Community gardens are one use for neighborhood mini-grants from the city, but the deadline is approaching fast.

The city will begin accepting applications for the FY2013-14 reBUILD/KC Neighborhood Mini-Grant Program on Wednesday, May 1.

According to the city, the reBUILD/KC Neighborhood Mini-Grant Program will award grants of up to $2,000 to successful applicants whose neighborhood projects foster partnerships, provide a public benefit to the community and can be completed by April 30, 2014. All grants require a dollar-for-dollar matching contribution of volunteer labor, donated materials and/or in-kind services.

The application period will open May 1, 2013 and close June 28, 2013 at 5 p.m. Grant applications and complete program information and criteria can be accessed at www.kcmo.org/neigh or at the Neighborhood Services Division on the fourth floor of City Hall, 414 E. 12th St.

Details

To be eligible for a grant, registered neighborhood organizations must meet the below criteria:

• Must represent a geographic area, such as a neighborhood or a cluster of neighborhoods
• Must demonstrate broad-based community support for and participation in proposed project
• Must perform the project within the geographic area in which applying
• Must demonstrate proof of partnership (formal letter of support)
• Must have active, identifiable leadership recognized and elected by its members
• Must demonstrate fiscal accountability and have an established process to manage grant funds that includes a current checking account in the name of the organization
• Must be a not-for-profit neighborhood organization in good standing and incorporated in the state of Missouri
• Must have the capacity to complete the proposed project by April 30, 2014

Examples of projects eligible for this grant include, but are not limited to, neighborhood cleanups, community gardens, community art programs and youth development programs.

Technical assistance will be available during the application period to help organizations understand the program and navigate the application requirements. The City will review all applications and select viable projects based on selection criteria.

Organizations will receive grant funds on a reimbursement basis, for eligible expenses incurred, based on neighborhood matching contributions. To earn the matching grant, the neighborhood group must make a contribution – donated labor, professional services, etc. – that is assigned a fair value ($15 per hour). For each $1 of donated time, labor or materials, the neighborhood group earns $1 of matching grant funds up to $2,000.

For more information about the reBUILD/KC Neighborhood Mini-Grant Program, please contact Tiffany Drummer, Neighborhood Services Division, at 816-513-3210.

Northeast neighborhoods brought children and parents to the PIAC hearing to show their support for a requested new playground and other improvements to parks. Photo by Mike Sinclair.

Fourth district residents and organizations made their pitches last night to the Public Improvements Advisory Committee (PIAC).

The 4th Council District.

The 4^th District includes much of Midtown as well as the northeast and parts of the northland. A second hearing on district proposals is set for July 23 at 6:30 p.m. at the Liberty Memorial, 100 W. 26^th Street.

Last night, the ideas for public improvements all came from the northland, Columbus Park and northeast area residents, and they centered on park improvements and beautification projects. The Northeast Alliance, a coalition of six organizations, asked for a playground, curbs and sidewalks, and tulip bulbs, while northlanders requested two different sets of improvements to Waterworks Park. The Kansas City Museum also presented a proposal to repair and reconstruct the gates around its facility.

PIAC will use information gathered through the hearings to recommend projects for funding to the council for Fiscal Year 2014-15. Project funding comes from the one-cent sales tax for public improvements. Last year, more than 800 requests for capital improvements projects were received through the PIAC process.

The deadline to submit a PIAC application for this year is Aug. 31, 2013.

A financial opportunity center just opened on Troost Avenue is joining others around the country help people reach financial stability.

The new center on the Rockhurst University campus is one of 70 nationwide and the first of three that the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) plans to open in Kansas City.

The center helps low- and moderate-income individuals and families increase their net income, credit scores, long-term job retention and net worth over time. Services focus on three primary areas: employment counseling and placement, financial education and coaching, and public benefits access.

The Prosperity Center is a collaborative partnership among Catholic Charities Kansas City-St. Joseph, Kansas City Full Employment Council, Greater Kansas City LISC, Rockhurst University, and United Way of Greater Kansas City.

The center, 5151 Troost Ave., Suite 100, is located in the Rockhurst University North Parking Garage, a multiuse facility with storefronts along Troost intended to serve the surrounding community.

