that I could find, but with fewer than a dozen employees, their corporate headquarters are in an office building at 76th and State Line Road.

The same day I caught the work on the sign, I stopped to check the progress of the new townhouses on Wyandotte. I can't say this is my cup of tea. I like the location and the rooftop patio. I wouldn't want to live across the street from commercial properties. I definitely wouldn't want this modernist design. (Can anyone tell me why we congratulate ourselves on modern design when the newest buildings in other cities are post-modern?)

What's it All Mean?

2010-04-07T07:35:00.003-05:00

UPDATE: Cheers to Brent Toellner for picking up the gauntlet I threw down the other day. It looks like the Star picked him up.

I don't know about you, but I thought yesterday's school board election was a real nail-biter. I didn't until late in the race when it became a referendum on John Covington's 'Right Size' plan.

Suburbanites I know had the impression that a majority of the district's parents were against the plan. I had the same impression. That raises the question: was the support for the plan really that small, or has the support grown in the month since it's unveiling?

The Mondale-esque trouncing that 'Right Size' supporter Joseph Jackson gave to 'Right Size' opponent Linwood Tauheed (68% to 25%) is suggestive of stronger support for Covington than anyone realized. The 4th school board district is the very heart of what people mean when they refer to 'the black part of town'.

In the coming weeks I'll be asking what does this victory mean? Was it a referendum on Covington as it would seem at first glance? Was it a referendum on Afro-centrism? Maybe it was just a referendum on Linwood Tauheed.

Whatever the case, yesterday was a good day for our city.

Housing Vs. Transportation

2010-03-29T08:41:00.001-05:00

I know two other blogs have beat me to the punch, but I'm covering it anyway (Let's Go KC, Toellner Tells it). The Center for Neighborhood Technology recently did a comparison of housing costs versus housing + transportation costs. I offer this as food for thought. I wish they would give you a slider that let's you adjust the price of gas.

Time to Stand Proud, Kansas City

2010-03-23T09:26:00.000-05:00

I'm going to do something I don't often do on this blog. I'm going to direct you to an effort that City Hall is backing and tell you to get behind it too. What am I talking about?

Google wants to try its new ultra-high speed fiber optic service in a select few test communities. This new service is purported to be more than 100 times faster than any existing service and will be offered at competitive prices.

To select the communities, they're asking interested cities to apply. City Hall has already done it's bit, as seen by this post on Cindy Circo's blog. What we need now is for citizens to step up and tell Google why their pilot program should be conducted here.

We have to act quickly. The deadline for telling Google why we deserve this honor is Friday. Please help our your neighbors and click over to Google and tell them why Kansas City should be part of this test program.

Who Speaks for the Small Businesses?

2010-03-21T13:35:00.005-05:00

A company that formerly had only a handful of competitors might find that it has dozens or even hundreds of competitors.

A friend of mine has a theory about the current state of health care coverage. Why, he asks, would large corporate interests be opposed to any policy that reduces the coverage burden they have to provide to their employees? Not only have they opposed all reform efforts, they have failed to provide any proposals of their own. (If anyone has a link that contradicts this statement, we would both be interested in seeing it.)

My friend's theory is this: if health insurance were affordable and easy to get, more people would attempt to start businesses. A company that formerly had only a handful of competitors might find that it has dozens or even hundreds of competitors. How many of those competitors would be nimbler, more imaginative, have better products, or better service? In short, my friend's theory says that the status quo helps large businesses retain their market share.

I don't know if my friend's right, but I couldn't help thinking about his theory while reading an article in this morning's Star about how health care reform is a promising prospect for mom-and-pop businesses. It hit me when I reached this couplet of statements approximately one quarter of the way into the article:

"Much of America’s business community has lobbied hard against the health care plan, contending that such things as mandated coverage and Medicare tax increases would cost them dearly.

Yet the crew at YJ’s, and 32 million other Americans, would shift from uninsured to covered. This group of 10 people [the YJ employees], in fact, looks to come out well ahead under the proposal."

Some of you might remember that a few years ago the Broadway Cafe made the New York Times by surviving on the same block where Starbucks failed. The explanation must surely lay in the quality of its service and the fact that it roasts its own beans. But, is it not a contributing factor that said Starbuck's was also competing with the Westport Coffee House, Coffee Break, The Roasterie, The Coffee Girls, Mildreds, YJ's, Oak Street Coffee, The City Market Coffeehouse, The Filling Station, etc., all supplied by local roasting operations? This situation exists in spite of Starbucks' generous benefits package, which surely gives it a competitive advantage in the barista market.

This issue raises a broader question that I keep asking. Who speaks for the Broadway Cafe's of the world in the halls of power? I can't escape the impression that the needs of small businesses are underrepresented. Yet all I have are anecdotes.

There is a growing body of evidence that small businesses are the engine of economic growth. In light of this evidence, we can no longer afford the luxury of assuming that policies good for large businesses are also good for mom-and-pops.

A million questions come to mind. Is the city bureaucracy friendly to businesses of all kinds? Do any of our incentive programs help one set of businesses at the expense of others? In other words, how level is the playing field? Why is this issue not reflected in the City Council's annual legislative priorities?

Whether it belongs at the state or national level, health care reform is not the purview of City Hall. That doesn't mean City Hall can ignore the small business issue. Lately I've been hearing talk about this issue coming out of City Hall. I hope it's not just lip service.

12th & Main

2010-03-15T09:08:00.001-05:00

Sometime last week, kcfreepress.com published an article about the history of this blog's namesake intersection.

The title of this blog is taken from that intersection because it's various corners represent different attempts to revitalized our community's heart. City Center Square and the Town Pavilion are different flavors, both failed, of attempts to bring something of the suburban shopping mall downtown. The nearby Power & Light District is the more contemporary approach of using more genuine urban principles to bring life back to the central business district.

It's Easy to be Cynical

2010-03-10T09:13:00.007-06:00

It's easy to be cynical about our city. When I saw a Forbes headline reading, "Cities Where The Recession Is Easing", I was sure my hometown would rank close to the bottom if not on the very bottom. Imagine my surprise when number ten popped up with a picture of Union Station.

To be clear, we're talking here about the Kansas City metropolitan statistical area, which is the Federal government's definition of what constitutes the "Kansas City Metropolitan Area". One other thing you should know. Changes in the gross domestic product for the local MSA usually looks like changes in the gross domestic product for the state of Kansas. In other words, the graphs have the same general shape. This suggests, as if it's a surprise to anyone that it's Johnson county and Wyandotte county that are driving the area's economy. (I occasionally spend time looking through the Fed's economic data. I haven't found anything that shows me KCMO proper. If somebody knows where to find that information, please post in a comment.)

What does that mean for Kansas City, Missouri? I see this as inspiration. If Kansas City, proper can come into its own, we could become one of the best metropolitan areas in the country.

Main Street Mile

2010-03-03T12:27:00.000-06:00

While getting caught up on my inbox this morning, I notice that registration has opened for this year's Main Street Mile. The Main Street Mile is organized by MainCor to raise awareness of positive change on Main Street. For the second year in a row, the race will feature a "Finish Line Expo" in the parking lot of Saint Paul's church at 40th and Main. For details and registration information, go to the MA1N STREET M1LE web site.

Suburbs are Part of the Solution?

2010-03-01T16:04:00.003-06:00

Suburbs are part of the solution to the problems of the city, so says Councilman Ed Ford. Before I address that I have to give him a big thank you. Some of his comments on the City Council's Tomahawk Ridge debate last Thursday play like a direct rebuttal of my previous post. (To watch the debate follow this link to the video recording of last week's City Council meeting. In the left column click the link for ordinance number 091071 for the debate on Tomahawk ridge.) Not only has he helped me clarify my thinking about sprawl, his obvious emotion over this issue has made me less cynical about him. That said, I still disagree with the substance of his argument. In Councilman Ford's own words:

"The Northland is a way to help pay. It's the only suburban area other than in the fifth district east of Raytown that provides and helps pay for essential city services. Only if you live in Kansas City are you in effect part of the solution to the cost of urban living."

Councilman Ford referred to the annexation of large parts of our hinterland in the 50s and 60s as a "way to bring in suburban growth to help pay for the enormous cost of the city." I agree that this strategy has been helpful. That's what I was alluding to when I said, the size of yards has been proportional to the affluence of the average resident which has created a rough parity between tax revenue and supported infrastructure. I even agree that the affluent suburbs have been helping support the urban core.

What I disagree with is that we can keep using that strategy. Suburbs that once helped make this strategy work, the very suburbs built during the annexations of the 50s and 60s, are about to become part of the problem. We'll have a better idea what's happening to these neighborhoods when the results of the next census come out. But I don't need statistics to tell me that some first-ring suburban streets are going the way of the urban core.

Meanwhile, the neighborhoods that the suburbs of the 50s and 60s supported continue to deteriorate. Aside from the conditions of many of the houses, some urban neighborhoods have infrastructure problems that I suspect few suburbanites are aware of.

The image at left is one that should have been part of my previous post on this subject. It shows 430 feet of road at 25th and Woodland Avenue. It has the same number of houses as the street at NE 90th Terrace that I showed in my previous post. Yet it was designed to look like 33rd and Charlotte. If the suburbs are supporting the urban core, then it has to be in part because much of the urban core has densities similar to the newest suburbs but without suburban affluence. So what happens to our city budget when we start to tear down blighted houses in the first ring?

I've been accused of wanting to bring all the affluent folk back to the urban core and push out the poor. (Tony, you're the first person in nearly 40 years of life to call me a hipster. Thanks for the compliment.) I have no desire to harm the poor. If I knew precisely how to fix this, I would tell you. I'm confident that continuing the way we are is a dead end.

2010-02-25T16:47:00.001-06:00

Tomahawk Ridge fails by 8 to 5 vote. More later.

Driving and Walking

2010-02-23T17:29:00.000-06:00

In this tight economy every penny counts. When somebody sent me a link that lets me calculate my annual spending on driving, I thought it was worth passing on. But if you're going to reduce driving, it would help to know what you can walk to. I present the two links, the new one and the old one, as a pair.

No Such Thing As Sprawl

2010-02-21T11:08:00.006-06:00

"There is no such thing as sprawl within city limits." Gasps and cries of disbelief erupted around the room. The speaker was Councilman Ed Ford. The place was the 4th District budget hearing, held Saturday at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, 40th and Main.

After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I started to process what Councilman Ford was telling us. He wasn't saying there's no such thing as sprawl. He was saying that land use is irrelevant inside city limits.

