Overland Office Park

By the time the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers stepped in, there was a mess to clean up.

To build its auto mall on the northwest corner of 135th Street and U.S. 69 Highway, Overland Park developer Terra Venture Inc. had bulldozed through a stream it wasn't supposed to touch. The Corps -- charged by the federal government with overseeing watershed and water-quality issues -- quickly wrist-slapped Terra Venture, forcing the company to redo its design literally in midstream. Terra Venture scrapped its original plan to build a road over the waterway, but it had already uprooted trees and torn up and graded the land.

That was two years ago. Now, as the Corps gets ready to review Terra Venture's application to develop a tract across the street at 135th Street and Antioch Road, Corps engineer Jim Scott has all but forgotten about the developer's muddy mistake at the adjacent site.

"Let's not talk about what went wrong. Let's talk about what went right!" he chirps.

And Terra Venture partner John Sweeney distances his company from the still-in-progress auto mall project, refusing to talk about it and saying only, "We were involved."

But Liz Hendricks, who lives off of Antioch Road and has studied Terra Venture's misadventures, dreads the thought of another project by the developer.

Residents like Hendricks were resigned to Terra Venture's proposal for the 100-acre auto mall when it came before the city council in 1998 -- right after the council had rejected a different developer's auto mall proposal, in part because of loud citizen opposition. When Terra Venture approached the Overland Park City Council with a rezoning request for the same property, the council first rejected it but then approved it after the company made changes.

One resident, Michaela Brady, said at the time that Terra Venture had "bent over backwards," promising buffers and reconfiguring the design to make sure the neighborhood could coexist with the car dealerships and retail stores such as Home Depot.

Some neighbors, however, filed suit against the city, claiming the council had been wrong to rezone the land. They lost -- but at the same time, other residents who had reluctantly supported the auto mall changed their minds when Terra Venture tried to get the city to rezone part of the land to accommodate an auto body repair shop that it hadn't previously mentioned. The city denied the request, despite Terra Venture's promises to provide a dense stand of trees as a buffer. And when Terra Venture removed trees by starting a controlled burn -- which covered residents' cars with soot -- neighbors became angry. The developer finally agreed to chip away the trees, a more expensive method of clearing the land. Then the environmental issues with the Corps surfaced, provoking a city planner to admit there were "lots of problems" with the development.

In February, an engineer who lives near the development sent the Corps photographs showing that Terra Venture had disturbed a wetland on December 28, 1999. And he wrote a letter arguing that "Terra Venture Inc. has failed to be truthful on their application to your office. They have stated ... that no wetlands would be impacted by the proposed project. Terra Venture's contractor has already destroyed a wetland in excess of 1/2 an acre."

In March, Mark Shaw, a representative of the Kansas Department of Wildlife & Parks, submitted a letter to the Kansas Department of Agriculture that detailed his visit to the site.

"From visiting the site, it looked like most of the riparian (adjacent to wetland) vegetation had already been removed. The wetland that was to be protected has already been disturbed," Shaw wrote.

Scott says Terra Venture was not punished, and he characterized the company's actions as a mistake on the part of an untrained surveyor. He says Terra Venture had turned over soil and run heavy equipment such as bulldozers and backhoes over a stream.

Now that the company is planning a business park with an 80,000-square-foot DaimlerChrysler office building and retail stores at the virgin site, a coalition of neighbors is trying to prevent the project. They don't like what they see on the partially developed side, where the auto mall is scheduled to open in 2001.

"I don't know what (Terra Venture) promised, but I know what we got. It's just a desert -- no trees, no buffer for the residents. It's just sad," says Dick Kuchenrither, a neighbor and environmental engineer who works for Black & Veatch. Kuchenrither says he and other residents would like to see the developer stay out of the floodplain, which is veined with wetlands, on the southernmost part of the property. But he doesn't think the company will agree to the neighbors' proposal for Operation WildLife to take over the area and preserve it as urban wild space, with programs for local school children to visit the deer, owls, hawks and raccoons in their natural habitat.

"We were thinking about a 'Walk With Wildlife' program," says Operation WildLife executive director Diane Johnson. "We have permanently disabled birds -- hawks, owls, eagles -- and could set them up at different stations along the trail. There's just so many different ways of doing something like this and opening the kids' eyes. There's so much beauty out there."