JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

QuikTrip’s proposal to build at 39th and Southwest Trafficway and disrupt the surrounding neighborhoods erupted into public view last week, and both sides are digging in for an extended battle.

From two days of reporting, here’s what I’ve learned:

• QuikTrip has a contract to purchase the UBC building, which would be razed, on the northwest corner of the intersection.
• QuikTrip is refusing to answer specific questions about the project and probably will refuse to meet with large groups of neighbors.
• The project will require City Council approval, which is where the neighborhood will have its best chance of prevailing.

Experience has demonstrated that QuikTrip is a determined and wily company. In Kansas City, they always use the politically connected law firm of Rouse Frets White Goss Gentile Rhodes (located, coincidentally, just south of the Trafficway on Belleview). It is home to such notable attorneys as Mike White, former Jackson County executive, and Jim Bowers, a former assistant city attorney.

Patricia Jensen

Handling the Southwest Trafficway project is another former assistant city attorney with Rouse Frets, Patricia Jensen, whom I reached by phone but was unwilling to comment.

Jensen has already stiff armed the neighborhood once. She helped set up an outdoor meeting Dec. 1, a meeting at which she and the QT project manager, Eric Eckhart, planned to meet with people whose homes back up to the site.

After word of the meeting got out, more than 70 people showed up in the UBC parking lot. Just a few minutes into the meeting, Jensen and Eckhart abruptly ended it on grounds it violated the provisions of the city’s latest ordinance pertaining to Covid-19 gatherings.

The ordinance prohibits indoor gatherings of more than 10 people but, to my reading, does not set a limit on outdoor gatherings. Two Roanoke Homes Association board members told me the people who had come out for the meeting were masked and were socially distancing.

Cancellation of the meeting gave lie to a statement made by a QuikTrip spokesman that appeared in The Star two days after the meeting. The QT spokesperson, Aisha Jefferson-Smith, said, “Our goal is to meet with the community and listen.”

The events of Dec. 1 made perfectly clear, however, that what she really meant was QT would be willing to meet with a very limited number of people and wanted to avoid contentious situations as much as possible.

Naturally, cancellation of the meeting riled the neighbors. The next day — Dec. 2 — the Roanoke Homes Association board adopted a resolution saying it “strongly opposes the proposed QuikTrip development at or near 39th Street and Summit Street.” (Summit runs parallel to Southwest Trafficway, just a few yards from the trafficway at that point.)

The resolution says, among other things…

:: The intersection already is “plagued by congestion and accidents” and a QuikTrip store would worsen that.

:: Traffic “cutting through” Roanoke on east-west streets, such as 38th, would significantly increase.

:: Roanoke was designated a Local Historic District in 1985, and the proposed development “would violate the architectural integrity of Roanoke and surrounding community.”

**

Yesterday and today, I got a first-hand taste of just how maddening it is to deal with QuikTrip.

First, I put in a call to Mike Thornburg, QT’s manager of public and government affairs. A person in his office said he was retiring in a matter of days and transferred me to Aisha Jefferson-Smith, the woman who was quoted in The Star’s story.

When I told Jefferson-Smith I had some questions, she immediately asked me to put them in writing in an email.

I sent an email in which I asked several specific questions, including how many square feet the store would encompass and how many gas pumps there would be; if any meetings were scheduled with neighbors; and when construction might start, assuming the company got approval from the city.

This morning, I called back and got Jefferson-Smith’s voice mail. I told her I’d like to get the answers to my questions today. An hour or so later, I got this email back: “First and foremost, thank you for contacting QuikTrip. Anytime we consider a new site we will always do our due diligence.”

She put those two sentences in quotation marks, just to emphasize, I suppose, there would be no misunderstanding about what she said.

I wrote back: “That’s it?? If so, why couldn’t you have said that yesterday?”

**

Today, Tosha Lathrom, president of the Roanoke Homes Association, said her group was teaming up with the Volker, Coleman Highlands and Valentine neighborhood associations — all of which are within several blocks of the site — to fight the proposal. (The site itself, oddly, is not within the boundaries of any particular neighborhood association.)

She said she also had also been in contact with the West Plaza Neighborhood Association, which jousted with QT on the expansion of its Westport Road store a couple of years ago. West Plaza won some concessions, but QT ultimately got a much larger complex, which straddles Mercier Street.

Lathrom said a QuikTrip store at 39th and the Trafficway would run counter to the urban movement of encouraging more walking, biking and use of public transportation. “I can’t imagine anyone thinking that’s a good location for a QuikTrip,” she said. “I can’t imagine the city letting a QT go there.”

This is the proposed site of a new QuikTrip. QT intends to buy the building and raze it.

To get final approval, the project would have to wind its way through a standard, deliberate process. First, a development plan would be submitted to the city. The plan would first go to the City Plan Commission, and then, regardless of how the commission voted, it would go to the City Council’s Planning, Zoning and Economic Development Committee. The committee could send it to the full Council with a “‘do-pass” or “do-not pass” recommendation.

The proposed site is in the city’s Fourth Council District. Councilwoman Katheryn Shields, the at-large 4th District representative, told me yesterday she hadn’t taken a position on the issue. I haven’t heard back from in-district Councilman Eric Bunch, but Lathrom said she believed Bunch, too, has not taken a position.

**

This project is a loser for Kansas City. QuikTrip should call off its high-paid attorneys and pull back. But that’s extremely unlikely.

Everybody loves QT when you need gas or want an iced tea and a hot dog or piece of pizza. But when it comes to building a monstrosity at one of KC’s busiest intersections, and plopping it down amid several of the city’s most outstanding neighborhoods, it’s another matter.

So, QuikTrip must be stopped.