Let's pretend we don't know the word 'sprawl', but we do want to know about tax revenue relative to infrastructure. The diagram above shows approximately 430 feet of road in three different parts of town. The top image is at 33rd and Charlotte and shows houses built around 1905. The middle image is NE 57th Terrace and North Brighton and shows houses built in the 1960s. The bottom image is a more recent development at NE 90th Terrace and Walrond Ave. (I've flipped the orientation of the Charlotte Street image to make comparison easier. Someday I'll have to write a post about the environmental logic of old houses.)

My diagram restates the obvious. Yard sizes have gotten bigger in the last century, particularly since World War II. Yet nobody talks about the obvious corollary: at some point this has to affect the quality of city services. Why? Because of tax revenues relative to infrastructure.

I'm not just talking about property taxes. You can find a complete breakdown of where the city's revenue comes from on page 443 of the current budget proposal. I'm also talking about sales taxes, use taxes, the earnings tax, licenses and permits, utility taxes, and service charges.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that the taxes paid by each property owner are the same at all three locations. Let's further assume that the residents of these locations expect the same level of service from the city: timely snow removal, regular trash pickups, rapid emergency response, and proper street maintenance. (Incidentally, the first draft of this post was written during the snow removal problems back in January.) It goes without saying that the city has to provide the same level of service to all three locations. In my hypothetical, they have to do so at the NE 90th Terrace location with half as much revenue as at the Charlotte Street location.

So far, we've been lucky. Until recently, the size of yards has been proportional to the affluence of the average resident. This has created a sort of rough parity between the amount of taxes paid and the amount of infrastructure supported. Now we have a problem. The first ring of post WWII suburbs are starting to look like the urban core. How long before those neighborhoods can no longer carry their own weight? Another way to ask the question is what is the break-even point between revenue and infrastructure? We're not even attempting to calculate that.

Ed Ford should be as concerned as anyone about this situation. His district contains houses in the middle range. The problem of sprawl will soon be a bigger concern to him than it is to us affluent liberals in the urban core. What Ed Ford told us yesterday is that he doesn't care.

The State of the Funk

2010-02-02T07:48:00.001-06:00

Over the last few days, the press has been talking about the Mayor's proposals for helping our beleaguered schools. There is much in the Mayor's plan that I like from pursuing grants (One of Mark Forsythe's campaign positions three years ago was that we are missing opportunities where grants are concerned) to repairing sidewalks near schools and designating a City Hall point person on school issues.

Even as he was pitching the idea at his annual State of the City speech at All-Souls UU, an article in the Sunday Star made it clear to me that the seeds of failure had already been sown. Near the bottom of the article, after the bullet points outlining the proposal, was this statement from the Star's Lynn Horsley:

"Funkhouser acknowledged that he has not fully briefed his City Council colleagues."

Hasn't he learned anything in three years?

Budget Hearings

2010-01-20T08:41:00.007-06:00

In case you've missed this, here's this year's schedule of public budget hearings. I cannot seem to find a budget link.

I found the preliminary budget. Here it is. The Council has until March 25 to adopt a budget. It goes into effect on May 1.

DISTRICT 1:
Saturday, Feb. 27, 10 a.m. to noon
Shoal Creek Police Academy
6885 N.E. Pleasant Valley Road
Kansas City, Mo.

DISTRICT 2:
Thursday, Feb. 25, 6 to 8 p.m.
Plaza Middle School
6501 N.W. 72nd St.
Kansas City, Mo.
　
DISTRICT 3:
Saturday, Feb. 13, 2 to 4 p.m.
Gregg/Klice Community Center
1600 John "Buck" O'Neil Way
Kansas City, Mo.

DISTRICT 4:
Saturday, Feb. 20, 10 a.m. to noon
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
11 E. 40th St.
Kansas City, Mo.

DISTRICT 5:
Saturday, Feb. 13, 10 a.m. to noon
Southeast Community Center
4201 E. 63rd St.
Kansas City, Mo.

DISTRICT 6:
Wednesday, March 3, 7 to 9 p.m.
Hillcrest Community Center
10401 Hillcrest Road
Kansas City, Mo.

For more information, contact Terri Wolfe, assistant to Councilwoman Deb Hermann, (816) 513-1624 or terri_wolfe@kcmo.org.

Who's Responsible?

2009-12-30T08:44:00.002-06:00

Right about now, I'd like to see Jack Frost roasting on an open fire. After my complaint about the condition of the sidewalks, a coworker mentioned seeing a lawyer on the local news who said you're better off leaving the snow where it is.

The thinking goes, if someone falls on an uncleared sidewalk it's an act of God. If someone falls on an improperly cleared sidewalk, the adjacent property owner can be held liable. Never mind that the sidewalk is City property.

(A note about the picture. This property owner is pretty good about clearing the walk. No disrespect is intended. Yeah, I know it's not a sidewalk. I picked it for its composition.)

But this lawyer, my coworker claims, went one step further. The lawyer is supposed to have said that there is no legal requirement to clear sidewalks. I was unable to find a link to the video. If the lawyer actually said that, he's wrong in the case of Kansas City, Missouri. Just to be clear, here's the ordinance:

Sec. 64-246. Removal of ice or snow.
It shall be the duty of all persons owning or occupying any real property, fronting upon any street, boulevard or highway, to remove from the sidewalks in front or alongside of such property all ice and snow within a reasonable time after cessation of a storm depositing such ice or snow. The provisions of chapter 62, article III, pertaining to littering, and penalties for violations thereof, shall be applicable to violations of this section.

This would seem to leave property owners between a rock and a hard place. Policy makers could fix this by limiting liability for property owners who attempt to clear their sidewalks and opening up liability for those who don't. (Mike Talboy?, Beth Low?, Jolie Justus?, anybody listening?)

There are issues to work out. What if the property owner is unavailable when the snow hits? How long does the property owner have to clear the snow? I could go on. Complaints about the nanny state aside, in this case the status quo discourages proper behavior.

Merry Christmas

2009-12-25T09:24:00.001-06:00

Merry Christmas, everyone.

I'm thinking it's a good thing Bing Crosby is dead. I think he'd get lynched if he were in town right now.

I tried to find a picture of Santa Clause for this post. Trying to find one with any characters or any sense of a real human being is nearly impossible. I'm sending an elf instead.

Shake Up at the EDC

2009-12-22T21:57:00.001-06:00

There's rumors flying lately of a possible shake-up in the way Kansas City does economic development. First was a posting a week ago by Joe Miller on KC Downtowner. Despite being in possession of an EDC document, Miller's post was met with some degree of skepticism. The rumor gained more strength the next day when the Business Journal backed up the story with its own article.

Whatever the truth of the mater, the document that Miller posted is itself worthy of public discussion. In particular, I want to point out my favorite part:

Greater emphasis on small business, entrepreneurship, organic business retention and growth, workforce enhancement and distressed areas assistance.

Why is this so important? I ask you, what city has ever made any real progress based on imported industry? Even if you still think tax breaks are the way to go, I think you will agree that there's wisdom in not putting all our eggs in one basket.

In Council: December 17, 2009

2009-12-21T17:21:00.002-06:00

Sorry for the delay in getting this out this week. There was a lot to go through. I'm still working on cleaning up after my template fiasco last week. Most of the work is done, but I still need to get the my blog roll up.

Because of the holiday there is no City Council meeting this week.

Sewer Bonds Approved

The Council finally approved $16 million in revenue bonds. Revenue bonds are paid back from revenues generated by the use that they fund, not from general tax revenues. In this case the bonds will be paid from fees for sewer services. The bonds approved last week are low-interest bonds being made available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Project

The City Council prioritized the projects eligible for low-income housing tax credits. Low-income housing tax credits are federal tax credits administered through the states, in our case by the Missouri Housing Development Commission. The program provides tax breaks for investors who invest in affordable housing. One of the requirements of the program is that only projects with local support are eligible. Hence the prioritized list from City Hall this week. Here's the list:

East Village Apartments (Swope Community Builders) Downtown, East side
Columbia Lofts (DLS Historic Developers) This might be the Columbia Burlap building in the west bottoms. I wasn't able to nail it down.
Basie Court Apartments (Dalmark Development) 1940 Woodland Ave. This is near the Jazz district.
Chatham Apartments – (Landmark Investment Group) As I recall, this building on Broadway was turned down several years ago for Tax Increment Financing, even though such a project would fit the intent of TIF better than the projects that actually do win that type of financing. I haven't heard anything about the disposition of this building in a while. I'll be anxious to see what happens.

Combat Pay Exempt from Earnings Tax

The Council voted to exempt pay earned in a combat zone from the city's earnings tax.

More Signal Coordination

It's a simple fact, a logical extension of the law of supply and demand. If you want to improve the air quality in this area, you have to reduce driving. A measure that reduces the time cost of driving doesn't do that. The Council went ahead with the measure anyway. I don't really blame the council for this one. The local culture starts with the primacy of the automobile as it's base assumption.

Other Business

By a unanimous vote the Council adopted a resolution calling for a feasibility study regarding the idea of capping I-678.
The proposed creation of the Power and Light Oversight died this week by unanimous vote when Councilman Skaggs moved to hold the measure off the docket.
The Council formally adopted its wish list for the second session of the 111th Congress.
The City Council approved Tax Increment Financing for the Vitagraph building in the crossroads after the TIF Commission deadlocked on the same issue. The Vitagraph building is being renovated by Shirley Helzberg for administrative offices for the symphony. TIF funds will be used to add two floors o the Vitagraph building.
The City Council approved increases to licensing fees for businesses.

Land Use and Sustainability

Around the country developers are building walkable neighborhoods, mixed-use developments that combine living, working, and shopping within the same package. It almost goes without saying that they wouldn't be doing this if it weren't making them money. Our local developers haven't figured this out yet.

A plat was approved creating 12 multi-family condominium units on a half acre near North Brighton and 152. The project takes advantage of existing arteries. There are no employment or shopping opportunities within a quarter mile walk of the development.
The City rezoned 2.2 acres at 34th and Prospect for the construction of housing for senior citizens. Although this project will use existing infrastructure, it uses a suburban development style (sprawl) and requires tearing down existing urban structures.

Looking Ahead

I'm running a bit behind this week. I'll post the look ahead later in the week.

Please Excuse the Mess

2009-12-16T18:59:00.002-06:00

I accidentally mangled my template this morning and didn't have a recent backup. No posts until I get the layout fixed.

More Destruction?

2009-12-15T06:49:00.007-06:00

I snapped these photos over the weekend. Sometime last week I noticed that part of the back of this building on the Southwest corner of 9th and Baltimore has been taken down. From what I can see on 9th street and an alleyway on Baltimore, it appears this may have something to do with the renovation of the buildings in that area.

