Dave's Of Our Lives

Okay the title is a bit of a stretch. My apologies to those allergic to bad soap opera puns. The Kansas City Star is reporting that one of the potential tennants for the Power & Light District might be Minnesota-based Famous Dave's Barbeque. Don't get me wrong, Dave's has pretty good barbeque but is the Cordish Company really that out of touch with our Kansas City heritage of considering ourselves the barbecue capital of the world? Famous Dave's features St. Louis Style ribs! I didn't even know St. Louis did barbeque, let alone their own style. So the theory is that people will go to downtown Kansas City to eat St. Louis style barbeque made by a restaurant from Minnesota?

OneKC Arena

I know that Sprint has naming rights to the new downtown arena, but wouldn't it make a great marketing tool for Kansas City to turn the roof into a giant OneKC logo? The taxpayers put some money into this project too. I think the City should get some "naming rights" ourselves. As long as blimps are looking for interesting shots during football and baseball games, what better way to promote Kansas City? Not to mention the view from every airliner that comes into KCI. My apologies for the crummy rendering. I'm no graphic artist!

A Truck By Any Other Color...

A few years ago I served on a citizens advisory committee that analyzed various City departments and made recommendations on how they could change their business models to operate more efficiently. One of our tasks was to look at the administration of the City’s fleet of rolling stock. (That’s fancy talk for cars and trucks) We made observations that KCMO’s handling of fleet administration was unusual. Among municipal governments we surveyed across the country, it s common to find a single centralized fleet maintenance and management function. Kansas City's separate departmental fleets reinforced the “silo culture” that was reducing efficiency. We recommended the City hire a Fleet Administrator and consolidate operations. Having green trucks for Parks, orange trucks for Public Works and blue trucks for the Water Department and individual garages, maintenance and purchasing procedures for each department just didn’t make sense. What especially bothered me was that some Parks & Rec trucks sat idle during the winter because, let’s face it, there’s not a lot of mulch hauling going on in January. Couldn’t these trucks be fitted with plows and put to work clearing snow? At the time, the answer was no. Public Works couldn’t use a Parks & Rec truck and vice versa. Huh? Aren’t they all City vehicles? We now have a fleet administrator who is implementing the suggestions our committee made so long ago. He’s moving forward with purchasing “City” vehicles and not “Department” vehicles. Along those lines, the new vehicles will all be a uniform color and have a “City” logo and not a “Department” logo on the side. A truck is a truck. Right? Not so according to our board of Parks Commissioners. The Parks Department is about to get use of $9 Million in new equipment. The commissioners, rather than being grateful at receiving some much-needed capital equipment, are upset about the color. According to parks Commissioner Tim Kristl, they’re either green or they (the commissioners) don’t want them. “We don’t want the trucks then,” Kristl said. “We want them to be green and we want the (parks) logo.” Parks Commissioner Sandra Aust says, “It’s a long, long tradition in this Parks Department and that’s our responsibility to uphold that tradition and believe it or not a color of a truck and a logo on a truck means a lot to our citizens.” Apparently it’s also a long tradition to let parks go without mowing, allow restroom facilities and shelter houses to deteriorate and leave trash cans overflowing with garbage. Just because something is a “tradition” doesn’t mean it’s a good one.

Field of Streams

“Sewers aren’t sexy.” That was advice given to me a few months ago when I was talking about what I consider to be the issues. “You can’t win with issues nobody wants to talk about.” Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one concerned that our current sewer and stormwater system that runs the length of Brookside Boulevard and into Brush Creek is in violation of the Federal Clean Water Act. I’m sure dumping sewage into a stream seemed like a perfectly good idea a hundred years ago but today we know better… Don’t we? Ask the city of Louisville what the consequences are when you ignore an obvious problem and the EPA has to step in and make you fix things. They’re on the hook for a $500 Million project. I’ve seen estimates for our sewer problems surpassing $1 Billion. “The settlement ensures that MSD will make extensive improvements to its sewer systems to eliminate unauthorized discharges of untreated sewage and to address problems of overflows from sewers that carry a combination of untreated sewage and storm water at a cost likely to exceed $500 million. Throughout the year, MSD's sewer systems are overwhelmed by rainfall resulting in unlawful discharges of untreated sewage and overflows of combined sewage into the Ohio River and its tributaries totaling billions of gallons each year.” Sound familiar? Just change “MSD” to “KCMO Water Department” and “Ohio River” to “Brush Creek” and you will be describing the Brookside Interceptor sewer system. The $30 Million we're spending to rip up Huntington is a start, but not anywhere near what needs to be done. It's no secret the EPA has been investigating Kansas City. Ignoring the problem will not make it go away.

Sign Of The Times

Received the first website request for a yardsign today. I wasn’t anticipating requests this far out but it’s certainly a nice little surprise on a cold December afternoon.

Say It Don't Spray It

From the Kansas City Star: "The Board of Parks and Recreation Commissioners agreed to pay National Streetscape Inc. $1,089,500 to create spray grounds in Douglas, Sunnyside, Harmony and Parade parks." The Parks and Recreation Board of Commissioners is a group of five citizens appointed by the mayor. They are not City employees nor are they required to have any experience with operating a large service oriented organization. The budget for Parks and Recreation gets cut year after year. I've toured the Parks & Rec facilities and let me tell you it's amazing what department director Mark McHenry and staff manage to accomplish with what they're given (or not given) to work with. Last year P&R had to reduce the number of times they mow the parks due to budget constraints. I know of one instance where a P&R truck was pulled from service during routine maintainence because the mechanic discovered the brakes were bordering on inoperable. The garage on Gillham is literally a horse barn. As I write this there's a City employee over there huddled next to a space heater because the building is so old and in such disrepair that the cold wind whistles through holes in the walls. We can't keep our parks sufficiently maintained, our equipment in safe, operational condition or even afford to patch holes in the walls at Parks garage facilities so the P&R Commissioners do what? They spend a million dollars on spray parks?! Let me see if I can understand the commission's rationale. We can't cut the grass as often as we need to but suddenly we're in the waterpark business? I have a hard enough time keeping my lawn sprinkler working all summer.

Show me the money!

An unpleasant part of running for office is raising money. At the start you have to hit up friends and family for seed money to get your campaign off the ground. Some candidates probably have wealthier friends and family than others. I myself come from a fairly modest background so the ability to rack up a huge amount of money with a few letters has been limited. As difficult as it is to ask for money, it has been both rewarding and somewhat humbling when the checks start coming in. When you get a $100 check from a retiree that you know is on a limited income you feel deeply moved. To me that's a big show of faith in me, and our political system. I don't intend to let anyone down that shows that much faith in our campaign.