Tired of Spire Tearing Up Your Freshly Paved Road? Kansas City Might've Fixed The System
Despite Boy Scouts’ many institutional flaws, one of the most important lessons the program taught me growing up was the concept of “Leave No Trace.”
The Leave No Trace concept and program:
provide an easily understood framework of minimum impact practices for anyone visiting the outdoors. Although Leave No Trace has its roots in backcountry settings, the Principles have been adapted so that they can be applied anywhere — from remote wilderness areas, to local parks and even in your own backyard.
Whenever we would camp or go somewhere, we were expected to not only clean up after ourselves but try to restore everything back to how it was before.
Some organizations and businesses who could have implemented this concept but did not were our local utility companies, most notably KC Water and Spire Gas.
Aided by out of date and poor city standards, local utility companies have been tearing up roads and sidewalks, often times right after they have been repaved, and patching them poorly.
This has resulted poor coordination, poor road conditions, and continuous potholes.
To show you what we were dealing with, click the twitter thread below, no really read it.
This troll twitter account (I think seriously) called utility markings “gang signs.”
I thought it was kind of funny but then began to see gang signs all around town often on freshly paved roads.
But luckily, our city council and mayor took our pleas to heart and worked with our public works department to implement better policies and standards. (Might have taken some ideas from old auditor reports too.)
It passed last week.
As noted in the committee hearing, this is only for roads right now but there needs to be more work done on sidewalk closures and other utility disruptions.
Here are the main changes as presented to council.
All of them will be critical but if you traveled down my beloved 75th street before it was repaved, you would’ve seen the important of the entire lane width standard and the back fill (some spots not newly paved have sunk).
There were complaints by the utilities about cost but according to KC Water it would add $4 million/year citywide. If you watch city council, there are millions of dollars in contracts going out each month to KC Water projects, this is a drop in the bucket for better roads and more efficiency.
Let’s hope utility companies follow the standard and the city has the staff to enforce it.
That has yet to be seen.
But for now, you can rest somewhat easier when you see the Spire trucks pull up in your neighborhood.
They at least should be trying to leave no trace.
If you’d like to subscribe to more analyses, hot takes, and amateur citizen reporting about Kansas City, Missouri politics and other musings please consider subscribing.