Connect Our Community: Wheat from the Chaff

It’s hard to tell if Connect Our Community actually has the grassroots support that the yard signs and Webster-Kirkwood Times coverage seem to indicate, or whether it’s the narrow project of a couple of incredibly hardworking gadflies who have managed to drag support for the project out of the swamp as if it were Sutpen’s Hundred. In examining Connect Our Community, both as a cultural political phenomenon and as a policy, those gadflies, Michael Carmody and David Eagleton, seem as good a place as any to start.

Carmody, an old retired white guy, has spent the last decade of his life vigorously pursuing the type of community organizing that is often spoken about reverently in much younger progressive circles. Whether the causes of that organizing have been good or bad has been more of a mixed bag.

He started first with “Save Sugar Creek,” which I consider to have been a basically NIMBY project to defeat some apartments under the guise of quasi-environmentalism. Then, after defeating the apartments and claiming victory there, he moved on to spearhead a project that I’m much more sympathetic to called “Safer Streets for Kirkwood (and St. Louis County)” which set out to improve pedestrian and cyclist safety in Kirkwood (and eventually all of the county). With Safer Streets, Carmody has trained his (intense) focus on the process by which the city has (or, to his great consternation, hasn’t) pursued safety improvements big and small. In Carmody’s telling, Kirkwood’s limited budget is not a valid excuse for failing to pursue any such improvements when you factor in the millions of dollars in grant funding he estimates we have missed due to some combination of incompetence and disinterest in the cause).

This hardline approach has burned a lot of bridges with local leaders thanks to his maximalist, insistent, dictating communication style, (a style that, unfortunately, essentially ensures that its audience will be forced to filter and ignore some of its associated content, which is often incredibly informative).

With Connect Our Community, Carmody —now teamed up with David Eagleton, a man that shares much of his style but with the added influence and connections facilitated by serving on the city’s Planning & Zoning Committee— has distilled a decade’s worth of research, organizing and email list-building down to a single, tangible project. The only questions are whether it has any chance of actually happening, and whether it even should. First though, let’s recap what the plan actually is.

What is Connect Our Community?

Connect Our Community is a plan to connect Grant’s Trail (the existing one, not the extension to Downtown Kirkwood) to the recently completed I-44 pedestrian/cyclist bridge over the Meramec, thus connecting one Great Rivers Greenway (Grant’s Trail) to another (Meramec Greenway).

The specifics of the plan call for a multi-use path to replace two lanes of Big Bend, then continuing down Marshall Road. Just past where Marshall crosses under 270, the path would climb a wooded hill until it hit Cragwold Rd before linking up with Meramec Greenway at the bridge. A protected intersection at Kirkwood and Big Bend is also included in the plan (more on that in a bit).

This project would be funded by a relatively new kind of federal transportation grant program known as SS4A (Safer Streets and roads For All) that provides 80% Federal funding for pedestrian safety projects. The project’s architects think that Kirkwood would be able to offload much of the remaining 20% of costs by bringing in multiple different stakeholders —Oakland, Sunset Hills, St. Louis County, Meramec Community College, Great Rivers Greenways, and others.

The Wheat

So what does the proposal get right? Well, quite a lot, both in terms of the project itself and in terms of the unique funding opportunity SS4A represents to Kirkwood. Let’s start with the latter.

Kirkwood Stands Alone In DOT Grant Eligibility

On March 17, 2022, Kirkwood City Council passed Resolution 33-2022 with relatively little fanfare. That resolution, the 41-page Vision Zero Kirkwood Action Plan, at the time felt to me like little more than a checked box with few teeth in the form of actual implementation. It turns out that I was wrong.

That’s because the words “Action Plan” turn out to mean something very specific to the federal Department of Transportation. And the fact that Kirkwood has an Action Plan means we have access to the pile of federal money that is the aforementioned SS4A. Currently, not a single other entity in the entire Metro region can touch that money. Kirkwood has an Action Plan and no one else does: Not the City, not the County, not Clayton or Webster or Chesterfield. Just us.