I'd hate to think that we were tearing down even more of our history.

Does anybody out there know what is going on here?

In Council: December 10, 2009

2009-12-13T17:02:00.002-06:00

What was the City Council up to last week? An unusual amount of this was covered by the mainstream press this week.

City Tightens Dress Code Requirements

The Council passed a revision to Chapter 10 of the code of ordinances that tightens dress code requirements. Specifically:

Establishments cannot enforce a dress code that is not posted.
Once posted, establishments cannot allow anyone into an establishment that does not conform to said dress code.

Red Bridge Road Bridge

The long-awaited construction of a new bridge over Red Bridge Road finally received approval this week with a $12 million allocation. The construction of the bridge will require two years beginning in January of 2010. The bridge to be built was have two lanes. According to the Star, this project "initially envisioned a four-lane bridge, but nearby residents feared that would attract massive amounts of traffic."

Residents of this area understood intuitively what traffic engineers and transportation planners never think of or what to ignore. Expanding roads creates expanding traffic. It's a simple case of the law of supply and demand. If we increase the capacity of a route, it reduces the costs of using that route, which in turn increases its demand. The principles called induced demand. Planners almost always assume that demand will grow whether a road is expanded or not. In some cases this may be true, but not in all.

Land Use and Sustainability

I'm expanding the scope of this particular feature. Land use and sustainability are closely related in that good land uses also tend to be sustainable land uses.

A company called Divine Mercy, L.L.C. received approval to build 83 multi-family housing units on 15.75 acres near NE Russel Road and NE Davidson Road. This project uses existing arterial roads and is close to an existing highway.
The Hickman Mills area plan was altered to change low density residential tracts to mixed-use tracts. The rezoning and approving of development plans for these tracts were held over for another week.
Exactly 21.11 acres South of Cleaver Boulevard, Troost to Paseo will be redeveloped. I was not able to find out what kind of development this is going to be. Given that it's approval process has been under the old zoning regulations, it's probably sprawl. (It seems we always create sprawl around here even though it is the twenty-first century now.) I don't know if the old commercial buildings on the South side of Cleaver Boulevard will be recycled, but the ice house on 48th will be torn down.

Looking Ahead

Here's a few items the Council will consider in the coming weeks.

The Council held over for another week it's wish list for the next Congress. You can read my comments on this wish list in last week's "In Council".
The Council also held over for another week a measure establishing the Power and Light Oversight Commission.
The House Committee received a resolution accepting the recommendations of the Housing Committee regarding projects to be submitted to the state for consideration of Low Income Housing Tax Credits.
The City finally seems poised to recognize electronic fences as a proper dog restraint.

My Hero

2009-12-12T09:53:00.003-06:00

Kudos to State Representative Belinda Harris of Hillsboro, Missouri. This week, Representative Harris filed legislation in Jefferson City for a constitutional amendment that would limit the use of eminent domain.

The crux of the problem, according to Harris, is that developers are sometimes creating the blight that is used as a justification for takings under eminent domain. According to Harris:

"The developers come in and buy these houses here and there, and let them go to pot, the windows are broke out and the roofs are leaking, and they have created this blight."

It may be that this measure is more about trying to advance some goal other than reforming eminent domain. For example it may be political theater for getting votes in an election year. Legislators sometimes do that kind of thing. In the coming days I'll be looking for intel about Harris' motive.

Given that eminent domain reform recently passed in Texas by 81 percent to 19 percent margin, and that it would probably get similar support in Missouri, it seemed inevitable that some legislators would be emboldened to step up to the plate on this issue. Which is why, for now, I choose to give Harris the benefit of the doubt.

Whatever her intentions, this legislation has some serious teeth. A few things that caught my eye:

"Private property taken for private use or private ownership or other private rights shall not be considered a public use." This is a specific repudiation of the term "public use" as redefined by Kelo v. New London. Whatever else changes on this bill, this needs to remain intact.
Only the State can use eminent domain.
If a taken property is unused after five years, the original property owner is entitled to receive it back at a price no greater than what the property was taken for.
If rights to a taken property are transferred or sold, the original property owners get first shot at buying the property back for the taking price. This provision operates for twenty years after the taking.

(This last item is the one I have questions about. I know that lawyers have tricks with corporations that make properties owned by the same person or persons different legal entities. Although I don't know much about the reasons, I know this practice is common and perfectly normal. I'll be interested in seeing how this provision fairs when the resolution gets to committee.)

Harris also proposes giving cities an alternative means of fighting blight. A related measure would allow cities to expend public funds to abate property nuisances and impose liens on abated properties for the repayment of said funds.

If the eminent domain measure is approved, it will appear on the November 2010 ballot.

In Council: December 3, 2009

2009-12-06T18:51:00.003-06:00

The Sunday Star this week had a lengthy article on the rise and fall of the West Edge project on the Country Club Plaza. The Star reports that in 2003, the City gave developers $31.6 million in tax-increment financing to help with the cost of removing rock that was in the way of a planned underground garage. Developers could have put some of that parking in above-ground garages. They could have shared parking with other facilities in the area. The garage behind Unity Temple, which is less than a quarter mile away comes to mind. My point is that somebody's lack of imagination took $31.6 million out of municipal coffers.

Let's see what the current Council has been up.

GSA Office Building

The Council adopted a resolution supporting the construction by the Federal Government of a General Services Administration office building in the east village.

Congressional Wish List Held on Docket

The City Council's wish list for the next Congress was introduced this week, but not approved. I haven't gone over this in detail, but here's a few things that caught my eye:

Their transportation wish list contains nothing for public transit. All of the transportation projects mentioned were highway projects.
They asked for $10 million to help solve the city's combined sewer/storm drain problem.
The Council requests expedited funding for environmental remediation needed to turn the old Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base into an intermodal facility.
There was also a list of housing measures the council supports, including continuing funding for community development block grants and support for measures related to foreclosures and vacant properties.

Although they expressed support for several key environmental programs (Specifically, Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grants, Green Jobs Act, and expansion of Green Impact Zone funding), they failed to ask for anything that might help with our area's air quality problems. They asked for nothing, I might add, that attacks the root causes of the air quality problem. No request for federal support of complete streets. No request for funding of public transit. No request for a change to land use policies that might in the long run make public transit a better use of public money. No position on emission standards for automobiles, or for cap and trade.

City Issues $16 Million in Revenue Bonds

The Council authorized the issuing of $16 million in revenue bonds for sanitary sewers. As the name implies, revenue bonds are paid back from revenues, in this case the fees paid for sewer services. They are not repaid from general tax revenues. The bonds being issued are low-interest bonds being made available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

TIF Projects

This issue always starts a debate. Under State law, the City Council has up to ten years to pass individual redevelopment projects under TIF plans. It's not unheard of for projects to be approved at the eleventh hour. Such was the case this week, when the council approved nine projects related to the River Market Tax Increment Financing plan. Of the nine separate ordinances passed this week, four were introduced on December 9, 1999. The remaining five were introduced on September 27, 2001. I'm not sure that such projects should be given public assistance without a reevaluation by the finance department.

The River Market TIF plan covers the area roughly from the river to Independence Avenue, Broadway Bridge the Heart of America Bridge. Essentially the whole of the River Market. The portions of that plan approved last Thursday include:

Project 5: Northwest corner of 3rd and Main.
Project 6: A property in the East 100 block of Missouri Avenue, North side. This property appears to be Harry's Country Club.
Project 7: Southwest corner of 2nd and Main.
Project 9: Contains a number of lots including: 114 Delaware, 201 Wyandotte, 201 Wyandotte, 210 Delaware, 407 Grand, 315 Delaware, 415-417 Delaware, 507 Walnut, 511 Walnut, 108-110 Missouri, 509-515 Walnut, and 517 Delaware.
Project 10: Contains a number of lots including: 200 Delaware St, 16 E 3rd Street, 200 W 5th Street, 523 Grand Blvd, and 210 W 5th Street.
Project 12: A City-owned lot at 300 Main (the park behind the City Market).
Project 13: A City-owned lot at 400 Main (the parking lot behind the City Market).
Project 14: A City-owned lot at 500 Main (the parking lot on the Southwest corner of 5th and Main).
Project 15: A City-owned lot at 7 E 5th Street (the parking lot on the Southeast corner of 5th and Main).

You can judge or yourself whether these lots need public assistance. Most of them seem to be empty lots or businesses that are doing all right for themselves. 509 Walnut, for example, appears to be Planter's Feed.

I wish I could tell you what is going to be done at each of these locations. At the time I'm writing this, that information doesn't appear to be available.

Land Use

I read recently that the United States looses something like 400,000 acres of prime farmland annually to suburban sprawl. So, I was happy this week to find several items related to the redevelopment of tracts in the heart of the city.

Exactly 4.14 acres near 18th and Vine were converted from low density residential to medium density residential.
The Council approved renovations of buildings at 37th and Main, 22nd and Central,
Several measures related to the redevelopment of Beacon Hill were approved (090851, 090947)

Looking Ahead

Here's a few items the the Council will consider in the coming weeks:

The establishment of the Power and Light Oversight Commission was held on the docket one more week.
The Finance and Audit Committee received an ordinance imposing campaign contribution limits for Mayoral and City Council elections.
The Public Safety and Neighborhoods Committee received an ordinance raising fees and permits prices on items related to Neighborhood and Community Services Department, animal health, and public safety.
The Referred to Transportation and Infrastructure Committee received an ordinance appropriating funds for the Red Bridge Road bridge replacement.

City to Offer Swine Flu Vaccines

2009-11-28T09:37:00.004-06:00

This is for those of you concerned about the H1N1 Virus. The City will be holding vaccination clinics on November 30 and December 3. Details below.

CONTACT: Mary Charles, city communications officer, (816) 513-1356
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Nov. 25, 2009
City to hold H1N1 vaccination clinics Nov. 30 and Dec. 3

The City of Kansas City, Mo., Health Department has scheduled additional public H1N1 vaccination clinics next week while supplies last.

The clinics will be as follows: Monday, Nov. 30 from 2-6:30 p.m. at the Health Department, 2400 Troost Ave.; and Thursday, Dec. 3 from 2-6:30 p.m. at the Northland Cathedral, 101 N.W. 99th St.

Vaccinations are free and will be administered on a first-come, first-served basis while supplies last for the following expanded priority groups:

Pregnant women
Children and young adults from 6 months through 24 years old
Adults 25 to 64 years old with significant chronic health conditions
Household contacts and caregivers of children under six months
Health care workers with identification.

