There is a community meeting this Saturday 6/15 at Northland Baptist Church about the Green Hills Road project.
If you end up going, you will probably meet a really nice guy name Todd. Todd is newer to KCMO and inherited this project and doesn't deserve to get publicly chastised. Also your two Councilmembers inherited it too so while you might have gripes with everything, just keep in mind that by having this meeting and a forum to "take it" these folks are doing what normally isn't done for road projects and you should vent but not at them personally. It's also a way to learn more about when the dang thing will be done.
Green Hills Road was bid in January of 2023. The ordinance authorizing the construction didn't get to the City Council until April of 2023. Because of some politics, it got held up and didn't get approved until the end of May. The KCMO fiscal year ends April 30 and starts May 1. Why that odd date? I am guessing it's because people are paying their city earnings taxes in April and so the City's books are flush with cash in May and that cash is used to run the City for a year.
What happens during that time period is the financial system goes into what City Hall terms "year end rollover." If contracts aren't in process before April, they won't get done before the end of the month and then the money that is allocated in a budget is "frozen" until it "rolls over." The roll over process can take 3, 4 months and basically even though a project has money sitting there, it can't be spent because it's in a prior fiscal year.
It was a huge pain in my rear when I was managing projects there and the way I worked around it is I had an awesome department financial officer. On May 1, I would get money into the newly funded projects that I knew wouldn't be spent in the first part of the fiscal year. I would have her transfer the money from the new projects into the project account for the old project and then use that money to execute contracts. When the project money in the old project "rolled over" I would have her transfer it back to the new project. It's like moving money from checking to savings or HELOC as you need it to keep things going. Of course it wasn't the way things were done and we'd get a proverbial snootily worded email but we didn't care because we were focused on progress over process.
Anyways, because of "roll over" the contract for Green Hills didn't get signed for a while and I don't think the contractor started working until September. We essentially lost 12 weeks of hot, dry summer air, started work in the fall, and watched the road sit there closed off with nothing going on because it the ground was frozen or a muddy mess. As you are reading this I'm sure your muttering to yourself "that's stupid" because it is.
Last week I needed to get something from CVS so I figured I would walk up there and see how things were going. First off even with the road closed, walking along it was horrible. Just remember people did that every day while it was open and why rebuilding it with sidewalks was so needed. Also, the road was built in the 1940's and through some substantial cracks in the pavement, the roadbed was showing signs of catastrophic slope failure because the sides are steep. This is looking north as a vehicle approaches at the start of some slope failure.
As I got further down to where the Coves dam is located, they've cleared for roadside grading. Note in this picture the 2-3" pavement dip that was forming because the slope was starting to slide and how there was a cliff at the edge of the road and any vehicle going off it was going to have horrible results. That slope failure probably would have gotten worse sooner rather than later and the road would have been closed once it slid.
Below is what a section of the east side of the road looks like. There's only 4 feet then it's a 10+ foot straight vertical drop off.
One cool thing about this project is it's only going to be a two lane road with sidewalk on the west and 10 foot wide side path on the east which means the rock outcropping on the east side near Line Creek will remain (I think).
The contractor has started on some of the retaining wall on the west side of the project that will be in phase 2 of the project. This is looking north near that house with the garage right on the road.
This is looking north right south of the box culvert. Note how the road is narrow with no recovery shoulder and how the new road won't be that much wider. From the retaining wall, there will be a five foot sidewalk, a five foot greenspace buffer, and then the curb. This isn't a massive overbuild like North Brighton became. If it was, the Waukomis/Green Hills corridor would have been an unaffordable project and like North Brighton, it would have never gotten fully finished.
Here is a shot of the western edge of the Line Creek box culvert crossing. Again, there is no room for error. Any veer off the pavement would have resulted in a horrible result. I don't know what the guardrail would have protected. Maybe someone on a scooter that hit it?
After a half mile into the project, I finally made it to Phase 1. I think there are 6 or 7 phases total. This is standing at Line Creek Drive (the entrance to Wau Lin Cree and the landscaping business) looking north.
This is midway in the first phase halfway between Barry and Line Creek Drive and looking southeast at the retaining wall on the east side of the project.
One of the biggest challenges with this project is the existing 24" water transmission main which serves the KCI Airport and quite a bit of southern Platte County. It's being replaced with a new 36" main and so space is limited and because of the importance of this water line, it cannot be shut down during the summer because of the water demand in the area. Since summer of 2023 was lost working on it, the tie didn't happen during that time period and so it's going to be dicey when they will be able to shut off the main and connect the new one in. Hopefully they can schedule it right where they can do the tie in this summer without shutting off water to KCI.
The new waterline has gravel backfill on top of and you can see it in this shot looking south from the entrance to the self storage facility. Note the white pipes sticking up. When they build waterlines, they install them then put vertical PVC pipe every 25 or 50 feet. Those pipes are set on top of the watermain and then after all the dirt work is done, a surveyor does a GPS shot on the pipe to locate it in 2D and a GPS shot on the elevation of the ground at that spot, pulls the pipe out of the ground, and then measures the distance from where the ground intersected the pipe to the end of the pipe on the top of the waterline. This survey data is then later plotted into a CAD program and an "as-built" drawing is created and put into KC Water's asset management system. That way someone who might need to replace or fix that watermain in 50 years knows exactly where it is and all the valves, hydrants, and services are located.
Watermains are pressurized and they can move around after they've been built so in order to prevent that "straddle blocks" are built to hold the watermain in place. Straddle blocks sounds really elaborate but it's simply some rebar and concrete around the waterline. The bigger the watermain, the bigger the block. If you happen to live in Wau Lin Cree or drive down to check things out sometime, you should pull to the end of Line Creek Drive and see the monstrous rebar cages that have been built that will be placed around the 36" main as it gets constructed.
Finally I made it to Barry Road where they've got everything rough graded out to rebuild and add some lanes at the traffic signal. This is looking south from Barry.
Unfortunately there are a lot of preventable things that should have happened to prevent another road construction dumpster fire that have become a hallmark of improvements in this area. I don't know anything about schedule when Phase 1 will be done or when the other 5+ phases will start and end. If you want to find out, attend the meeting Saturday and be nice to Todd.
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