The Prosperity Center will target residents located within the boundaries of the Urban Neighborhood Initiative – Troost Avenue to Highway 71 and 22^nd Street to 52^nd Street.

The founders of the Prosperity Center offer this evidence that the model has been successful:

• Nearly 75 percent of participants who commit to working with a financial coach improved their monthly cash flow and net income.
• It has helped nearly 12,500 people get jobs; enabled nearly 10,000 to increase their net income; and helped more than 6,000 people improve their credit scores – key to greater and more affordable economic options for their families.

Details

All Prosperity Center services are offered free of charge. For more information, or to make an appointment, call 816-501-4239.

The mayor’s KCI advisory group met Tuesday for what it calls airport school.

The group is gathering facts to answer a question: Should the three-terminal KCI airport be replaced by a single terminal airport?

The city council’s approval of planning for an estimated $1.2 billion single terminal airport has flown into substantial public opposition.

Bob Berkebile, a study group co-chair who worked on the  design for KCI before it opened in 1972, showed pictures of what then was gate security – low wooden railings with gaps between them so people could easily come and go. “There was no thought about security,” he said, but then KCI was considered on the cutting edge of airports.

KCI was placed where it is because jets replaced prop planes then and required more landing space than was available Downtown. The current site also made sense because TWA had a massive maintenance operation there.

Mark VanLoh, Kansas City aviation director, said that with about 11,000 acres, KCI is “one of the largest land area airports in the United States.”

The Federal Aviation Administration owns the property, finances some of KCI’s  $117 million budget and sets extensive rules and standards, he said.

The FAA also requires routine planning studies and is reviewing planning approved by the city council.

The city and airport operate together and independently.

“The revenues I generate cannot go to fix a sewer line on Main Street, VanLoh said. “It all has to go to the airport.”

Of 100 airports in the nation of any size, KCI ranks number 33 or 34 in terms of passengers served, and the largest portion of those passengers come from Kansas.

Also, VanLoh said, “the airlines are not going to come to Kansas City because of a nice shiny terminal sitting on the ground – they’re going to come here because they think they can make money.”

The concept of big hub airports is dead, he added. The city wants to attract more direct flights, which is done by showing airlines passenger numbers that prove direct flights would be profitable.

Asked what are the best new airports in the nation, VanLoh said there is no one best but many are being studied.

“What we want to do is like ideas and steal from everyone,” he said.

The next meeting July 2 is to include reports on things like passenger security, baggage movement, airport revenue and capital improvements.

Photo courtesy Heart of America Shakespeare Festival.

The Heart of America Shakespeare Festival begins tonight.

The festival will present As You Like It in Southmoreland Park on June 18  through July 7 on Tuesday through Sunday evenings at 8:00 p.m. and also on Monday, July 1.

According to the festival’s website, “This delightful pastoral comedy will bring our park to life as our heroine Rosalind journeys to the Forest of Arden with her cousin Celia and her philosophical Fool, Touchstone.  The forest provides a safe place for the exiled Duke and his entourage, the dispossesed Orlando and for Rosalind and her companions.  In the wilds, the wildest adventures occur.  This story has everything we love about Shakespeare’s comedies; mistaken identity, madness and mayhem.  And of course, LOVE.”

This is the festival’s 21^st season production.

Neighborhoods around Midtown are preparing to make their appeals to the city for funding.

This year’s Public Improvement Advisory Council (PIAC) hearings are beginning this week.

According to the city, PIAC comprises 13 members – two residents from each council district and a chairperson – who are appointed by the mayor and City Council. PIAC will use public input from the hearings to make recommendations to the City Council regarding both the citywide and neighborhood portions of the Fiscal Year 2014-15 capital budget. Project funding comes from the one-cent sales tax for public improvements.

Past projects funded through PIAC include flood control, storm drainage, street resurfacing, bridge repairs, traffic signals, tree trimming and planting, and improvements to parks and trails.

Details

• For a complete listing of all neighborhood and citywide PIAC hearings, or to make a PIAC request, visit the PIAC website
• Fourth District hearing: Tuesday, June 18, 2013, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Kansas City Museum Carriage House, 3218 Gladstone Blvd.

Bill Worley (in the orange shirt) led a tour of the historic Valentine neighborhood on Sunday. One stop was the Knickerbocker Apartments, currently listed by the Historic Kansas City Foundation as the 6th most endangered building in the city.

