Swope Health announces a new edition of its podcast, One on One with Swope Health, featuring a conversation on the Re-Connect Eastside initiative, featuring Selina Zapata Bur, planning manager, Kansas City Public Works, and Earl Harrison Jr., CEO and founder of HG Consult Inc.
Eric Wesson, founder and publisher of The Next Page KC, a newspaper focused on the Black community, hosts the show’s conversations with Kansas Citians about issues of importance to the community’s health and wellbeing.
The project to Reconnect the Eastside is a city-led initiative prioritizing safety and connection to refine the vision of US 71 Highway. When the Highway was built, homes and businesses were acquired and demolished, and entire neighborhoods were split apart. The impacted neighborhoods and businesses were predominantly Black.
The project area is roughly bounded by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard on the north, 85th Street on the south, Swope Parkway to the east and Paseo Boulevard on the west.
This project was initiated with the support of Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver, who secured funding for the Planning and Environmental Linkages study. The three-phase project emphasizes improvements in safety and public health.
“It needs to be safer,” Selina said. “Everyone agrees that 71 needs to be safer.” She notes the highway has a high-injury status, saw 10 fatalities in the last five years and is twice as dangerous as other Missouri highways. “That’s the one thing, the kind of constant that we hear: everyone wants it to be safer.”
At this stage of the project, Selina and Earl are listening to ideas, opinions, and suggestions from the public – neighborhood, churches, businesses, commuters, and other organizations. All ideas are welcome, and all comments are tracked and monitored.
To participate, visit reconnecteastside.com where you can add comments, including placing an idea at a specific point on the project map. You can also find the schedule of upcoming meetings, listening sessions and pop-up events.
Selina and Earl have organized comments to date into three broad categories:
- Freeway: Largely keeping 71 Highway but with traffic calming measures and examination of access points. This could include removing traffic lights at cross streets.
- Parkway: Revamping the Highway into a parkway, like Ward Parkway, with more green infrastructure for pedestrians and bikes, and more opportunity for business development. This would require re-routing Highway traffic.
- Return to grid: return the area to a neighborhood, without the Highway. In some ways, this is the hardest to envision because it cannot bring back the homes that were removed.
Selina and Earl now look for opportunities to enrich each option with ideas from the community. They will weave in ideas for green space, parks, light rail, housing, noise abatement, pollution and environmental concerns, commercial development and more. They will present refined options to the public early in the new year, and they will again listen to feedback.
Learn more in the conversation: https://youtu.be/8VLkH27i79Y
An earlier podcast featured a discussion on Reconnecting the Westside.
