Dead In Its Tracks

Chubby's on Broadway may seem an unlikely place to hatch a plan for civic warfare, but on the steamy Sunday evening of July 8, thirty or so malcontents scurried into the brightly lit diner to talk in conspiratorial tones about light rail. For three hours, the group surveyed maps of the plan, scanned the city's 77-page proposal, scribbled notes and discussed strategy like guerilla soldiers the night before an ambush.

Although a few of them were the usual suspects -- business owners along the proposed route who would fight the plan even if it cured sadness -- most were citizens from throughout the city who had united recently for different reasons but under one cause: to defeat the city's proposal. Before the meeting ended, the group decided to call itself Citizens Against Rail Plan -- emphasizing that it's the plan they're against because, most insist, they support the concept of light rail "if it's done the right way."

"We must fight this thing as if it's a death struggle," says one CARPie. The group's ferocity aside, it alone may not spell disaster for light rail -- at $800 million, the proposal is so expensive that opposition was inevitable. But the plan's curse could be in the cross-section CARP represents. For every citizen angry enough to convene at Chubby's on a Sunday night, hundreds of others sit in homes across the city and simply don't see the light-rail vision. City planners may have crafted Kansas City's best light rail plan yet, but their effort to rally the community has sputtered.

Now, when there could be a vocal citizens' movement to herald environmentally friendly, traffic-reducing light rail and the progress it will spur, there exists a contingent of frustrated, insulted and alienated voters. At best, they want answers. At worst, they want the plan dead.

Kansas City's venture into the futuristic enterprise of light rail began more than a quarter century ago, when the Mid-America Regional Council and forward-thinking planners first came up with a study for a 24-mile stretch of rail through the city. It was 1975, the year local mobster Nick Civella was convicted on gambling charges, the year before Kansas City hosted the Republican National Convention and the Royals placed first in the American League West.

The visionaries kicked around different light rail ideas throughout the 1980s, and in 1992 the Area Transportation Authority won federal money to conduct a three-year study for a line to run from the City Market through the Plaza and south via Bruce Watkins Drive. From this study came an even bigger award: federal funds to advance the project into the engineering phase for a starter route between the Plaza and downtown. Although the city council, the ATA and the Mid-America Regional Council all backed the idea, the Chamber of Commerce and then-mayor Emanuel Cleaver saw the starter route's $200 million price tag as a waste. Even though the plan would have eventually included a citywide route, contentiousness killed the project. It was 1997, the year of Kansas City's light rail low point, typified by Cleaver's dismissal of the project as "touristy frou-frou" -- five obnoxious syllables still repeated ad nauseam by light rail detractors today.

"I don't know how that was possible, for people who have been active in various arenas in the community not to know that what we were planning was a regional transit system," says ATA light rail planner Jim Pritchett.

Enter Clay Chastain. With the ATA's proposal in tatters, the civic firebrand hijacked the idea, gathering enough signatures to put on the ballot a light rail plan that would run from his beloved Union Station to the airport, and he managed to get 45 percent of voters behind him. That number decreased the following year, when Chastain proposed a fifteen-year, one-cent sales tax increase to fund, among other things, a light rail route from the airport to an unspecified point somewhere south of the airport. Last fall, Chastain returned with a more specific proposal for a route between the airport and an actual destination (Waldo), with an east-west line along Volker Boulevard from Watkins Drive to the Plaza. He lost again, but for the third year in a row, the numbers hung around 40 percent despite having a high-profile, oft-mocked advocate leading the way.

Such trends read as good news to the city's planning department, which had started work in February 2000 on its own light rail project, in conjunction with the ATA, as a facet of FOCUS, the city's long-range development plan. If Chastain could snag so much support with napkin-planning and a petition drive, the city and all its resources surely could put together a light rail proposal that would have Kansas Citians dancing the locomotion.

This April, the city planning department released a final draft of the Central Business Corridor Transit Plan. That proposal, estimated to cost nearly $800 million, recommends a 23.8-mile light rail route from I-29 in the north to 75th and Bruce Watkins Drive in the south. The line runs from the Northland, past the City Market to downtown, by Union Station and Crown Center, through midtown via separate lines on Main and Troost, along Volker around the UMKC campus and then southward along Bruce Watkins Drive. The proposal was drafted by city planners, a team of consultants and more than one hundred citizens selected by Mayor Kay Barnes to serve on five light rail committees. It illustrates a Kansas City of the future, with street-level, electric-powered trains slicing through the city, picking up transit riders and tourists alike and whisking them to and fro. Bus routes feed into the rail line, and streetcars run to the 18th and Vine jazz district and down Southwest Boulevard. Approximately thirty stations line the route near major intersections; five of them allow people to park their cars and hop aboard. The city's principal thoroughfares, Main and Troost, look completely different, with just three lanes of traffic. Trains arrive every six minutes at most stops.