Unfortunately, those 65 years old and older are not yet eligible for H1N1 vaccine according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines. Unlike with regular seasonal influenza, those over 65 have been less likely to become infected with H1N1.

More than 64,000 doses of vaccine have already been distributed to medical providers in Kansas City, Mo., who have agreed to provide these doses to people in the priority groups. Another 1,700 people have been vaccinated in clinics at the Health Department.

For more information about vaccine availability, call (816) 513-6008.

Media inquiries about this issue should be directed to Jeff Hershberger, public information officer for the Health Department, (816) 840-2548 (pager).

Happy Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T09:11:00.003-06:00

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

I heard a lot of complaining over the last week about required time spent with family, much of it dealing with inlaws. I get along with my family and they don't live too far away (so I don't feel obligated to stay the whole day), which is why I've been looking forward to today all week.

When I was looking for a turkey picture to accompany this post, I briefly considered using a picture of our esteemed mayor. I decided it was best not to ruin your appetites.

Enjoy your day.

New County Budget

2009-11-23T16:43:00.000-06:00

Jackson County Legislator Theresa Garza Ruiz, first district at-large, earlier today sent out a list of links related to the new county budget. Luckily, this e-mail can be viewed on a web page here.

In Council: November 19, 2009

2009-11-22T14:50:00.002-06:00

From listening to media accounts, you'd think that firing Wayne Cauthen was the only thing the City Council did this week. That's not the case.

Land Use

I've been concerned for some time that our land use practices are unsustainable. The ratio of infrastructure to improvement has be increasing since World War II, puting upward pressure on taxes. Calculating that ratio is beyond the means I have available to me. I had thought I could make a crude estimate of land use by calculating the ratio of structures to acres with figures taken from fact sheets for plat approvals. This week's fact sheet for a set of townhomes on Beacon Hill produced a ratio of 1.29, a figure that is unlikely for townhomes. Unless I can come up with something better, that leaves me with only qualitative estimates of land use. Offhand, I'd say that townhomes on existing roads in the heart of the city is a good land use.

On the other side of the spectrum is the approval of a preliminary plat of 1656 acres for industrial use. Here we have a bit of a conundrum. Modern industrial uses are extremely inefficient from a land-use perspective, yet they are not designed that way for frivolous reasons. The closely-packed, multistory factories and warehouses of the industrial era don't serve contemporary needs. What's even worse is that the low density development pattern is difficult for public transit to serve, making these employment-rich areas inaccessible to people most in need of jobs. I don't have a solution, or even the beginning of an idea, but there it is.

Other Items

Here are a few other items that caught my eye.

The Council voted to raise inspection and permit fees for restaurants.
The Council allocated $3 million received through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to the improvement of sanitary sewers.

Looking Ahead

Here are a few items the City Council will be considering in the coming weeks:

In an item related to the stimulus funds allocated for the sewers, an item was referred to the Finance and Audit committee authorizing the issuing of $16 million in revenue bonds, also for the sanitary sewers. As the name implies, revenue bonds are paid back from revenues, in this case the fees paid for sewer services. They are not repaid from general tax revenues. The bonds being issued are low-interest bonds being made available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Another item referred to the Finance and Audit Committee revising Chapter 40 of the City ordinances concerning licenses and business regulations. No text of the revision is yet available on the City Clerk's web site.
Planning and Zoning received a preliminary plat for a condominium project in an existing apartment building on the South-East corner of Armour Boulevard and Kenwood Avenue.
A resolution establishing the Power and Light [District] Oversight Commission was introduced but held on the full council docket rather than referred to a committee.

The Morning After

2009-11-20T07:50:00.001-06:00

In middle of the melee yesterday, the Citizen's Association entered the fray with a letter blasting both sides. Initially, I mistakenly thought the letter was a response to the removal of Cauthen. The media is reinforcing that impression by reporting on the Cauthen firing and the letter in almost the same breath.

But look at the letter carefully. You'll notice that the date on it is Monday, November 16. The conclusion I came to was that the letter was still being prepared, but was rushed out after the removal of Cauthen.

Six Council members are saying they were surprised by the move yesterday. Were they? Maybe they didn't think Funkhouser would go that far, but something was undoubtedly in the air before the removal.

City Council Fires City Manager

2009-11-19T20:37:00.002-06:00

As you've no doubt heard by now, City Manager Wayne Cauthen was fired today. I'm still trying to digest it all, but frankly it doesn't come as a surprise. I'd heard rumors toward the end of the previous council to the effect that he used his ability to read anybody's e-mail to his own advantage. I was never able to substantiate them. If true, then the Mayor's attempt to get rid of him early in his term was flawed only because he acted before he had his ducks in a row.

One columnist over at the Star is already criticizing the Mayor for doing this behind the backs of some Council members. Some may agree with the Star. As much as it pains me, I have to side with the Mayor on this one. A friend of mine was on a board a few years ago that had to remove a member. "It's not an easy thing," he told me earlier this evening by phone. "No matter how necessary the removal may seem to you, there's always going to be a contingent that sees it as personal or spiteful or whatever. I knew who those folks were going into it. I wasn't going to sway them. The cost of approaching them before the removal was higher than the cost of flak afterward, or at least that's what I thought at the time."

I see from Prime Buzz that the so-called Citizen's Association has taken this as an opportunity to take pot shots at the Mayor, as if he had a political future.

Pfizer Pulls out of New London

2009-11-16T11:00:00.007-06:00

The experience of New London demonstrates the wisdom of the adage that a bird in hand is better than two in the bush.

One of the themes in my previous posts on the use of eminent domain for economic development is the unpredictability of the future, specifically, the presumption that the proposed use of a property will produce a better outcome for a city than the existing use. Because of this theme a friend of mine sent me a link to a Wall Street Journal story that is only now, nearly a week after appearing, getting any play in the local press.

(Because of trouble with the internet at my breakfast stop, I haven't had a chance to read the latest responses to previous posts before posting this. I regret this because some of those comments likely bear on the current discussion.)

Several times in my previous posts and in the comments to them, I've referred to the supreme court case Kelo v. City of New London, Connecticut. Susette Kelo and the other residents of her neighborhood had their property taken so that a nearby Pfizer property could be "enhanced" with a project that included a hotel, offices, and high-end condominiums. It was a 2005 Supreme Court decision favoring New London that put our legal system's official stamp of approval on using eminent domain for economic development purposes.

Now, four years after that decision, which the Wall Street Journal calls, "one of the worst in recent years," Pfizer has decided it doesn't want Susette Kelo's property after all. This after the city and state spent $78 million clearing the land. As a way of putting that in perspective, I looked at Kansas City's fiscal year 2009-2010 budget to see how much $78 million will buy.

Please note that the numbers I'm quoting are projections. We won't know what the city actually spends until the end of the fiscal year. In terms of our newest city budget, that $78 million is approximately 1.8 times the amount allocated for the KCATA. It's nearly three times the amount allocated for neighborhood and community services. It's almost 40 percent of the amount allocated for police protection. It's more than 75 percent of the amount allocated for fire protection.

If nothing else, the experience of New London, Connecticut demonstrates the wisdom of the old adage that a bird in hand is better than two in the bush.

More on Eminent Domain

2009-11-14T09:51:00.003-06:00

FADE IN. NARRATOR (VOICE OVER) "Previously on '12th & Main'." (Montage of men in suites arguing over a conference table.) COMMENTOR 1 "So, if [a] business that everyone agrees would be a benefit has all of a block assembled for their project except for one small property, it wouldn't be okay for a City to use eminent domain?" CASEY "Your example asks me to elevate the convenience of one over the rights of another."

INT. BOARD ROOM.
COMMENTOR 1
"I am concerned that you are willing to discount the potential benefits to the community because one business would benefit at the inconvenience of the original property owner."

CASEY
Strange. That's exactly what I was about to say about you. You're assuming that the reason for the taking of property is better for the community than the potential of the property being taken. This is an assumption that I cannot accept.

Hypothetical. Two side-by-side properties have similar value, and their owners have roughly the same net worth. The first property owner wants more space for his or her business. Owner one asks the city to take the property of owner two and give it or lease it to him. The City now has to decide which use has the most economic potential.

This choice doesn't scare me because the government has to make the decision. This choice scares me because humans in general seem bad at recognizing potential. I'm thinking here of the people who scoffed at Sam Walton for building department stores in small towns. I'm thinking of the HP executive who didn't understand the possibilities of the small computer that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built in their garage. What about the entire management of Xerox who didn't know what to do with any of the dozens of things invented by its Palo Alto Research Center? A more parallel example is the 19th century leadership of St. Louis who chose not to pursue becoming a railroad hub because they had two rivers.

These examples are easy to dismiss because the results seem so obvious. We congratulate ourselves on being as smart as the first movers. We say, "What idiots those investors were." We think, "How stupid could those executives be?" We ask, "How could St. Louis not understand the value of the railroads?"

But the future is not easy to see. About thirteen years ago, I heard a friend tell a co-worker that some day a television program's broadcast time would be irrelevant because everyone would watch their favorite program at their own convenience. I suggested that when on-line periodicals finally arrive they wouldn't publish regular issues the way paper ones did. They would just release stories every few days or once a week. Both theories were met with skepticism by all those present.

To take an older example, I remember once reading about Guglielmo Marconi demonstrating his "wireless telegraph" to a potential investor who didn't understand that the clicks he was hearing from a hand held speaker were the result of actions on an unconnected device.

I suppose you're going to tell me that my hypothetical doesn't answer the question. Your example was all of a block assembled except for one small property. Surely, the benefit is clearer when the favored project is considerably larger than the unfavored project. I must admit I would have trouble refuting this with logic alone. Once again we have a concrete example.

American Formal and Bridal, once located on Main Street was taken to build the Power & Light District. American Formal and Bridal paid full property taxes for many years. The Power & Light District is now taking money out of City and County coffers.

This is only to consider the monetary affects. The P&L seems to be opening old racial wounds, an issue I can't even get into without appearing to be leaving the realm of rational discussion. A post-Kelo interpretation of eminent domain also has a discouraging affect on small entrepreneurs who are increasingly being recognized as the true engines of economic growth. Instead of putting City Hall's support behind large projects like the P&L, we should be doing all we can to encourage the proliferation of entrepreneurs. That encouragement starts with respect for entrepreneurs' property.

In Council: November 12, 2009

2009-11-12T07:48:00.000-06:00

The City Council is not meeting this week because some members are attending the National League of Cities meeting in San Antonio, Texas. Watch next week for more City Council news.

Eminent Domain Reform Passes in Texas

2009-11-10T21:28:00.003-06:00

The issue isn't whether City Hall thinks these businesses were worth saving. The issue is that City Hall is not supposed to be making that decision.