Why is Valentine Road so curvy? Why are houses in Midtown so close together?

Bill Worley, history instructor with Metropolitan Community Colleges, answered those questions and more on a Sunday walking tour of the Valentine Neighborhood.

The Kansas City Museum sponsored the tour, which is one of a series.

City Beautiful Movement advocates considered curved streets like those on Valentine Road elegant and J C Nichols would later spread the curves in developments farther south, Worley said.

Valentine Road, like Janssen Place road in Hyde Park, was named for a rich investor who never lived in Kansas City.

Midtown houses were generally built close together because owners were taxed based on the number of liner feet their lots had on the street.

Corner lots, taxed higher, were often more swank to make that worthwhile, Worley said.

His tour started in the parking lot of the Uptown Shoppes, which was once the lawn of the Bird family estate (as in the  Emery Bird Thayer Department Store). The home was torn down in the 1930s to make way for commercial construction. An ornate gate on Pennsylvania Avenue still has the estate name chiseled in stone: Elmhurst.

What are now the Valentine, Roanoke and Coleman Highland neighborhoods were laid out as subdivisions on the city’s southern fringes during a real estate boom in the 1880s.

“But you know what happens to boom,” Worley said, “there’s a bust.”

Many of what were then lavish homes and apartments were built from 1900 to 1914, the start of World War I. Then many were built in the booming 1920s.

The walk started south down Washington Street. Lots were bigger there than on streets to the west and many homes larger and more lavish. Some apartment buildings there called three story walk-ins there are typical of the 1920s. More than three stories required an elevator.

Garages were not common in homes before World War I and part of Washington’s appeal was a streetcar line. But after World War II the large houses near busy Broadway got broken up into apartments more than homes even one block west.

Property naturally shifts to what real estate investors call highest and best use, Worley said, and to them “best use” means most profit.

The walk turned west on 38^th Street, where Worley noted the shirtwaist homes with stone on the lower floors and another material above.

Common at the time, shirtwaist referred to a working womens’ clothing style of a blouse of one material and color and a skirt of another.

The walk turned north up Pennsylvania Avenue, another street named after a tycoon. It was the home state of Kersey Coates, who laid out Quality Hill on his own land in the 1860s.

The walk stopped at what is left of the historic but endangered Knickerbocker Apartments at 501-535 Knickerbocker Place.

The adjacent Kansas City Life Insurance Company owns them. It demolished half of the complex in 1982 to make room for company expansion, after winning a battle against the Valentine Neighborhood Association and the Landmarks Commission of Kansas City.

Worley said the company and neighborhood have had a “symbiotic relationship” since the powerful insurance firm went in there in the 1920s, with it sometime supporting neighborhood causes and sometimes not.

“It’s one of those things – it’s an ongoing conversation,” he said. “I’m not sure the folks who own Kansas City Life would admit it but it’s hard to imagine Kansas City Life with no Valentine neighborhood.”

by Joe Lambe

Jackson County officials – who said recently that errors led to  problems with 18,000 residential reassessments – on Monday said new reassessments will now be mailed to 68,000 property owners.

The new  notices will go out this week and appeal times will be extended, they said at a meeting of the Jackson County Legislature.

Jackson County Executive Mike Sanders said, “When this is all over we will do a top-to-bottom review of what occurred in this process, good or bad.”

The 68,000 properties, many of them in Midtown, are about a third of the residential properties in the county. They are those that county workers viewed from the outside, checked comparable sales for and plugged into a model they said would work.

It did not. Complaints about extremely high reassessments prompted a review that found problems with 18,000 properties.

Assessed Value Analysis was hired for $90,000 to help clean up the mess. Bob Burnett of that firm reported Monday that in checking into the 18,000 with increases such as 35 percent, “we found that those with increases of 20-to-25 percent had the same errors.”

Of the 68,000 properties, about 10,000 are condominiums. There were so many problems assessing condos that they will remain at last year’s values, officials said, unless they lost large amounts of value.

Of the 58,000 other properties, a “significant number” will see lower values than on the first errant reassessments, Barnett said.

But not all of them. “There’s still going to be a number of people who are distraught or unhappy,” he said.

