Trolley Folly in Kansas City, Missouri!

Too many politicians, unions, attorneys, accountants, engineers, architects, etc., appear to migrate towards non-government organizations (NGOs) with federal grant money (U. S. taxpayers’ money) and manipulators with nefarious agendas for their own personal benefit. When these seemingly disparate connivers meet up, common sense and representative government are crushed. These assaults upon people’s freedoms are not limited to the hood rats inside our nation’s capital, the District of Corruption. The D. C. dictatorial disease can be felt at all levels of government as well. Consider the ‘trolley folly’ in Kansas City, Missouri.

The latest assault in Kansas City is an artificially created Transportation Development District (TDD) founded under Missouri Revised Statutes, Chapter 238. This TDD appears to be another beachhead in the unconstitutional ‘sustainable development/U. N. Agenda 21’ campaign that is being forced upon us at all levels of government. The Mid-America Regional Council (MARC) is a NGO sustainable development proponent that partners with our local public television network to funnel U. S. taxpayers’ money to sustainable development and social equity (a true oxymoron) projects throughout the Kansas City metropolitan region. It is funneling $18 million towards this project. Planning is already in the works for six extensions to the system, even though construction has not been started on the initial, 2.2-mile route between Kansas City’s River Market area and it’s Union Station. Doesn’t this expansion smack of putting the ‘trolley before the horse’? The vote for the trolley line was as gerrymandered as the district itself. By Missouri statute, 238.230, special assessments may be imposed, ‘if approved by (1) A majority of the qualified voters voting on the question in the district, or (2) The owners of record of all of the real property located within the district who shall indicate their approval by signing a special assessment petition; the district may make one or more special assessments for those project improvements which specially benefit the properties within the district. Improvements, which may confer special benefits within a district, include, but are not limited to, improvements which are intended primarily to serve traffic originating or ending within the district to reduce local traffic congestion or circuity of travel, or to improve the safety of motorists or pedestrians within the district’.

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Everything was engineered to suppress the vote. Realizing that they would never capture the approval of the owners of record of the real property within the district, the proponents of the trolley opted for Option 1, a majority vote of ‘qualified’ voters within the district. Who was a ‘qualified voter’? Only residents within the district; property owners, even those who live within the city of Kansas City, Missouri, were not allowed to vote unless they reside within the district. Notification of the vote was also suppressed. As a result, a whopping 500 votes were cast, with the proponents capturing 60% of the ‘qualified’ residents’ votes. Ultimately, approximately 300 ‘qualified’ voters passed a $100,000,000.00 project! How is this project to be paid for? There is a one-cent sales tax to be added to the existing sales tax rate. Additionally, there will be a levy assessed to all of the property owners within the district, the same individuals who were not allowed to vote on the project. And the abuse doesn’t stop there. Because a levy is not defined as a tax, all churches and non-profit organizations within the district will be assessed a levy. Naturally, if you have enough money and clout, you can carve out a better deal for yourself. That is what happened with a trust managed by the Bank of America. The trust manages the majority of pay parking lots within the district. Each parking space is to be assessed a levy. An attorney representing this trust was able to cut this levy in half for the trust, but the other owners of parking spaces are still faced with the full levy. How will this benefit the parking lot owners and the businesses that conduct business within the district, especially those that rely upon customers to come to them? Don’t you wonder what the cost of parking will become? Of course, this is part of the issue. People will less likely to drive within the district, and they may be less likely to visit the district, too? Are the residents who are renters, especially those who voted in favor of the trolley, prepared to pay increased rent as the additional cost of this project is passed from the property owners through to them? Kansas City, Missouri is not the only city that is pursuing this form of transit within its core; you may want to review what is happening within your city to see what may strike you as possible government abuse of local laws and statutes. In fact, Kansas City may be arriving at the dance somewhat belatedly. In addition to the questionable constitutionality of the vote, the question remains, ‘Is this project appropriate for the city’? Many cities have much more dense populations within their city cores making similar projects much more appropriate, but Kansas City and the surrounding communities are configured in a significantly different manner from other metropolitan areas. The metro benefits and suffers from regionalization, due, in part, to a state line that separates the states of Missouri and Kansas within the metro and the Missouri River that separates the original city to the south of the river from the ever emerging city to the north of the river. There are additional factors on both sides of the state line that contribute to the regionalization within the metro, and combined, the focus upon the ‘city core’ appears to disproportionately benefit unions, attorneys, accountants, MARC and other proponents of ‘sustainable development’, and politicians. The forced trolley project is not ‘forward thinking’, but an abuse of property owners, consumers and local and U. S. taxpayers. This type of grant spending contributes to why actual federal spending NEVER decreases. It isn’t as if this is the only ‘district’ in Kansas City, MO that has benefitted from questionable taxing as a method of financing the district. The ‘Power & Light’ district is a nice compliment for events at the adjoining Sprint Center, or for those seeking a fun environment for dining, imbibing, shopping or entertainment, but the city loses money within this district every year. All too often, those in government oversell the possible benefits and undersell the actual costs of a project. To add more insult to injury and steal more of income earners’ and non-income earners’ disposable incomes, Jackson County and the state of Missouri will be seeking their own one-cent sales tax initiatives in the near future. Should all of the tax initiatives pass, local patrons and visitors to the district may be facing a sales tax of up to a 15 percent! With the dramatic increases in health insurance because of ObamaCare and energy costs, courtesy of the faceless thugs within the EPA, Americans are being taxed over the fiscal cliff to our fiscal death. The self-appointed beneficiaries of sustainable development/U. N. Agenda 21 have had twenty years to bastardize our legislative, regulatory and bidding processes clandestinely to grease the skids in their favor. Over this timeframe, leftist wordsmiths have also hijacked the narrative. It is time for American citizens to learn the laws of their city, county, state and country to prevent being manipulated by political and ‘civic’ leader puppeteers who use their positions of power to further empower and enrich themselves. More importantly, patriotic citizens need to be educated to understand the ultimate goals of sustainable development/U. N. Agenda 21. Only when people realize how projects like the Kansas City trolley project and kindred projects around the country are designed to advance a reprehensible, vindictive and unconstitutional agenda, at the expense of the purported beneficiaries, will they be equipped to arrest the current electoral, regulatory and tax blitzkrieg being rammed upon us in the name of sustainability and social justice. Kansas City citizens and property owners, especially within the TDD, deserve better than non-representative government. Most importantly, we also need to pray for divine intervention so that this invasion of an un-American agenda is terminated.