While getting caught up on the news this evening, I stumbled on an item out of Texas that I hope takes fire in Missouri. It seems that during last Tuesday's elections, Texas voters passed a constitutional amendment prohibiting local governments from taking properties through eminent domain for commercial uses.

The measure which passed 81 percent to 19 percent effectively reverses the effect of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2005 decision in Kelo v. New London, Connecticut. For those of you who are uninitiated, Kelo v. New London is the decision that overturned 200 years of strict interpretation of government's use of it's eminent domain power. Among it's local effects are the removal of long-time business American Formal and Bridal to build the Power and Light District, and John Copaken's use of City Hall cronies to force Danny Edwards out of a primo spot downtown.

I'm not going to quibble about whether these businesses were worth saving. The issue here is not whether I think them worth saving. It's not even whether City Hall thinks they were worth saving. The issue is that City Hall is not supposed to be making that decision. Liberals agree with this. Conservatives agree with this. Swing voters agree with this. In spite of that, our City Council had the gall to put this in their Jefferson City wish list:

Oppose any efforts that restrict the Citys use of eminent domain which would impede the Citys ability to provide core services to its citizens or limit the ability of the City to protect and build revenue through economic development or redevelopment.

I hope it won't be too long before such a measure is put before Missouri voters. In the meantime, I hope the 62 percent margin in Texas has a chilling effect on eminent domain abuse in the rest of the country.

Peacemakers Summit this Saturday

2009-11-09T07:49:00.008-06:00

I don't like to post two items on the same day. I'm always worried the earlier one, the one that gets pushed down will not be read. But something arrived in my in box this morning that's too important to wait another day. I present it in its entirety.

The Peacemakers of Kansas City is a grassroots coalition of individuals and groups hosted and convened by Second Baptist Church on October 10, 2009 to begin a diologue on pursuing peace in our city.

The public is invited to attend the 2nd session of the City-wide Peacemakers Summit to be reconvened on Saturday, November 14 and hosted by Second Baptist Church, 3620 E. 39th Street, K. C., MO, beginning with a 9AM fellowship breakfast.

At 10 AM, Action Teams will assemble to implement strategies proposed and recommended by the 2006 Commission on Violent Crime Report which was chaired by Dr. Stacey Daniels-Young and compiled by Tracie McClendon-Cole.

Facilitators have been assigned to lead the teams listed below. Volunteers may choose to serve on at least one of the following Action Teams: truancy and preventive programs; single mother support; workforce revitalization; youth district; leadership institute; landlord policy; predatory lending; spiritual renewal and adopt a neighborhood; gun policy; court watch; conflict dispute resolution; youth and family comprehensive master plan; evaluation and implementation.

Rev. Dr. Vernon P. Howard, Jr. is pastor of Second Baptist Church and convener of the Peacemakers Summit. He says, "My brothers and sisters, the blood of our children cries out to us from our streets. Let us answer the Call. Come and be a part of the movement to restore, reclaim, and renew our community. Come, let us eradicate violent crime in this city."

The COMBAT Problem

2009-11-09T05:47:00.001-06:00

Being arrested for trespassing on your own property is Kafkaesque, to say the least.

On the eve of last week's COMBAT renewal vote, the local news on channel 41 ran a story about a couple who were arrested for trespassing on their own property. It seems that the couple owned a former drug house. Because of a quirk in the legal basis of the house's seizure, the current owners, who had nothing to do with drug dealing, had some unusual requirements placed on them. You can read the details of this fiasco by following the link in this paragraph.

Let me make one thing clear. I am not about to defend the police or this quirk of the COMBAT program. Being arrested for trespassing on your own property is Kafkaesque, to say the least. I am trying to shed light on the underlying problem, the problem COMBAT tries to address, in the hope somebody listening will have a better idea.

A friend of mine lives in a block with a combination of shirtwaists and architect-designed houses. Across the street from my friend, in the middle of the block is an apartment building from the 1920s. About once a year a
resident of this building is arrested for drug dealing. The question that puzzles my friend and his neighbors is why do drug dealers keep moving in to that building? The neighbors know to watch it. The police know to watch it. Arrest must surely be inevitable.

The answer must be because it's a known drug house. Being purveyors of an illegal substance, drug dealers can't advertise. They can't open shops in strip malls. They can't build web sites. How then do they make themselves known to their customers? By setting up shop in previously-used locations of course.

The conundrum here is that if some restriction is not placed on these properties, the new owners might unwittingly continue to rent to drug dealers, or worse yet, an associate of the arrested drug dealer might buy the property. I stress, this is not a defense of COMBAT. I'm just looking for a way out of this mess.

For starters, we might required that officials inform new owners of the extra scrutiny. This will naturally discourage potential buyers. We'll have to sweeten the deal some way.

In Council: November 5, 2009

2009-11-06T17:32:00.003-06:00

Meanwhile, down at City Hall...

City Takes on Debt

The City Auditor's review of the fiscal year 2009 budget reported that this year the city would pay $120 million on outstanding debt of $2.6 billion. Over the last few decades our leaders have borrowed a little more than twice the city budget. I don't know if any of that has been paid off since the auditor's report. On Thursday, the City Council authorized borrowing up to $20 million for various projects including street repair. Here's the breakdown:

$16,659,000 street reconstruction
$1,987,007 public building improvements
$853,993 parks
$400,000 bond issuance fees

Legislative Priorities Adopted

And in that context, the Council approved a legislative wish list for the General Assembly's 2010 session that includes a request for new incentive programs and opposes any restrictions on TIF, among other things.

Shortly after I drafted this post, I got the Chamber of Commerce's City Hall newsletter. In reporting on this same resolution, the Chamber says, "The Chamber and the city have worked in sync the past several months as both organizations have developed their priorities." I'll leave you to decide what that means.

Midtown Down Zoning

For some odd reason, many houses in Midtown that were originally built as single-family houses are in areas zoned for multi-family dwellings. This has lead to some gorgeous old houses being chopped into apartments. At the request of the Heart of Westport Neighborhood Association, City Hall down zoned a section of Westport between Main and Broadway, 39th street and Westport Road.

Looking Ahead

Here's a few items coming before the City Council or one of its committees in the coming weeks.

The Marlborough Neighborhood will soon get a new bus shelter.
The OH Dean building (most recently the Walters Electronics building) at 37th and Main will soon be redeveloped.
Platting for Beacon Hill will soon be approved. Beacon Hill will also get a tax abatement.
Restaurant permit and inspection fees are about to go up.

There is no City Council meeting scheduled for next week.

Buffer Zones a Problem?

2009-11-04T08:51:00.002-06:00

Developers get a more desirable product, residents get a better neighborhood, and the city gets infrastructure that's less costly to maintain.

An article was posted on the Star's web site late Monday about the opposition to the new zoning ordinance by certain of the city's legal and development community. I'm still working my way through the reported complaints, but something caught my eye right away. One area that particularly upset this community was the expansion of buffer zones around streams. This seems an odd concern in an area that even now has ridiculous amounts of undeveloped open space. The complaint may be unjustified in other respects.

According to Chapter 65 of the City's code of ordinances, one of the purposes of expanded buffer zones is to improve storm water management. Now where have I heard that before? Oh, yes. The combined sewer/storm drain problem, the one that's projected to cost us two to four times the entire city budget. Let me get this straight. They're complaining about being told they can't add to one of our city's biggest problems?

I can already hear at least one objection. Aren't we forcing them to reduce their profits by restricting the area that they can develop? One solution to this, which Chapter 65 specifically points them to is to the requirements for open space and conservation developments in Section 80-209. According to the code, these types of developments are designed to lower development costs by allowing "more compact and less costly networks of roads and utilities."

Sounds like such a development would be more walkable.

Perhaps developers fear that people buying their new real estate only want sprawl. I don't believe this is the case. From what I've read, and from my discussions with people, many would jump at the chance to live in a more walkable neighborhood. (It's mainly schools holding them back.) The mere existence of places like Brookside and Zona Rosa show that compact retail developments are economically viable.

So, my first impression is that we have in our new code a genuine win-win situation. If developers use Section 80-209 to get around the restriction of Chapter 65, they get a more desirable product that is cheaper to build, residents get a better neighborhood, and the city gets infrastructure that's less costly to maintain.

The Urban Puzzle: Interlude

2009-11-03T08:08:00.003-06:00

My last post in this series produced some confusion. In referring to a picture of the intersection of Southwest Boulevard and Main, I commented that it was "a lot of trouble and expense to make things marginally better for cars." Some wondered why I was criticizing an automobile connection between the East and West ends of downtown. I wasn't. After rereading the post, I realized how easily my words could be misconstrued. What I should have said was that this plan was a lot of trouble and expense to make the route visually appealing for drivers.

If you look carefully at the artist rendering, you can see landscaping on the inside of the traffic circle. At first glance there's nothing odd about that. Many auto thoroughfares have landscaping. But if you reed the FOCUS plan you'll see that it calls for the connection of Southwest Boulevard and Main Street "with a traffic circle, small urban park"

The Urban Puzzle:

I know perfectly well that the FOCUS plan is ten years old. In many ways the FOCUS plan has the effect of being something created yesterday. Citizens frequently wave it in the face of City Council members and City Hall bureaucrats. And the City Council frequently refers to it in its legislation. Consider an ordinance recently introduced by Cindy Circo which states that it is "consistent and complies with the FOCUS Kansas City Plan."

So, I'll say this again, why do we spend so much money on amenities that we speed through at thirty-five, forty-five, or fifty-five miles per hour? ("It's coming up on the right. There it went." "There what went?")

The point of my last post was much broader and still stands. Making things pretty for drivers is just the tip of the car-friendly iceberg that includes "synchronized traffic signals, ramp metering, highway cameras to tell is how fast traffic is moving on the expressway, and extra paving for free right turn lanes."

What of the charge that something like the urban park would not be done today? Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you "House Dreaming" the sculpture at the intersection of Gillham Road and McGee Trafficway. More about that in Part IV.

Breakfast Anyone?

2009-11-02T09:08:00.008-06:00

Anyone who's visited the City Market on weekends the last few years can't get out without noticing the standing-room-only Succotash restaurant on the North side of the market square. Starting today, what market goers will notice is its absence.

Yes, I said its absence. No, it's not another victim of the sour economy or competition (real or supposed?) from the Power and Light District. In a few weeks, Succotash will reopen in a newly-renovated store front at 26th and Holmes. The new space, rumored to be the home of the first Meiner's market, is the kind of pre-World War II structure that miraculously dodged the wrecking ball in the years since and is now again in fashion.