So the deadline to file informal appeals by phone or online has been extended to July 22. The deadline for filing formal appeals with the Board of Equalization is extended from July 8 to July 29.

Also, starting Monday, county workers will be available to take calls for informal appeals from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., Monday through Thursday. Normal phone times will apply on Fridays.

The estimated county costs for second mailing of notices is $36,000. And besides the $90,000 for Burnett’s firm, Todd Appraisal is also getting $23,000.

County officials say the money had to be spent. They also say part of the problem is the state has drastically cut money to pay for appraisers and data process experts.

Previous posts

• Reassessment appeal deadline extended by county
• Assessment questions? Here’s some advice
• Midtown reassessments being reassessed
• County to address reassessment complaints today
• County legislator’s letter on reassessment
• How to appeal if your property taxes go up
• Property assessment: your home is worth more, but…

The city will hold its first round of public meetings this week to get feedback as it prepares to update Bike KC, the City’s bicycle facilities plan. Identical meetings will be held from 5-7 p.m. at the following dates and locations:

Details

• Tuesday, June 18, 2013, Mid-Continent Library-North Oak Branch, 8700 N. Oak Trafficway
• Thursday, June 20, 2013, Brush Creek Community Center, 3801 Emanuel Cleaver Blvd.,
• City staff will lead presentations at 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. The presentations will include an explanation of the plan update process, Bike KC history, current facilities, process for changes to the adopted route system, and a discussion of facility types.

A museum in Rome is loaning this sculpture to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art this summer, as part of a cultural exchange between the two museums. Photo credit: Fauno rosso, Roman, 2nd century C.E. Red marble, 66 inches. Sovraintendenza ai Beni Culturali di Roma Capitale – Musei Capitolini.

A little piece of Rome is coming to Midtown this summer.

Under a new exchange program, a red marble statue of a drunken satyr will be on display at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art from June 22 through Sept. 29 in Kirkwood Hall.

Here’s more from the museum:

The Fauno rosso, a red marble sculpture of a satyr (also called “faun”), was given to the Capitoline Museums in 1746 by Pope Benedict XIV. It was commissioned by Hadrian, the great emperor of Rome and it was most likely sculpted by Aristeas and Papias of Aphrodisias in modern-day Turkey. The Capitoline is now lending the sculpture to the Nelson-Atkins.

The loan marks the beginning of a long-term relationship between the Nelson-Atkins and the Capitoline Museums, a group of art and archeological museums in Piazza del Campidoglio, on top of Capitoline Hill in Rome, Italy.

The Fauno rosso raises a cluster of grapes in his right hand; he holds in his left a cudgel used by shepherds. A fawn skin tied at his right shoulder covers part of his chest and supports two pomegranates and a bunch of grapes. To his left a goat looks up at him and rests one leg on a wicker basket. To the satyr’s right is a supporting tree stump with shepherd’s pipes hanging from it.

The Fauno rosso seems to have stopped midway in his stride as he excitedly turns his head up to the raised bunch of grapes. His mouth is slightly opened in delight and his hair is unkempt, a reflection of his wild nature. His left leg is extended and the foot turns to his left; his straight right leg supports most of his weight and so his right hip juts out suggestively.

Fauno rosso is sculpted out of red marble rather than the commonly used white marble. This suggests that the satyr has drunk so much wine that he is as red as the grapes he has consumed.

“We are delighted to have this arresting masterpiece as it crosses the Atlantic for the first time,” said Julián Zugazagoitia, CEO and Director of the Nelson-Atkins. “The grandeur and the majesty of Kirkwood Hall is the perfect backdrop to appreciate and enjoy this work.  It is an appropriate space that will transport us to the city of Rome, with whom we are launching this partnership and the start of a great relationship.”

The Fauno rosso loan is part of a broad program of exchanges and cultural events between Rome and the United States that was launched in Washington, D.C. in 2011 called The Dream of Rome. The program finds nowadays new support in Enel Green Power, the Italian company devoted to worldwide development of energy generation from renewables, which entered in a partnership with the Capitoline Museums, along with the Knights of Columbus. Through The Dream of Rome, some of Rome’s magnificent masterpieces will be on display in prestigious museums in the U.S. in cities such as Washington, D.C., San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Boston.