By CAROLYN SZCZEPANSKI
In front of a house where the ceiling is caving onto the porch and the south-facing windows are covered in plastic, there’s a stream of raw sewage running into the street.
The property at 3435 Holmes Street in north Hyde Park is part of the disheveled empire of landlord Charlie Williard.
For years, residents say, Williard has been violating city housing codes and has been more willing to sit in a jail cell than fix up his properties. People like Frank Stapley, who has owned his house on Holmes for more than a decade, have all but given up on trying to get the aging landlord to clean up his act.
But after five weeks of watching feces and toilet paper bubble up through a hole just inches from the sidewalk, they’ve had enough. And Williard’s not the only one on their shit list.
On one recent Wednesday night, despite a stiff breeze, the stench of sewage was stifling on Holmes. The weather had been dry for days, but the east side of the street was stained with slime. The source of the wetness was a hole the size of a basketball goal in front of 3435. Toilet paper floated just below the surface of the slightly undulating pool that had oozed all over the sidewalk and slicked the adjacent driveway.
“This morning it was just awful,” said a woman who lives across the street. “There was toilet paper and everything that goes with it.”
It’s been discharging for five weeks, Stapley said, doing little to mask the anger and disbelief in his voice. The smell makes it unpleasant for neighbors to sit on their stone porches. They've watched children hop into the middle of what they think is a puddle of rainwater. The neighbors walk their dogs down the middle of the street to avoid the mess on the sidewalk.
Williard doesn't deny the problem emanates from his rental property. Sewers get backed up, he said blithely, by tree roots and debris. At least, he added casually, the outflow at the bottom of the lawn is below the level of the home's basement, so the tenants aren't tromping through the muck.
Sitting at a paper-strewn desk in a cluttered house that doubles as his office, Williard said the problem would be cleared up by the end of the week. But on the following Monday, Williard admitted that the hole was still oozing. He said he'd hired a licensed plumber.
"I feel a little bad for them," he said of his neighbors. "But the cigarettes they smoke are a lot worse for them than that odor. Not that they all smoke cigarettes."
With little hope that Williard would fix the troubling discharge, Stapley and his neighbors have been calling City Hall, hoping public officials would fix the health hazard and bill Williard for the work. But, even with Stapley calling every single day, they suffered through nearly six weeks of human waste being flushed onto the street.
Colleen Doctorian, spokesperson for the Kansas City Water Services Department, which oversees sewers, said the sewer line maintenance division visited the site on September 16 and turned the case over to the Neighborhood Preservation Division. Doctorian says Water Services will fix the leak and bill the owner if the Neighborhood Preservation Division decides the Williard isn't cooperating. It's been nearly three weeks since that visit. But 3435 Holmes isn't on Water Services' list of repairs.
The lack of response from the city has pushed Stapley to wit's end. In the past month, he's called state agencies, the federal Environmental Protection Agency and his U.S. Congressman complaining about the mess. He knows his persistence is starting to get on the nerves of some officials. But he doesn't care.
"If this were in front of the mayor's house, it would have been fixed by now," he said.
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i'm the one who has been calling. judge kagel. not sure of the spelling? he is the one we deal with when we have to go to court. any one can drive buy and tell that for the most part most of us keep our homes up but we still have to go to court and pay some times over a $1,000 a year in fines for thing that he has been able to get away with since at least 93 when i moved in. the city is at fault for this as much as he is.
i have had problems with my home as i have been rehabing it for 15 years, and yes it has looked bad at times. but i have had to pay fines and fix the problems. he does nothing and get away with it.
this problem is on the 3400 block of holmes. drive by and look for yourselves. and look at the homes on the block. i'm sure any one can see what he owns and what he does not.
also Carolyn is great. she and the pitch are the only ones who had the BALLS to touch this until last night.
Hey, this guy has 468 cases under Missouri Casenet going back to the early 1990s. What did Cleaver and Barnes do? Let's start with the real problem.
Look, I delivered holiday gifts to one of this scumbag's tenants one year. He pulled up into their yard, and came up the broken steps (the driveway had heaved too.....) and demanded rent. There was trash on the front porch and in the backyard. Apparently he had simply removed items from the house, or forced his tenants to do that, and just left it. go to www.jacksongov.org and do a real estate tax search by using his name. He has over 25 properties - but somehow has 466 cases filed in the 16th circuit court, some of those by the city of kansas city. The city continues to do their job - it's the judges who keep giving him rent and possession and costs that are the problem.
It is truly pathetic that no one has stopped this unscrupulous landlord after all of these years.
It would be interesting to see how many tenants he has evicted and then tried to collect money from - people who probably complained and couldn't get him to fix anything. So then the sunuvagun takes the tenant to court, and some bleeding heart judge gives him rent + possession + costs. Go see for yourself. Let's get rid of these judges who allow this man to continue to behave in this manner.
Go to Missouri casenet and type in his name
https://www.courts.mo.gov/case...
Maybe they should just reach out to Queen Gloria for assistance! She really knows how to deal with shit. (pun intended)
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