Richard Tolbert Saves What?

By NADIA PFLAUM

Debra Higgs watched with relief as men wearing masks removed pile after pile of belongings and random debris from her neighbor’s house at 1806 East 36th Street. For years, she’d been asking City Hall to make her neighbors mow the lawn and stop using the property as a dumping ground for car parts and scraps of wood and metal.

But she faced a mighty stubborn opponent: The neighbor was Richard C. Tolbert — the same Richard Tolbert who recently circulated a petition to stop Bannister Mall from being redeveloped as a soccer stadium and office complex. The same Richard Tolbert who, when we last checked in on him, was running for Jackson County executive while facing numerous code violations and filing serial bankruptcy claims in what looked like an effort to avoid paying more than $100,000 in unpaid taxes and fines for code violations.

Last week, Tolbert, his brother “and some others,” were evicted from the property next door to Higgs, he told The Pitch February 27. “My brother got mixed up in one of those subprime mortgages,” he said, speaking on his cell phone while moving his belongings from the front lawn to a U-Haul pulled up next to the house. “He got behind. He got foreclosed upon. There was a trial. We appealed. We were granted a new trial. But before we got a new trial, they came and put us out without any real notice.… So we’re having to scramble and get our stuff.”

According to county records, the house is owned by Nationstar Mortgage LLC.

“The way they do it,” Tolbert said, “they put your stuff out of the house, and they made a big pile so you couldn’t get to anything. It’s taken us a week to dig out our important stuff from the stuff that isn’t so important. But we’re handling it. We’re dealing with it.”

Higgs, Tolbert’s long-suffering neighbor, said the same day that seeing the house turned inside-out was more disturbing than she expected.

“You would not believe someone living in that filth,” she said. “All these years I’ve been fighting about what’s outside the house, not knowing what’s inside the house.”

Tolbert the candidate in 2006  

Tolbert owns property at 2012 Agnes and 1101 Linwood, but he wouldn’t say where he and his brother are moving.

“I don’t want to tell, because then they’ll come and mess with us there. They been following me around,” he said. When I asked who “they” were, he said: “The authorities! The civil process! The people that handle evictions! No one has ever seen a case like this!”

He continued, “Nothing should happen until your appeal is decided, right? Isn’t that what most of us think? Everyone’s telling me, ‘We’ve never seen a case like this before.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I know.’”

Higgs and most of Kansas City are by now quite familiar with Tolbert’s determination.

“He’s the first one on TV talking about saving Bannister Mall,” Higgs said with a chuckle.

From the looks of the mountains of junk piled on the front lawn of 1806 East 36th, Tolbert saves everything.