Kansas City Council advances streetcar extension to ballot, would need to find additional $30 million to pay for it

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Earlier in the week, we tried to set the record straight about why the Kansas City streetcar isn’t going to travel down Brookside Boulevard anytime soon, if at all.

Some among the chattering class insist that a few grumpy Brookside residents sent City Hall fleeing from a fight with the neighborhood and instead deciding to curtail the line down Main Street near the University of Missouri-Kansas City campus.

That theory is flawed for two reasons. One, if a little opposition were all it took to stave off one of City Hall’s expensive ideas, the streetcar would never have gotten started downtown. 

Two, the Brookside NIMBY theory ignores basic math. We explained that it was money that meant the streetcar wouldn’t go to Brookside Boulevard. Let’s put a finer point on that: At a Thursday committee hearing at City Hall, streetcar planners explained that the extension of the rail line down Brookside Boulevard into Waldo had a $114 million funding gap. That’s to say, the local money generated by a sales-tax increase and special assessments, coupled with anticipated federal matching funds, would have been nine figures short of meeting the $471 million project cost.

That kind of money doesn’t just pop up out of nowhere, even if every Brookside resident falls in love with the streetcar idea. Clearly, there are at least some living in Brookside who don’t like the streetcar idea, no matter what. Others have questions about it. But gauging the amount of support or opposition in Brookside is a guessing game. There are no published polls, and there has been no vote.

Meanwhile, the plan that voters will see at the ballot boxes in August and November, which stops at or near UMKC after heading south on Main Street, still comes up $30 million short.

Doug Stone, a Husch Blackwell lawyer working with City Hall on the streetcar project, says he thinks the city could make up that $30 million difference through various grant programs. Trying to bridge the $114 million gulf for the Brookside line, on the other hand, was impracticable.

The City Council on Thursday passed a resolution to have voters approve a transportation-development district and a one-cent sales-tax increase, along with special assessments for most properties within one-third of a mile on either side of the streetcar line.

During a Thursday council committee discussion prior to the full City Council vote, members of the public were invited to share their thoughts about the project. Russ Johnson, a Kansas City councilman and unabashed supporter of the streetcar project, led the discussion. Johnson has insisted that the streetcar will help economic development near the rail lines and could help build urban population density. When he got re-elected to the council in 2011, he was living near Tiffany Springs Park in Platte County, north of Highway 152 in one of Kansas City’s farthest, most sprawling suburban locations.

Johnson told public speakers that they had three minutes apiece to make their point. The handful of people who showed up to the meeting testified mostly in favor of the project.

One of those folks was Lou Austin, who chairs the Three Trails Village Community Improvement District in south Kansas City. Austin shared some demographic figures about the 64130 zip code, an area east of Highway 71 that The Kansas City Star once dubbed “Murder Factory.” Austin said the average household income there is $24,266, and he estimated that residents there pay an average $8,007 in transportation costs associated with having a car. That’s about 33 percent of income going to vehicle-related transportation. 

Austin said greater access to transit could cut that average cost in 64130 by more than half. (The proposed streetcar lines in the latest extension plans don’t reach 64130, though, if approved, the extension would include a new Prospect Avenue MAX bus route that cuts through the impoverished zip code.)

Austin took four minutes to make his case, uninterrupted by Johnson.

One resident spoke up against the streetcar extension. Marsha Lerenberg, of Armour Hills, wondered aloud why the city wanted to spend big money on a streetcar line when it could spend far less on a bus system that would reach more people.

Just as Lerenberg reached the three-minute mark of her testimony, Johnson cut her off.

“Your time is up,” he told her.