Reply #38: Ignorance, convenience and profit

[Mabus]

They didn't/don't care about anything else but their bottomline. They had proposed to bulldoze most of the eastern side of the city to put in the Eastern Parkway (or as we called it "The Eastern Porkway) that would have been a connector route from the SLT and K-10 (state highway). That got stopped too.

There are a lot of little things in the overall SLT proposal. For one thing, because of the increase (and shift) of population to the west side we're having a lot of flooding problems caused by lots of concrete and asphalt on hills, yes, there are hills in Kansas (KU is often referred to as "The Hill" since most of the campus is on Mt. Oread, a limestone outcropping, aka "chalk rock", hence KU's Rock Chalk Chant). But the worst problem involves sewage. The developers were allowed to put in a lot of their subdivisions without paying proper impact fees. Without the impact fees there was nothing in the city budget to properly extend the sewage infrastructure to the new areas. As a result, the sanitation pumping station on the HINU campus gets overworked and is prone to overflow. This is bad enough (fecal matter on the campus) but it does get even worse. The pumping station is next to a small cemetary where over 100 children are buried, including some of my relatives. One of the children buried there is the first child (the 6 month old I mentioned earlier) to die to die. He is among the relatives I have buried there. As you may have guessed, this is a very personal battle for me.

Anyway, the powers that be wanted the trafficway to go through the wetlands because they didn't think there would be any objection. It would primarily affect Haskelll and they just didn't care.