Get ready for another Clay Chastain petition drive to support a detail-starved transit plan
Can Kansas City trust a landscaper in Virginia who struggles with e-mail technology to shepherd what would be the city’s biggest capital improvement project in history?
Clay Chastain says you can.
“I think this plan I have designed that you have in your hand is the greatest public transportation plan placed before voters in the history of the United States of America,” he says.
Chastain, the Bedford, Virginia, resident last heard from around these parts when he finished a distant last in the mayoral primary in April, is talking about his latest $1.82 billion light rail/commuter rail plan that he wants to put on the November 2016 ballot.
We struggled over whether to cover this latest plan for several reasons. The most obvious one is that his plan is unrealistic.
Chastain contemplates building a 30-mile line that starts from the forthcoming Cerner campus at the old Bannister Mall site to Kansas City International Airport with seven stops in between. That light-rail spine is supplemented by a 12-mile suburban commuter system that brings people from eastern Jackson County to Union Station, with a stop along the way at Truman Sports Complex. And then there are the usual gondola lines and other such accoutrements that typically dangle from his transit plans.
That all sounds nice. But like other Chastain plans, his latest struggles under the weight of further scrutiny.
Some of those details were not readily available on Wednesday. He forgot to include attachments with further information in many of his e-mails to local media outlets.
“I think we’re technically challenged in Bedford,” Chastain says.
Financially challenged, too.
Chastain envisions paying for the plan with $1.8 billion over 25 years, coming from a three-quarters-cent sales tax, which comes from a new one-eighth-cent transportation sales tax, a new one-quarter-cent capital improvement sales tax and redirecting the existing three-eighths-cent sales tax. Then he counts on a 40 percent match from the federal government, good for $728 million. And when those numbers aren’t enough, he thinks that the business community, especially developers, will kick in another $200 million out of the kindness of their own hearts.
Why? Because Chastain thinks they should.
“That’s reasonable to expect that we can get developers to pitch in that kind of money over time,” Chastain says of this $200 million line item.
The general pattern among developers in this town is to find as much of other people’s money to make their projects work, not the other way around.
Chastain deserves credit for one thing: He envisions transportation as a means to connect people to places and not mostly a way to promote real estate development. But that’s not the reason we write about Chastain’s plan. It’s mainly because, with the low 1,700-signature threshold required to put measures on the ballot, there’s a reasonable prospect that Chastain could get his plan before voters next year. And Chastain, for once, seems to acknowledge some of the thinking in his plan might not be fully formed and that it’s larded with financial assumptions.
“I will fully admit that there are no guarantees,” Chastain says.
Still, he says his ideas have more merit than others currently underway.
“It’s certainly better to go for this than some little putt-putt in downtown,” Chastain says of the two-mile streetcar line under construction on Main Street. “There’s zero transportation benefit to the streetcar.”
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Shoppers at midtown and Brookside grocery stores will get to exercise theirs when Chastain greets them with a clipboard next year.
