Held Back

For a river town, Kansas City doesn’t much like its river.

Few people here seem to know it, but, apparently, riverbanks have uses beyond oil refining, sewage treatment and blackjack. Rivers are also a source of beauty and inspiration. In Omaha, for instance, people actually walk alongside the Missouri River — for miles at a time!

This revelation came a few weeks ago, when a consultant made a pres­entation to a City Council committee. Steve Rhoades, a landscape architect and planner, talked about opportunities to build trails on top of the levees that keep the Missouri River from flooding. Rhoades is working for the Mid-America Regional Council on a proposed system of hiking and biking paths, greenways and open spaces linking the seven metropolitan counties.

As the light-rail discussion has made clear, Kansas City tends to lag behind its peers. Yet Rhoades’ talk was in some ways even more demoralizing than learning for the 18th time how Portland, Oregon’s transit system raised property values, healed the sick and solved a New York Times crossword puzzle. Rhoades’ slides included images of levee trails in Lawrence and Manhattan, Kansas, and in Omaha. Yes, while we’re dousing chemical fires next to our rivers, our little sibs are enjoying theirs.

Historically, Kansas City has considered its rivers something to be hidden or defeated. Last week, dignitaries and the press packed a windowless conference room in the Muehlebach Hotel to glimpse the design of a new Paseo Bridge.

When it opens in four years, the $245 million bridge will allow cars and trucks to span the Big Muddy with greater comfort and ease.

Hikers and cyclists, meanwhile, look for the river and find dead ends. “You can get so close to it, and yet you can’t actually get to it,” says Brent Hugh, a Raytown resident and Missouri Bicycle Federation member.

The good news is, barriers between citizens and water are coming down. At Kaw Point in Kansas City, Kansas, parkgoers can stand on a rocky tongue of land and watch the Kansas and Missouri rivers commingle at their toes. In Platte County, workers are putting a trail on a levee between Parkville and Riverside. On October 31, after Rhoades’ presentation, the council’s Transportation and Infrastructure Committee told the city manager to put together a plan for opening up Kansas City’s levees for recreation.

Alas, city officials can’t simply spread a layer of crushed limestone atop the levees and plant a sign welcoming hikers.

The Army Corps of Engineers may build it, and the people of the city may own it, but a levee answers to a different creature altogether. In Greater Kansas City, the levees and floodwalls along the Kansas and Missouri rivers are managed by seven independent districts. These districts are run by supervisors elected by property owners near the levees, giving them a somewhat colonial flavor.

These levee boards are very protective, viewing levees as damage control and nothing more.

That’s obvious to anyone biking around the Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport. The levee between the runways and the Missouri River is managed by the North Kansas City Levee Unit , made up of five guys most of us don’t know: Richard Lanning, William Zimmer, Clay Edwards, Ed A. Brown and Michael K. O’Neill. Every tenth of a mile or so, signs at the base of the levee warn that trespassers will be prosecuted. The signs are “pretty mean-spirited,” says Councilman Bill Skaggs.

Skaggs tells me that he approached the supervisors of the North Kansas City Levee Unit 15 or 20 years ago, when he was a member of the Missouri House of Representatives. Hiking on the levee was one of the issues he wanted to address. But the conversation went nowhere.

“Their attorney politely said, ‘It’s really none of your business,'” Skaggs says.

During the October 31 committee meeting, Skaggs said that getting multiple uses out of levees in urban areas made sense. Of the levee around the downtown airport, Skaggs said, “I’d love to go up there and walk on it.”

“There are a lot of people who would,” Rhoades answered.

Rhoades told the committee that he, too, once spoke to the North Kansas City Levee Unit about recreation opportunities. And like Skaggs, he met resistance. “They are opposed to even discussion of the concept,” he said.

Jerry Brant, the North Kansas City Levee Unit’s attorney, tells me that the supervisors are willing to listen to ideas. Ultimately, however, the district has a long-standing policy of prohibiting public access. “This board’s sole function is to maintain this levee,” Brant says.

The levee, Brant says, protects lives and industry. Any digging or interference, he adds, could upset what is already a sensitive flood-control device. “That water coming down there is a very powerful thing,” he says.

Well, yeah, obviously the levee’s first priority is stopping the river from going all Katrina. But other river towns have figured out ways to open up their levees to recreation without putting people or property at risk. Why can’t we?

Hugh, the bike rider, suggests that the levee districts are missing an opportunity. The levees require $23 million from local sources to match the $42 million that Congress recently authorized for bolstering flood protection. Allowing people on or near the levees, Hugh says, is a way to build support for them. “It’s what’s going to make people care about the levees and spending billions of dollars to fix them,” he says. Public access also makes the levees eligible for federal spending on transportation and air quality.

I can understand how property owners in low-lying areas would be nervous about anyone touching the levees. But it’s annoying that obscure private interests seem to have cut off any real discussion about how a public-works project might also be used to improve the quality of life for everyone in town. The police department, after all, doesn’t answer first to homeowners with the most expensive jewel collections.

I recently took a look at what we’re missing. I parked my car in the River Market and headed to the pedestrian pier at the end of Main.

My walk along the river was short.

The trail ended at the ASB Bridge, where a railroad had posted no-trespassing signs. Across the river, colored leaves fell from trees into the water, a beautiful sight beheld by virtually no one.