When I first heard that Succotash was moving, I feared it might be the end of one of our favorite local mainstays. Then I drove to the new location and walked around a bit. What I found was a highly walkable neighborhood. Old store fronts mix with single-family homes and well-maintained colonnade apartment buildings. There's even an apartment for rent upstairs from the new location. A small office building sits across the street. Crown Center, Hospital Hill, the UMKC School of Dentistry, and the Ronald McDonald House are all in close proximity.

Incidentally, Succotash is not just a breakfast place. Sometime in January they expanded their closing time to 10:00 PM. No word yet on the hours for the new location, but I'm confident that this location is a winner and that Succotash is about to transform from a quasi-tourist destination to a genuinely local hangout.

In Council: October 29, 2009

2009-10-30T23:31:00.008-05:00

Here's a round up of items in this week's City Council Minutes.

43rd and Main TIF Plan Ends

In a long-expected move, the Council voted 10 to 0 to end the 43rd and Main Tax Increment Financing Plan. Not voting were Bill Skaggs who was out and (surprise, surprise) Jan Marcason and Beth Gottstein. The other taxing jurisdictions didn't get all their money back, but it's a start.

CORRECTION:It seems that my impugning of Council Women Gottstein and Marcason for not voting to end this TIF plan might be somewhat misplaced. It turns out they recuse themselves from an earlier vote on an amendment for this TIF plan I apologize to Council Women Gottstein and Marcason.

Money for Sports Complex

The City allocated $1.7 million for maintenance and improvements at the Truman Sports Complex. I'd love to see an itemization for the use of this money. A person doesn't spend a day at the ballpark when his or her work hours were cut on account the recession, not when he or she has a family to feed. Incidentally, $1.7 million would nearly cover the streetscape costs for the Troost MAX line.

Signal Upgrades

The Council allocated just over $1 million in federal funds for traffic signal upgrades on Oak, Central, and Baltimore in the downtown loop. The intent is to synchronize signals so that drivers can decrease drive times, thereby reducing fuel consumption and improving air quality. I've already explained why the justification for projects like this ignores the law of supply and demand. Surely there are federal funds available for projects other than traffic signals.

Land Use

One of the problems we're not talking about is that we're creating infrastructure faster than we're gaining taxpayers. We've been doing this at least since 1960. Here's how this week's plat approval stand up.

Northview Meadows: Takes advantage of the existing arteries North Brighton and 92nd Street. 2.33 single family lots/acre.
Lakeview Villas: Takes advantage of the existing arteries Indiana and North Prospect. Fills a gap between two existing developments. 2.66 single family lots/acre.

Looking Ahead

Beth Gottstein this week introduced the first draft of the City Council's legislative priorities for the 2010 session of the Missouri General Assembly.
A pending approval for the plat of townhomes on Beacon Hill was referred to the Planning and Zoning Committee.

Seen Around Town

2009-10-30T08:35:00.003-05:00

Here's a few photos I've taken around town in the last few months.

"Did you see the Warhol exhibit?" a friend asked recently, referring to the display that runs at Union Station until January 10.

"Yeah, I said. I'm not sure what I paid for though. It was all prints." Short silence.

"You realize that's what Warhol did, prints?"

Well I do now. In spite of my mistaken impression, I'm recommending the show. They are beautiful works. I might not have know they were in town if not for this striking advertisement on the catwalk tower at the intersection of Pershing and Main.

The same day I stopped to photograph the big soup can, I noticed a vintage fire truck and a flag hanging from two cranes in the crossroads district. I wasn't able to find out what this was about. If anyone knows anything, I'd appreciate an explanation.

Rumor Mill: Condolences

2009-10-27T08:05:00.001-05:00

It's rumored this morning that Laura Glover, wife of former City Council member Jim Glover passed a way this weekend of Cancer. My heart goes out to Jim and his family this week. Please keep him in your thoughts.

Operation Green Light Wins Award

2009-10-27T07:16:00.000-05:00

How can this not increase demand? How much of this demand will absorb the traffic flow and air-quality improvements?

Starting some time in 2003, the Mid-America Regional Council (MARC) started working with local governments to synchronize traffic signals in certain corridors. The idea of Operation Green Light, as it is called, is to improve traffic flow which will shorten travel times and improve air quality.

Last week, MARCs web site proudly proclaimed that Operation Green Light was awarded the Transportation Achievement Award from the Missouri Valley Section of the Institute of Transportation Engineers (MOVITE).

This all sounds good on paper, but there's just one problem. Have these guys not heard of supply and demand? By improving traffic flow and travel times they have increased the transportation supply, making the cost (in both time and money) of using a car lower. How can this not increase demand? How much of this new demaind will absorb the traffic flow and air-quality improvements created by the program in the first place? I wonder if they even bothered to calculate it.

What else could we have done with the money spent on this? Here's a few ideas.

BRT lines on Troost, State Avenue, or Metcalf
Line consolidation
Downtown lunch circulator (i.e. something that would introduce transit to new markets)
WiFi on exurban and suburban bus lines

It doesn't necessarily have to be one of these. The point is that to improve air quality, we should be making transit more competitive, not making things easier for cars.

In Council: October 22, 2009

2009-10-26T20:13:00.001-05:00

The City Clerk's website finally came on line this morning. So here's the City Hall news a little late.

More Liquor Law Changes

More liquor law changes appeared this week. The first gives the director of neighborhood and community services more powers when dealing with problem businesses. Problem businesses are defined as those that "cause a nuisance to or change in character of the immediate area which may include but will not be limited to, noise, traffic and parking associated with the operation of the premises from patrons or other persons frequenting the premises." This ordinance also creates a six month probationary period for businesses with new liquor licenses.

Festival District Temporary Permit

The second liquor law change this week created a new ordinance for issuing temporary liquor permits for festivals. This isn't everything that's in the ordinace, but here's a few highlights:

Street must be closed in the festival area.
Festival permits will only be issued to a "promotional association," which the ordinance defines as "an entity formed by property owners who own or operate fifty percent or more of the square feet of bars, nightclubs, restaurants, and other entertainment venues located within the proposed festival district."
The director of neighborhood and community services must notify all property owners within 500 feet of the proposed festival district's boundaries.
The director must hold a public hearing regarding the proposed festival district no fewer than 30 days after the notification to the property owners.
Liquor sales in festival districts can only occur between 9 am and 1 am.
Minors aren't allowed in festival areas that serve alchohol.
This section, section 10-139, automatically expires in two years. I'm guessing this is to force a future council to evaluate the effectiveness of the ordinance even if there is political pressure not to.

Land Use

Between 1960 and 1990 developed land in Kansas City, Missouri increased 110% while the population only grew by 29%. Simple math, not to mention common sense should tell you that infrastructure has been increasing at a higher rate than tax payers.

Two plats were approved this week with very different uses of infrastructure

Existing Infrastructure: Condominiums at 44th and Rockhill
Semi-Existing Infrastructure (existing arteries, new side streets, likely sprawl): Twenty-two single-family lots and one church near I-435 and Pleasant Valley Road

In Council: City Gets New Blight Measure

2009-10-24T09:58:00.000-05:00

The City Clerk's web site is down this morning, so this week's roundup of City Council news will be necessarily short, at least for now.

The big news this week is Kansas City's new get-tough measure for dealing with extremely blighted properties.

Convention Hotel Questions

2009-10-18T22:34:00.014-05:00

The very day after I posted this, Mark Forsythe's Kansas City Post had an entry on this same topic. (Link removed because site is down. 4/23/10) He provided the kind of concrete example that I was looking for with my questions. Forget the 1000-room convention hotel, he says. Build a streetcar line down Main street. This would bring the nearly 1500 rooms in the Crown Center area within the critical five minutes of the convention center, and more things to do with five minutes of convention goers. And the transit would help the city when there are no conventions in town.

We've recently lost three conventions that got too big for us. Regardless of whether this is cause for alarm, isn't this a compliment to our city?

This is directed at Convention and Visitors Association President Rick Hughs.

It seems that all I have lately are questions. The most recent concern talk of building a new convention hotel. I don't know much about the convention business, so I need some convincing. These questions may seem dumb to someone in the business. But you're messing around with public money. The majority of us who contribute to the public coffers aren't in the convention business. So indulge me.

For those of you who might be new in town, we've recently lost three conventions that got too big for us. Regardless of whether this is cause for alarm, isn't this a compliment to our city? Convention planners invited more people to our sprawling burg and enough people said yes that three conventions out grew us.

Which begs the question, how many hotel spaces do we need before we stop losing conventions? I suspect that we will never reach that point. Where are we losing these conventions too? I heard that one of them went to Orlando, Florida. Do you really expect me to believe that size is the reason we lost that convention? It's Florida for God's sake.

My biggest question, is how do we get more smaller conventions? I've heard no discussion about that. According to recent news reports, we are going to end 2009 with 32 convention bookings. If we assume one convention a week and that we probably won't book any conventions the weeks of Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Years that gives us room for at least 17 more conventions without building more hotel space. I say 'at least' because I can't discount the possibility that some of the 32 conventions are small enough that we can book two conventions in a week. That may be a better argument for a large convention hotel. So why isn't it being used?

And the questions continue to pile up. Won't building a convention hotel for a mere three conventions glut the market the rest of the time? Won't that glut make it harder for smaller hotels to stay in business? Won't that put us right back in the same boat? Can we please get an honest comparison of the opportunity cost of building versus not building? Where's the point of diminishing returns?

One other thing. What are we doing to help those 32 conventions grow? Yes, yes, I know, we run the danger of helping a convention outgrow us. But if we're good at that, then it shouldn't be hard to recruit another convention to replace it.

Not in the Fact Sheet

2009-10-18T09:20:00.002-05:00

This project increases the tax base without increasing infrastructure.

This started as part of this week's "In Council" feature. It deserves it's own post.

Sometimes when I read City Hall minutes, I loose time studying an ordinance's attachments trying to figure out if there's something worth commenting on. When looking over a rather ordinary ordinance related to the expansion of a printing business at 1600 Olive, what caught my eye was what was not in the fact sheet. What's not there is any mention that this project helps our collective pocket book by increasing the tax base without increasing the infrastructure that said tax base must maintain.

What? That's a silly or pointless thing to put in the fact sheet, you say. It's no sillier than "Is it good for the children?" (which is silly because the answer is always "yes" with no explanation of how it is good for the children). It's no more pointless than "How will this contribute to a sustainable Kansas City? (As if the answer would ever be "It doesn't.")

