MoDOT’s crappy maintenance of inner-city bridges is no accident — just look

Charles Chappelle moved out of the inner city several years ago, but he still feels a connection to the area. “My church is there,” he says. “My barber is there.”

Chappelle also owns a couple of houses along East 29th Street. A daughter lives in one of them.

So Chappelle makes frequent trips to the East Side, though he’s retired from the Federal Aviation Administration and has lived in Lee’s Summit since 2000.

And the neglect that he sees bothers him.

I’m sitting in the passenger seat of Chappelle’s burnt-orange pickup truck. Occasionally, to the annoyance of other motorists, he slows down to point out his objections.

This is not a typical blight inspection. Chappelle is not leading a tour of boarded-up homes or liquor stores. We do not pause to consider a broken drinking fountain in a city park.

Instead, we’re taking stock of bridges, exit ramps and guardrails. Chappelle thinks the Missouri Department of Transportation’s maintenance of Interstate 70’s right of way in the center city is so poor, it’s tantamount to redlining.

“A lot of this is about fences,” Chappelle says after exiting westbound I-70 at Van Brunt Boulevard. Weeds choke the chain-link barriers between the homes and the on- and offramps. The grass needs mowing.

Overgrown vegetation is one problem; another is the condition of the bridges above I-70 — also MoDOT’s responsibility.

“Why don’t they repair this?” Chappelle asks as we pass over I-70 on East 27th Street. The rough and patchy-looking surface makes the stretches of East 27th that are maintained by Kansas City’s Street and Traffic Division seem luxurious — and that’s saying something.

It’s not just the pavement that looks terrible. On the west side of the bridge, foam cups and a Twix wrapper cling to the tendrils of overgrown weeds. A mangled guardrail on the east side of the bridge looks like someone used it as a turnstile.

The East 23rd Street bridge is also a mess. No one has bothered to remove the pedestals that used to support traffic signals or streetlights. (On a return visit, I measure an inch-and-a-half-deep seam in the road surface.)

“There’s a pattern here,” Chappelle says. “Do you see a pattern?”

When Chappelle drives in the southeastern suburbs, he sees a different pattern.

He sees progress.

Interstate 470 connects the Grandview triangle with Lee’s Summit and Independence. Unlike I-70, it has MoDOT’s full attention.

Crews recently repaired the bridge approach to Raytown Road. A few miles to the east, workers are busy on a massive, $48 million upgrade to the I-470/U.S. Highway 50 interchange. Other workers are installing a new interchange at Strother Road in Lee’s Summit.

While they’re enjoying the new connections, I-470 users can also take comfort in the fact that their highway is a little safer than most. MoDOT put in new median protection from a point north of I-70 all the way to Highway 50.

“They got project on top of project out here,” Chappelle says.

As I mentioned, Chappelle lives in Lee’s Summit. He’s happy to see so many orange barrels in his neck of the woods. While passing a new exit that offers easy access to a Target store in Lee’s Summit, he says: “It’s wonderful. I’m glad. Don’t take it back.”

But to Chappelle, all the activity in the suburbs puts the seeming disregard for I-70 in the inner city in stark relief. While going past weeds that choke a fence near Jackson Avenue, he says: “You should see the same vista that someone in Johnson County sees.” Johnson County highways are the Kansas Department of Transportation’s responsibility. But you get the point.

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MoDOT will hear none of this talk of redlining. A spokesman at the agency bristles when I used the term to describe Chappelle’s feelings.

Steve Porter, the spokesman, says MoDOT is very busy. The department has 10,204 bridges to maintain. Do I know how many are in poor condition?

No, I don’t.

Well, it’s 1,100, and MoDOT’s going to replace 802 of them in the next five years.

“We have a lot of work to do,” Porter says.

There’s more work than money to pay for it. Porter reminds me that Missouri’s gasoline tax is only 17 cents a gallon, well below what other states collect at the pump to fund their highway departments.

Yet in spite of inadequate funding, Porter notes, “We don’t have bridges collapsing. We don’t have major issues.”

As for the weeds, Porter says crews try to cut them once a year. Sure enough, a week after I spoke with Porter, I see guys with trimmers in Chappelle’s old neighborhood.

“It’s not redlining,” Porter says. “We try to get to things on a regular basis.”

Porter’s points are well-taken. But his eagerness to dismiss Chappelle as a crank suggests that the agency can be coldhearted. “I guess that’s what your friend doesn’t much have a clue about,” Porter says, after explaining the role of traffic patterns and regional planning in forming MoDOT’s list of priorities.

Porter says there’s no effort to discriminate against poor areas.

Still, it’s not a fluke that MoDOT trucks are a more frequent sight in the metro’s wealthier zip codes.

In some instances, MoDOT is able to share the cost of construction with cities and developers. Tax-increment financing, for example, is paying for some of the work at the interchange of I-470 and Highway 50. TIF is also contributing to the Strother Road interchange.

Cost sharing works great in communities where developers want to be. Lee’s Summit is such a place. East 23rd Street is not.

I should point out that TIF’s inequalities are hardly limited to freeway construction. We’ve known for a long time that TIF is used to help developers put up million-dollar condos in areas that are hardly blighted.

But I’m not going to gripe about TIF this week. Instead, I’ll argue that MoDOT should pay special attention to the East Side to compensate for the destruction created when the road gang originally tore through.

Highway builders used tax maps to sketch their plans. Low-rent areas provided the cheapest routes and the least political opposition. By the 1960s, freeways came to be known as “white men’s roads through black men’s homes.” (A grassroots coalition of neighborhoods altered — but failed to stop — the construction of the South Midtown Freeway, now known as Bruce R. Watkins Drive.)

“Urban renewal” efforts of the 1950s and ’60s uprooted thousands of residents and became synonymous with “black removal.” It’s not easy for those of us who weren’t around then to know what was lost when the slum-clearance agencies wiped out, say, the Attucks neighborhood.

Interstates, however, offer a glimpse of the damage done. Streets that dead-end at I-70’s right of way practically howl with despair. “It’s like a scar,” Chappelle says of the interstate.

The obstacle gets handed from generation to generation. The interstate separates some children on the East Side from their elementary schools. I walk the Cleveland Avenue bridge over I-70 — honeysuckle bushes are so out of control, they push pedestrians into the street. The guardrail is no higher than an adult’s waist.

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I’m writing this column the day after a 10-year-old boy was accidentally shot in a house along East 25th Street.

Two blocks from there, East 25th dead-ends into I-70.

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