Paw Prints the Magazine

This Doggone City

By Joe Miller; Special to kcdowntowner.com

Here’s a story about how things work for regular folks in a city that doesn’t.

A little more than three years ago, a friend of mine thought it would be neat to have an off-leash dog area in a park in her part of the city [Kansas City, MO in case you were wondering]. Dog parks are very popular because millions of people have dogs. Other cities build them because they attract young professionals — the perfect demographic to help cities grow.

My friend called a meeting to see if other folks might like the idea, too — and 120 people showed up.

She called the city’s parks department and asked how she could make it happen. The city workers there were very helpful. One even drove around town with my friend on her day off, scouting locations.

At first my friend thought the ideal location would be South Oak Park, just east of Wornall at 83rd. But the parks staffer said it had too many trees; it would cost too much to clear the land. (Also, neither one of them knew at the time that the park — complete with a playground — sits on top of a toxic dump, but we’ll get to that later in our story.)

They finally settled on another park nearby: Sunnyside Park. It’s just west of Wornall on 83rd.

“This is a perfect location for a dog park,” the parks staffer said.

My friend had more community meetings. Her group circulated a petition and got more than 700 signatures in favor of the project.

There were people who didn’t like the idea, of course. There always are. You’re never going to get 100 percent backing on any project, be it a dog park or a bridge. But the dog park naysayers were far outnumbered by the dog park backers.

My friend felt like she was part of something really exciting. She was making new friends and they were all happy to be doing something to make their city better.

It just happened to be campaign season [in Kansas City, MO] at the time. Dozens of people were running for City Council and Mayor. These politicians saw the dog park supporters as an opportunity. They showed up at dog park meetings, smiled and shook hands with people. They said the dog park was a wonderful idea and they would help make it happen. The soon-to-be Mayor even showed up with his little poodle (at my behest).

After the election, the new Mayor appointed a new Parks Board. Shortly after they were sworn in, they took up the matter of the dog park.

It just so happened, though, that one of the new Parks Board appointees was a longtime friend of one of the handful of people who opposed the dog park — a woman who lives across the street from Sunnyside Park.

This new Parks Board appointee had been involved in politics for many years. She was once a member of the City Council and she had served on a lot of important boards. She had a lot more experience working the system than all but one of her new fellow board members.

She’s also extremely loud and obnoxious. And she has a way of using those characteristics to bully people into doing what she wants. (For the record, I argued strenuously against the appointment of this woman when I worked in the Mayor’s Office, for this very reason.)

So what happened when the dog park issue came up for a vote?

The new Parks Board met behind closed doors and decided against a dog park in Sunnyside. Then they refused to allow anyone to speak about dog parks during the public comment portion of their public meeting.

The hundreds of new friends who had come together to create a dog park were understandably upset. They’re Americans, after all. Americans tend to get pissed off when their leaders meet in secret and screw them over.

One woman yelled at the new Parks Board members, but all of the rest simply argued that they should be allowed to speak. The new Parks Board members, in turn, attacked the citizens’ characters, saying they didn’t know how to behave in meetings.

Angry and undeterred, the dog park supporters got a lawyer — a very good, well-known one. This lawyer believed that the dog park supporters had a strong case against the Parks Board for violating their First Amendment rights.

Apparently the Parks Board’s lawyer thought they had a strong case, too. He recommended that they appoint a task force to examine the issue of dog parks so they wouldn’t get sued.

So that’s what they did. They asked members of the City Council to appoint citizens to this task force, and the Council members obliged.

These folks met for a year, giving time out of their busy schedules to support an issue they thought might make the city just a little more fun to live in. They had meetings all over the city, they did all kinds of research and, after all was said and done, they gave the Parks Board a list of recommendations.

Among those recommendations: Put a dog park in Sunnyside.

At the same time, however, the officials at the Parks Department, working under the direction of the new Parks Board, had already decided that there would not be a dog park there. They very quickly threw together their own recommendations for where dog parks might go. At one point, a week or so before the task force’s report came out, one of them sent out an email saying they should maybe drive around and at least look at the parks they were going to recommend for dog parks.

It’s obvious from this email that they knew all along that this task force that the Mayor and City Council had asked regular folks to give up their precious time to serve on was basically just a sham to avert legal action on a First Amendment violation.

So what park did the Parks Board recommend instead of Sunnyside?

The location that the parks staffer had said would be too expensive to develop: South Oak Park.

The one that was built on a toxic dump.

My friend discovered this after she got a bunch of documents in response to an information request under the Missouri Sunshine law (be sure to check out the parts I’ve highlighted in red). In one of these documents, the Parks Department staff actually recommended against building a park on the site because the contamination had never been properly mitigated. The Parks Board ignored this warning. Now there’s a playground on the contaminated land.

Curious, my friend visited the site. She examined a stream of water and saw that it was bright orange, a sign of methane contamination. She went back another time after a rain and, after just a few minutes of walking around, her sneakers were stained orange.

Which is ironic, because orange was the new Mayor’s campaign color.

The new Mayor was upset that the Parks Board he appointed had so blatantly disregarded a process designed to engage regular folks — the ones he campaigned to make the city work for. He reached out to my friend and assured her he was going to turn the Parks Board around. He told her he was going to remove some of the Parks Board members if they didn’t abide by the task force’s recommendations.

My friend felt hopeful. She had a bunch of meetings with the Mayor, his staff, members of the Parks Board, and neighborhood folks, etc. She took off time from work to attend some of them.

The Mayor told her she’d have to work with her City Council reps to find some money to help pay for the park. One of those reps said my friend would have to raise $150,000 before she could get any city funds. Another Council member — one who attended the dog park meetings before the election — agreed.

My friend was flabbergasted. “Who else has to do that?” she asked me. “Do they make people do that when they want a playground? We pay taxes, too.”

Still, my friend thought the Mayor could make it happen, even though his political power is very weak because he’s made so many mistakes while in office. After all, it is his Parks Board.

But then last week the Parks Board voted to kill the chances for a dog park in Sunnyside once and for all, choosing instead the toxic dump site.

My friend and all of her new friends are understandably dejected. She’s decided she is going to to move from Kansas City, as have some of her partners in grassroots activism. She wouldn’t be the first friend of mine who has left because the city is so lame. Over the last ten years, I’ve seen quite a few leave. They’re disgusted with the lack of quality amenities that other cities have, like dog parks, bike trails and sewers that don’t back up. They’re tired of leaders who rig the system for their own personal interest, who engage the citizenry only as a meaningless formality.

Some of the members of the Parks Board are no doubt happy to hear this. They might actually smile and rub their hands together in delight at the notion of my friend moving to a cooler city.

But I have to ask, in a city that is struggling mightily because it’s been losing population like crazy for the last couple of decades, is that what’s really best for the city?

To you insiders I have to ask, are we really going to be able to rebuild this city with the likes of Aggie Stackhaus?

*Permission to crosspost granted by the author:  Originally Published 01/24/2010 – 4:02 p.m. CST

For more on the Kansas City, MO dog park issue read Paw Prints The Magazine’s July 2009 article, “Kansas City Solidifies Reputation as a Cow Town instead of a Dog Town”

Tags: Aggie Stackhaus, dog park, kansas city, Kansas City City Council, South Oak Park, Sunnyside Park