Since the 1980s, there's been a lot of complaining about 'rising taxes'. Precious little attention has been given to the relationship between land use and municipal revenues. Mention of this issue in ordinance fact sheets would be a helpful reminder to citizens and decision makers.

In Council: October 15, 2009

2009-10-17T13:32:00.008-05:00

I haven't done one of these in a while. A few months ago I got sideswiped by an ordinance that was debated before it was introduced, then pasted to the end of the council minutes away from the other passed ordinances. Some apparently took this, not as evidence that the council had done something weird, but as an indication that I'm incompetent. I decided to change my approach to City Hall news. Then my personal life got complicated. Things got away from me.

Anyway my City Hall coverage is back, hopefully better. These posts have always been the least commented on feature of this blog, but it helps keep me connected to what's going on.

Bloch School Honored

The Council adopted a resolution honoring the UMKC Bloch School’s Institute for Entrepreneurship on being one of the top twenty five graduate entrepreneurship programs in the country. A few weeks ago I asked rhetorically where are the young turks trying to start the next Hallmark or Sprint? Obviously the Bloch School is trying to foster exactly that. It's not enough that we have this institution. Are we doing anything to insure that Bloch's graduates start their business in KCMO instead of Johnson County? Can we do anything to raise Bloch's ranking in the list?

PIEA Annual Report Received

The annual report of the Planned Industrial Expansion Authority was officially received by the City Council this week. What's in this report? I wish I could tell you. There's no electronic copy that I can find on line, and the statute requiring its production is vague about its contents. Someone will need to go to the City Clerk's office and personally request a copy of the report.

New Liquor License Ordinance

Kansas City got a new 3:00 am liquor license ordinance this week along with a new ordinance specifying instances when nearby property owners may withdraw their support of liquor license applications. This was covered in the mainstream media, so I won't rehash the details here.

Appointment to KCATA Board

This week, the Mayor rushed through the appointment of Michael Short as Platte County's representative on the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority. I'll try to find time to post more on Mr. Short. So far the only thing I know is that he's served on the board of the Citizen's Association. Did the Council demand payback for approving Funkhouser's selections for the TIF Commission? I don't know.

Upcoming Ordinances

It's my impression that the mainstream press gives more attention to passed ordinances than those in the pipeline. Yet the public needs to know about upcoming items. This is the biggest change to my approach in covering the City Council. From now on, I'll be covering upcoming items. For the first few weeks these items will be shorter than passed items while I get ahead of the game, so to speak.

The following items are out of committee and ready for a vote of the full council. The votes will probably occur at the next council meeting, but there is no way to say for sure.

The Council will soon vote on proposed changes to restrictions and prohibitions for certain retail licensees, particularly businesses that sell alcohol.
Under a new state law, the Council is expected to vote on an ordinance creating a "vacant building receiver" at City Hall. The stated purpose of this ordinance is "To protect neighborhoods from vacant nuisance buildings or structures which constitute a blight or pose a threat to the health, safety or welfare of the public." More about this after I take it apart.

TIF Plan to be Terminated

An item referred to the Finance and Audit Committee this week will terminate the 43rd and Main Tax Increment Financing Plan. There was some effort a while back to use this plan for projects at 39th and Main. It appears that the TIF plan will end without giving assistance to the Hawthorne Plaza renovation. I hope the developer tries to proceed without city help. I think this area has enormous potential.

Questions

2009-10-15T08:16:00.011-05:00

The wishes of those voters don't matter. Isn't this the attitude Mr. Chastain accuses our leaders of?

Is Clay Chastain daft? It's a question I've asked many times over the last few years. The Virginia-based supporter of public transit was in town yesterday to push his latest transit plan along with a second measure to make it impossible for the City Council to veto any measure voted on by referendum. I feel his pain. I really do. I can't imagine putting in the work required to pass a ballot measure only to have it overturned at the stroke of a pen. I even agree that having elected officials override the will of the voters is scary territory.

Mr. Chastain needs to get some sense. His 2006 plan had some serious legal problems, not least of which was the requirement for the construction of tracks in North Kansas City and Gladstone. So it's OK for the voters of KC to impose their will on the voters of those to cities? When a friend of mine posed this question to Mr. Chastain at a public forum a few years ago, Chastain's response was that the route through Northtown was on a state road, and that the route through Gladstone was not very long. In other words, the wishes of the voters in those cities don't matter. Isn't this the attitude Mr. Chastain accuses our leaders of?

What should our leaders do with a voter-approved plan they can't legally implement? Another election? If memory serves, the city's cost for an election is somewhere in the neighborhood of $500,000 to $1 million. Ask a judge to overturn the Chastain plan? That's passing the buck without saving the city much money.

But I'm not here to rehash old issues. I'm really here to ask Mr Chastain to go away. So far, the Chastain political show has played like a badly-written knock off of "The West Wing". (Take note: when "The West Wing" was funny, it was on purpose.) This time his actions may be tragic. The Mike Sanders plan for commuter rail gets us more miles of transit for less money in a shorter time. Sanders himself is better positioned to garner support from a wider array of players. Even so, the Sanders plan can't work without help from Kansas City, and Kansas City can't help if it's legally committed to one of Chastain's boondoggles.

Question

2009-10-13T12:12:00.006-05:00

Kudos this morning to Jackson County Executive Mike Sanders. Yesterday he unveiled his proposal for a city-wide commuter rail system. The big question I'm asking is why it has taken so long for any of our supposed area leaders to propose such a thing. We're the second largest rail hub in the United States, and we have the second largest passenger station right at it's center. Which is why I'm saying to all our unimaginative leaders, "Well duh! Why didn't you think of it?"

Now it's time to start dissecting the plan. One of the big questions is how many tracks we can get next to Union Station without tearing down the office buildings near it? I'm going to rephrase the question: can we put tracks under these buildings? The first few levels of all of them are parking. In the short term, we only need a few tracks. In the long term, and if commuter rail succeeds, we'll need more tracks. Regardless of how likely or how far in the future success is, the question has to be asked now. So I'm asking (any engineers out there?) can we run tracks under these buildings? We have to do at least that to use Union Station as intended. If we can't do that, is there some other way we can use Union Station with commuter rail?

Even if we could build under them, the owners of those buildings won't want to give up that parking. In a preemptive rebuttal, I'd like to point out a few things. It appears that several lines of tracks can be built before the parking on the West end of the station has to be cut into. (see the attached map.) This parking was built to be added on to and is currently underused.

The new footbridge across the tracks allows for the possibility of shared parking arrangements with the new parking garage near the freight house. If push comes to shove, there's room for a parking garage between the tracks and Washington Square Park. But I don't think we'll need to.

Please Help Spread the Word.

2009-10-06T12:39:00.013-05:00

I know this is a little late, but it only arrived in my mailbox a few hours ago. If you can help, great. If you can't, at least spread the word to other sympathetic ears. (The picture is mine.)

In an effort to document the actual number of cyclists and pedestrians in Kansas City, the City of Kansas City, MO will be conducting survey/counts in October. This effort is in conjunction with the National Documentation Project.

Counts/surveys will be done at ten locations on two separate dates/times. We need a total of 20 - 25 volunteers; a minimum of 2 people are needed for each location on each date.

Volunteers will be REQUIRED to attend a training session. Volunteers will receive their assignments, survey packets and ID at the training. The training will take place, Wednesday, October 7th, 4:30 - 5:30 PM at Mid-America Regional Council, 600 Broadway.

Volunteers are needed for the following dates:
Thursday, October 8th, 4:00 - 6:00 PM
Saturday, October 10th, 10:00 AM - 12:00 Noon

If you are interested in volunteering please contact Deb Ridgway, Bicycle Pedestrian Coordinator, at deb_ridgway@kcmo.org or (816) 513-2592.

Thanks so much for your support of this very important project.

Deb Ridgway, MSW
Bicycle & Pedestrian Coordinator
414 East 12th Street
20th Floor, City Hall
Kansas City, MO 64106
(816) 513-2592 direct

The Urban Puzzle, Part III

2009-09-25T17:07:00.024-05:00

As I was looking through the FOCUS plan for midtown this image caught my eye. It's a conceptual drawing for connecting Southwest Boulevard to Main at 18th Street. (It currently connects at 19th and Baltimore.) Aside from requiring the razing of several vintage buildings, do you see anything wrong with this? Look carefully.

The Urban Puzzle:

In case you saw something different than I did, let me point out what I see: a lot of trouble and expense to make things marginally better for cars. The FOCUS plan explicitly says this is a combination of a traffic circle and a small urban park. Why should we have streetscaping for the benefit of people buzzing through at 25 or 35 miles per hour? It's not uncommon to see aesthetic improvements for automobile corridors, improvements that we barely notice, that are never questioned.

Meanwhile we have places that lack usable sidewalks. We give lip service to creating walkable environments, but we have a long way to go in changing our spending priorities. Streetscaping for cars is only the tip of the iceberg. We'll happily spend money on synchronized traffic signals, ramp metering, highway cameras to tell is how fast traffic is moving on the expressway, and extra paving for free right turn lanes. I can even go on the internet and find that as I'm writing this, the Kansas City Scout highway sign for Northbound I-35 at Parvin Road says, "Share the road with motorcycles look twice." Yet money for exclusively pedestrian improvements always has to be "found."

I know I'm ignoring issues of funding sources and who's responsible for what in regards to different kinds of infrastructure. I'm trying to make a point about what we do, not how we do it.

One example of such lop-sided priorities exists in the area of my 30th and Gillham thought experiment. In the next part of this series, I'll explain how a simple shift in priorities can improve the pedestrian experience without slowing auto traffic on Gillham. We may even get a little extra money to spend elsewhere.

Seen Around Town

2009-09-23T07:30:00.000-05:00

I haven't done one of these in ages because I haven't found very much that I want to show. Friday night, a friend of mine got these views of the downtown skyline from the top of a building in the crossroads. He wishes they weren't so grainy, but as he's the first to admin he's not a photographer.

Opportunity Cost, Part II

2009-09-20T11:29:00.002-05:00

This post started life as a response to my previous post on the opportunity cost of TIF. But I think it's worth its own post.

I wonder if city hall looks for magic bullets. The e-mail that my friend wrote to the member of the Union Hill Neighborhood Association was ignored, as were other bootstrap suggestions he's made to various neighborhood leaders. How much of that is because said leaders don't like his ideas? How much is because such efforts are likely to be thwarted by City Hall?

This week the Pitch published a story describing one glaring example of a bootstrap effort being ignored by City Hall. Local lawyer Lou Austin was working on a plan to revitalize the Bannister Mall area. City Hall's myopic focus on getting a soccer stadium blinded them to other possibilities. The result: Austin's plan couldn't get any traction. Austin's plan had local entrepreneurs and outside investors. Maybe they would eventually have asked for tax abatements or TIF. The point is that this home-grown effort was ignored downtown.