What an Action Plan Gets You

Having an eligible Action Plan puts a given community on a SS4A funding ladder. Now you can get initial money known as a Planning Grant to fund the creation of an Action Plan (East-West Gateway received one of these for $580.6k in February to try and develop an Action Plan for the entire region). Then you can also get a “Supplemental Action Plan Grant” that can be used to flesh out your existing Action Plan with further study, data collection, program assessment etc. This is the type of grant we got in February in the amount of $480k. Just last week City Council approved a plan for how to use this money, listing four initiatives:

• a Southeast Kirkwood Connectivity Study;
• a Kirkwood School District Safe Routes to School Plan;
• a Citywide speed study; and
• Baseline Data Collection and Performance Measure Refinement

The real boon, however, comes in the “Implementation Grants”. While the expected value of Planning Grants range from $100,000 to $10 million, the Implementation Grants start at $2.5 million and go all the way up to $25 million. This is the kind the Connect Our Communities folks are after.

The idea here, again, though, is that you identify what projects you should spend the money on in the Action Plan first, and then the Implementation Grants are used to execute the projects identified by that plan. So does our Action Plan support prioritizing South Kirkwood?

Well, yeah, it basically does! Our Action Plan featured the following graphic outlining what streets were the most dangerous and thus really needed to be prioritized in any Implementation Grant proposal, and when you look at it, the Connect Our Community proponents are spot on that our Action Plan suggests that Big Bend is in dire need of safety improvements. Then, when you look at what we’re spending our Supplemental Action Plan grant money on, this same area pops up again in the form of a “Southeast Kirkwood Connectivity Study”. All this points towards the Big Bend corridor being well qualified to receive Implementation dollars.

And, if we then take a step back, Connect Our Community seems like a pretty good solution to this established South Kirkwood road safety problem. In broad strokes, Connecting Grant’s Trail more directly with Meacham Park is an absolutely worthwhile goal and connecting Meacham Park with Meramec Community College makes a ton of sense to me too.

Even the more specific aspects of the project, like the conversion of Big Bend & Kirkwood Rd to a “protected intersection” (essentially think vastly improved safety for cyclists), sound really solid to me. To help you visualize what that might look like, here’s a rendering of a protected intersection overlaid with the existing one:

If this was the extent of the project: multi-faceted pedestrian and cyclist safety enhancements running from Grant’s Trail in Oakland past Meacham Park and on to Meramec, I’d be in full-fledged support. Unfortunately, I don’t think the Western half of the project makes nearly as much sense.

The Chaff

Mostly this comes down to rapidly diminishing returns. Connecting the bridge-to-nowhere with Kirkwood on the one side of the bridge doesn’t change the fact that it still doesn’t go anywhere worthwhile on the other side. If Sam Page called up Mayor Griffin and said, “let’s get this project done, you put in the application and we’ll put in the work to get everyone else on board,” then sure, we should do it. But according to the Mayor, there is very little interest in the project from the County Executive’s office.

And that makes sense to me. The second half (the more expensive half!) of the project would basically be a novelty project for road cycling hobbyists. Now, cycling tourists can bring money into the city, especially if the newly-funded Rock Island section of the Katy Trail is eventually linked to the Meramec River Greenway. But that just feels like a lot of caveats that are a long way off to justify the cost.

Now, supporters will tell you that you have to connect to the bridge because that’s how you bring in all the other funding entities. Without the tie-in to the bridge, Sunset Hills and Fenton have no interest in the project, and perhaps Great Rivers Greenway is less excited/interested in chipping in some money if the path only connects to a greenway at one end rather than both. But I also don’t think those entities are breaking down the door trying to get us to submit an Implementation Grant proposal for the project either:

• Fenton is not exactly the Daddy Warbucks of municipalities
• The route doesn’t actually improve any of the connections for Sunset Hills… at all I don’t think?
• The County is apparently uninterested
• Great Rivers Greenway didn’t toss any money for the extension to Downtown Kirkwood, and I’m pretty sure this project falls lower on their priority list than that

May I suggest an Alternative?

Losing the expensive back half of the project gives you a lot of money to play with if you’re looking to maintain the same level of ambition. I think one great potential use of that money would be the reconceptualization of the project from one long cycling path that connects the Grant’s Trail Greenway to the Meramec River Greenway to one that actually puts “connecting our community” first.

I think that a project operating under that framework looks, essentially, like an upside-down T: One arm reaching out to Meramec, Vianney and Robinson, one arm reaching out to the Grant’s Trail and the Oak Bend Branch of the St. Louis County Library system, and right down the middle, a connection to the economic, cultural, and political engine of our community: Downtown Kirkwood.

