Swope Health announces a new edition of its podcast, One on One with Swope Health, featuring a conversation on the Re-Connect Westside initiative, with Selina Zapata Bur, planning manager, Kansas City Public Works, and Josh Boehm, project manager with WSP, an engineering and urban planning firm.
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 Westside is a city-led initiative focused on restoring connections within the Westside neighborhood addressing historic challenges caused by the construction of I-35 and I-670. The project works in collaboration with the Missouri Department of Transportation and uses a $1 million grant for this Planning and Environmental Linkages Study.
The initiative, Selina and Josh say, prioritizes listening to the community and engaging community members in the planning. The Westside neighborhood was made up of 14,000 residents in the 1940s, when the interstate freeways were initially built; the neighborhood now contains about 3,300 people. The interstate caused the displacement of homes and businesses, while creating a physical barrier with noise and air quality issues.
The project was launched with the bipartisan infrastructure law that acknowledged impacts of interstate development. Josh said the city recognized an opportunity to correct the harm and improve safety and efficiency. With the highways now aging, there will be requirements for state investment – and this project can give the community a voice in those coming investments.
“This is a very community-driven process, and that’s what it’s intended to be,” said Selina. “This is about the community and making the quality of life better for the West side, connecting the neighborhood.”
In community engagement sessions, the discussions are targeted to explore three broad options: should the interstate highways remain the same, be realigned or removed entirely.
- Remain: What can be done to connect if the highways remain as they are? Consider enhancing and developing viaduct space, ways to connect blocks without street access and open up Penn Valley Park to the West side.
- Realign: Based on idea that I-35 could be realigned to a different location, for example, to the west lots where rail infrastructure is dominant. This option would require federal and state funding and would have significant regional impact.
- Remove or possibly Reroute: Starts with the idea to tear down the interstate, and perhaps provide local access parkways in its place.
Josh and Selina announced the upcoming community session at 10 a.m. Saturday, Dec. 13, at the Mattie Rhodes Community Center. They also discussed the separate project examining reconnecting the East side, which will be the subject of a separate discussion on One on One with Swope Health.
Listen to the full conversation here: https://youtu.be/0mxVXwz93F0