Here's a radical thought. What if City Hall had decided that getting the Wizards was more important that where they built their stadium and that they were not going to step on the toes of other efforts? What if City Hall had said to the Wizards, "there's already an effort to revitalize that area that we don't want to interfere with. If you want to work with them, we'll help broker the deal. If not, we will find you a good location in our city. We have 316 square miles of space, about a quarter of it undeveloped, most of it low density. There ought to be some place we can build a stadium without stepping on anybody's toes. We will help you find it."

The worst outcome for this scenario is that we have exactly what we have now: no stadium. No Bannister redevelopment. The best outcome is that we get a stadium and a redevelopment. Even being halfway successful gets us one or the other.

On further thought, I wonder if the basic problem here is the psychological effect of City Hall's involvement. As soon as City Hall becomes a partner, they become psychologically invested in its outcome. This will predispose them to thinking their idea is better than competing plans. They will fight for "their plan". City Hall needs to be agnostic.

Opportunity Cost

2009-09-18T08:36:00.001-05:00

As I'm writing this the City Council, much to my surprise, approved the appointments of Jeff Rumaner (a.k.a. Stretch) and Mary Lindsay to the TIF Commission. After Wednesday's front-page story in the Star, I thought both these nominations were dead on the vine. In a largely suburban, middle of the road city, the Star puts a large photo of a tattooed, wild-haired artist, above the fold, no less. Who thinks that was designed to scare people? Can I have a show of hands?

Oh, and did you notice that Lynn Horsely and Mike Mansur, the Star's usual City Hall reporters were absent from the story. True, Kevin Collison one of the article's writers follows development. Still, I can't help wondering if this story was shopped to a friendly reporter. (I'm speculating. It might just be that Horsely and Mansur were too busy with the MAST Ambulance story to have time for TIF.)

Some apparently blame the downturn in development on the Mayor's appointments to the TIF commission. While acknowledging that the sour economy contributes to the problem, many act as if we could improve things with a more liberal TIF policy.

I beg to differ.

What is the opportunity cost to the city of our massive investment in TIF? According to Wikipedia, opportunity cost is "the value of the next best alternative forgone as the result of making a decision." (The use of the term 'next best' in this definition is a little misleading. The reason the alternative is investigated is to make sure that it's not the best option.)

In the case of TIF, part of the alternative is the unknown number of small mom-and-pop projects that are discouraged by TIF. Economic research of recent decades has shown that small firms create the majority of new jobs and the majority of wage growth. One study found the strongest growth occurred in firms with fewer than twenty employees. I've also seen other suggestions that mom-and-pop retail is more profitable per square foot of store space than national chains. What of the Kauffman Foundations continued assertions that entrepreneurs are the real source of economic growth.

What does all this have to do with TIF? To even play, a business owner has to pony up at a minimum $20,000. This automatically selects for big fish before appointed or elected decision makers even get involved. If we're going to provide any government assistance to businesses at all, an entirely debatable question itself, we need a program that doesn't discriminate against the small fish.

The Urban Puzzle, Part II

2009-09-11T09:57:00.001-05:00

Urbanism on a Shoestring (Courtesy of 180° Urban Design and Architecture):

For Part II of my version of urbanism on a shoestring, I'm posting an e-mail a friend of mine sent to a member of the Union Hill Neighborhood Association.

"I ran into your wife a few weeks ago at the bus stop. We briefly discussed installing improvements for the bus stops in the area of Union Hill. She said the KCATA requires 100 boardings before it'll install a bench or a shelter. It doesn't help that the 53/54 routes will soon have their schedules reduced because of the Troost BRT.

"Fortunately, I think there's a way to get the 100 boardings the KCATA requires. Most of the things I'm going to suggest don't require any action from the KCATA itself. I'm not married to any of these ideas. My intent is not to push any particular proposal, but to spur thought and discussion. I'm hoping that others who see this list will have ideas of their own. Some of those ideas are bound to be better than mine.

"Reposition the five bus stops in the area. There are four routes that run through the are: 28, 53, 54, and 55. These routes have five bus stops in the area. Two are on McGee Trafficway, just east of Gillham road. Two are on the short stretch of 29th Street just West of Gillham and and one is on Gillham itself. I propose that these five stops be consolidated into two stops on Gillham: a Northbound stop on the Southeast corner of 29th and Gillham, and a Southbound stop on the Northwest corner of 29th and Gillham. The routes of 53, 54, and 55 would need to be realigned to turn west on 27th Street instead of 29th. Here's where the KCATA is going to object. This change would require the redrawing of maps for routes 53, 54, and 55.
"Publish weekday stop times in the newsletters and on the web sites for Longfellow and Union Hill. I have this list made up because I board near you after breakfast at the Filling Station. That schedule is on my computer at work. I'll forward it to you after the first of the week.
"Acquire bus schedules for the various routes in the area and leave them in area businesses such as "The Filling Station," "Seed," and "You Say Tomato."
"Organize a rider club. People may have misgivings (safety concerns) about transit. Since there's safety in numbers, organize a group of people who agree to meet every day and ride together. Since nothing attracts people like more people, after the club is established, some may join just for the social aspect.
"Advertise the riders club in the newsletters and on the web sites for Longfellow and Union Hill. Post signs for the club in the local businesses. Perhaps the KCATA would be willing to post information about the club on their web site. We could also consider creating Facebook and Meetup pages for the club. We should also investigate whether it can be listed on google transit.

"It may be possible to get a kiosk without the required 100 boardings. The two adjoining neighborhood associations could pay for the up-front costs of kiosks themselves. Procure two of the old kiosks being removed from Troost because of the BRT conversion. Among the residents in the neighborhoods, you should be able to scrape together enough money for repainting and new glass."

I'll be publishing the schedule my friend referred to as soon as I get it.

I'm Back

2009-09-06T09:47:00.000-05:00

It's been a rough couple of weeks for me. Personal and professional obligations have kept me away from this blog at a time where there was a firestorm on my comments. I suppose some of you think I was ignoring the uproar. So be it. I'll be going through the comments in the next few days. My time is still a little tight and the topic of the post is old news. That's why I'm going to focus on things that move us forward. If that bothers you, may I suggest that take advantage of one of the web sites that lets you start a blog for free.

In the meantime, here's something that's been a draft on my hard drive for nearly a month.

The Urban Puzzle, Part I

2009-09-06T09:37:00.007-05:00

A few weeks ago, Kevin Klinkenberg over at 180° Urban Design and Architecture started a series on his blog about how to do urbanism on a shoe string. This got me thinking about how we use our urban resources. Although I look forward to the insight that a working architect brings to this subject, I don't think it takes an architect to see that we could use what we have more effectively.

Urbanism on a Shoestring (Courtesy of 180° Urban Design and Architecture):

To make my ideas concrete, I'm going to apply them to an area near 30th and Gillham. It's an area that's close to my heart. The Filling Station, my favorite coffee shop, sits nearby at the intersection of 30th and McGee Trafficway. I spend a lot of time in the area. I've experienced the area as a pedestrian. I've spent much time looking at the buildings and thinking about the pieces of urban fabric that comprise the area. It's a puzzle waiting for someone to put the pieces together.

What are the pieces? Colonnade apartments mix with Shirtwaists. Townhouses mix with condominiums. Rows of uninterrupted store fronts speak of a time when walkability, not parking was the rule for commercial development. Not that parking is under served. Wide thoroughfares, and a vacated section of 30th Street provide more than enough parking for the few businesses that are already there. Gillham, a significant North-South artery provides easy access by car or bus. Speaking of buses, four lines pass through the area. Two more are proximate to it.

While I was working on this post, I found a description of the puzzle—the picture on the box, if you will—on page 33 of the Kansas City FOCUS Plan. Here's the list, along with my assessment of how the area around 30th and Gillham measures up. The items on this list are quoted directly from the FOCUS plan.

Higher density	Yes
Cultural diversity
A variety of housing types	Yes
An extensive, convenient, dependable public transit system.	Can be improved
Availability of employment within proximity to housing	Yes
Daily shopping opportunities in close proximity to housing	Store fronts not used
A higher proportion of local, smaller shops
A balance between parking needs and accommodation and regard for pedestrians
Regard for an active street with both cars and pedestrians
More opportunity for social interaction
Adaptive reuse and conservation of existing facilities	Yes
Architectural variety	Yes

Revisiting the Recent TIF Ordinances

2009-08-24T07:48:00.000-05:00

I'm still recoiling a bit from the backlash from last week's post suggesting that there might be something improper, perhaps even unethical about the City Council's introduction and passage of two TIF project ordinances in a single day. The two ordinances in question allow developer Tom Levitt to proceed with renovation of one of the last undeveloped buildings in the crossroads area. While I certainly went off half-cocked last week, (I am not a professional journalist), that doesn't change the fact that what happened last week is highly unusual.

So what did happen last week? The City Council had a committee discussion about an ordinance before it was introduced. That's not the way legislative bodies typically work. In rough outline, the usual procedure is this: introduction in full body, reference to committee where refinement is made and testimony is taken, then back to the full body for a final vote. This rough procedure is standard practice for the City Council, the County Legislature, the Missouri General Assembly, and even the United States Congress.

The City Clerk's page for these ordinances show only that they were introduced and passed on the single day, Thursday, August 13. They do not show that there was a discussion on the previous day, August 12. (At the very least, the City Clerk could have included a link to the Finance and Audit Committee discussion regarding these ordinances.) This is such an unusual order of events, that in the committee meeting, Council Woman Sharon Sanders Brooks asked the staffer from the City Attorney's office if the procedure they were following was legal. Said staffer assured her that it was.

So what lead to such an unusual legislative arrangement? In the words of the man who presented these ordinances to the committee, "What we are experienceing here is a perfect storm of unfortunate events." Originally, the TIF Commission was scheduled to discuss this project on July 8. Because no quorum was present, the TIF Commission meeting was rescheduled for July 27th, at which point they approved the Levitt project.

State law requires City Hall to wait fourteen days after the TIF Commission approval before introducing an ordinance. The Council was not allowed to consider this plan until Tuesday, August 11. Since the Council was not scheduled to meet the week of August 24, and since the ten year expiration date on the 22nd and Main TIF plan was August 26, if the Council was going to pass project 18, they would have to do it on August 13.

Ordinances 090718 and 090719 passed with support of all the affecting taxing jurisdictions including the county, school district, and library district.