Here’s why I think it works. First, as I said, the first half of the Connect Our Community plan is solid, so I leave that essentially untouched as the first phase of the project. Then, instead of the Tour de France through western Kirkwood, let’s take advantage of the fact that the city is in the early stages of planning an overhaul of Kirkwood Road from the railroad tracks to Monroe (the intersection that Spencer’s Grill, Kirkwood Glass, and Grapevine Wines currently call home). Getting some SS4A federal funding for that project by including some common sense pedestrian improvements (like a South Kirkwood Road lane diet to match the proposed one on North Kirkwood, and some sidewalk infill near the tracks), is a no-brainer.

Furthermore, such a connection ticks off a bunch of boxes in our Action Plan, thus increasing our odds of actually getting the thing funded. If you look back at the color-coded streets map, South Kirkwood Road and Big Bend were highlighted by our original Action Plan as two of the most dangerous roads in the city. Then, in our Supplemental Action Plan, the two planned studies apart from the citywide speed study and data collection, were, again: 1. a safe routes to schools plan (this plan pulls Nipher into the mix), 2. a “southeast Kirkwood” (read: Meacham Park) Connectivity Study.

Speaking of Meacham Park, remember the priorities I listed in that “Meacham Park is an Island” piece I did a few months back? If not, here they are again:

1) Downtown Kirkwood, 2) Meramec Community College, 3) Meacham Park itself

Well, when you think about it, a revised version of the “Connect Our Community” plan like the one above would address all three of those priorities about as directly as I could ever possibly imagine. A “Connect Our Community” plan with Meacham at its center literally and figuratively, is an idea that would border on sentimental if it wasn’t so long overdue.

Did We Miss the Boat?

Now here’s the big question: Is this all too little too late? The big problem is that the second round of the SS4A funding cycle just closed on July 10th. Now, I wish we would’ve submitted an application here rather than having skipped it, as we seem to have done, but I’m also not privy to the kinds of guidance that the Federal DOT offered. Perhaps we have to actually wrap up the Supplemental Action Plan (which isn’t scheduled to be complete until after 2025) and see what that new info yields before we have any shot of getting more SS4A to start working on solutions. I’m not sure.

But it’s important to remember the window on all this is limited. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law only funded the SS4A program for five years, and we’re already two years in. We had a head start on the rest of the region and it’s essential that we get more out of it than 400k’s worth of studies.

This is yet another reason why I think it makes sense for the city to hire a full-time transportation planner under Jonathan Rachie to develop these kinds of applications and oversee their implementation rather than outsourcing the job to a consultancy or, in this case, not submitting any application at all. There is a lot of federal-funding-bang for very little transpo-planner-salary-buck if we can stomach a little up-front cost in the form of an additional salaried position.

On top of that federal time-crunch, we’re also running out of time to work with our local partners. St. Louis County is about to begin work on some not-very-impressive improvements to Big Bend from Couch to Kirkwood Road, and MoDOT is about to begin on a similarly uninspiring re-do of S. Kirkwood Rd from the city boundary to Big Bend.

That leaves us a bit in a bind because re-pavings are often used as the opportunity to make big safety improvements along routes. This happens for a few reasons. First, if MoDOT or St. Louis County are already in communication with Kirkwood because the schedule says its time to re-do one of their roads that runs through the city’s boundaries, that helps solve the coordination problem. It’s easier to get meetings with the relevant players, easier to get them to focus on our myopic problems, easier to sequence the construction work in a logical manner, etc.

Second, funding gets easier if we have partners already throwing money at the project. You can do more if another entity is pitching in, but also, in terms of prioritization, Kirkwood isn’t going to want to fund our required 20% of the funding to re-do a road that just got repaved while we struggle to come up with the cash we need to fix all our other streets that MoDOT and St. Louis County don’t help us maintain. So you really want to find a project that would help a lot, but also ones that lines up well with a project that needs to get done anyway.

It’s Not Nothing

I’m not sure how deep the community-wide support for Connect Our Communities really goes, but I do know that it’s not nothing. Real people have real signs supporting the project in their yards and there are real articles in the Webster Kirkwood Times. The policy architects we led this piece with have gotten this project on the agenda in a way that is genuinely impressive. In doing so, they’ve forced leaders to give legitimate considerations to a proposal with real merits. But now we have a year to get this right, and it will be up to the supporters and advocates of the project (myself included) to be flexible and adaptable enough to actually see some form of it through.