Liz Gibbons.

So I’ve waited until less than a week before to roll out my analysis and profiles of and interviews with six candidates in an a election that is likely to be decided by mail-in ballots. Is it ideal? No. But ballots aren’t due until the day-of, and here I am, and here you are! There’s no time like the present! So how will all this work? Well, I haven’t quite decided. Here’s what I’m thinking though: Today I will publish my profile of Liz Gibbons and a brief piece from Joseph Fuchs, tomorrow a question and answer series with Bob Sears and an analysis of Maggie Duwe‘s voting record and platform, and Friday an examination of the voting record and platform of Ellen Edman followed by a question and answer series with Sandy Washington. To cap it all off I will write a final piece examining how the candidates and how the compare to one another this weekend. It will then be up to you, the reader, to decide which three will take their place in the upper room at 139 S. Kirkwood Rd. Finally, I encourage you to tune in to tonight’s candidate forum at 7:00. As always, thanks so much for reading and I hope you enjoy!

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When I interviewed Liz Gibbons last week, the first thing I asked her about were those signs. The ubiquitous red, white and sky blue can seemingly be found in about half the yards of the Kirkwood and I wanted to know why? how? Just like everyone else she’s been under Stay at Home orders for the last two months, it’s not like she’s been able to be out knocking on doors. And yet the signs keep multiplying. The first possibility Gibbons suggested was that she has set down deep roots in Kirkwood. She is a third generation graduate of Kirkwood high school, she now has two adult sons that live here and in that time she’s come to know quite a few of its residents. But this is Kirkwood, lots of people have deep roots, very few people have that many signs out. The initial wave of signs can be dated to a campaign event held at One 19 North before the pandemic put down roots of its own and the March election was pushed to June. After that, the only real opportunities for engagement with voters came via mailers, social media (her facebook page “Liz Weddell Gibbons for Kirkwood City Council” has 20 likes and 21 followers), and, if she could get people to find it via some other means, her website, lizgibbonsforkirkwood.com. Of course, the other possibility is that lots and lots of people just agree with her stances on the issues.

Throughout our conversation, Gibbons sought to talk about things we agreed on, a quality that differentiates skilled politicians from iconoclasts at every level. When I tried to explain what this website was and why I was trying to talk to the candidates (tripping clumsily over my words as I did so), she said she had come across it a couple of times before remembering that the idea for the Grant’s Trail extension to downtown via rail spur featured on her website originated on this one. It was sort of an awkward opening but only briefly. This being a point we not only both agreed on but were whole-heartedly excited about, we lingered on it before moving to more contentious topics. Gibbons told me that she had gone a step further and had contacted Union Pacific to see how feasible such a project was, it turned out pretty when to her surprise (and dismay) they offered her a contract to make the purchase then and there! The idea of unilaterally making a purchase on behalf of a city that had not yet elected her was enough to make us both laugh; (I happen to think she should’ve done it and been a legend). The trail extension was clearly something Gibbons had thought about, or at least read about, in detail though. This was even more evident when she went on to talk about the need for some sort of trail head facilities at the would-be new downtown terminus, likely near the new theatre, another aspect of the project as I had envisioned it. But in doing so, (and in talking about access to the theatre, potentially via the trail), Gibbons slipped in a lamentation of the fact that the the theatre will have a lower than what is typically required number of parking spaces included. It was a small comment but one that ultimately foreshadowed our fundamental disagreements on the course that development in Kirkwood should take, a disagreement that would shortly emerge.

At a broader scale though, the potential Grant’s Trail extension cut to the heart of Gibbons priorities on the issue of walkability as a candidate, exposing both their ambitions and limitations. She told me that the health and safety of the residents of Kirkwood was her highest priority. While this was seemingly in reference to the recreation opportunities a trail extension to downtown would offer, it’s hard to imagine that concerns of health didn’t carry further connotations in May of 2020. Later in this conversation, Gibbons would make this connection more explicit when we moved to the topic of the proposed Kirkwood Flats.

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Perhaps no issue is more emblematic of the divide between my and Gibbons opinions than that of the issue that got her into the race in the first place: those very same Kirkwood Flats. Going into the interview, I suppose it was obvious that this would be its central tension —I have yet to see a person deride “over-development” and endorse the Kirkwood Flats project in the same breath— but I also hadn’t heard her take on this specific project. As soon as the topic was broached Gibbons offered, “I know you’re for it and I’m against it,” as the jumping off point which cleared it up pretty quickly. But many people are opposed to the flats as constituted and I needed to see how deep that opposition ran, so I pressed on. “In an ideal world, what would you like to see on the site of proposed flats?” I asked.

“In an ideal world? I think you could maybe do some three story town homes. But I’m not willing to go much bigger than that”.

Town homes seemed to be more of a compromise to a blog that clearly disagreed with her basic premise that density was bad rather than her actual preferred outcome. (Even if it wasn’t, the site is still owned by UMB Bank and they have no plans on leaving, so town homes aren’t happening anyway. For what it’s worth, I also happen to think town homes on the main drag of our commercial strip is poor urban design). And it was here that the question of health returned as Gibbons went as far as to say that, in light of the current pandemic, it was clear that single family housing was not only the aesthetically preferable form of development, it was also the safer one. (A point that I think Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore and Taiwan would dispute). Later she offered another possibility for development of the site, one that seemed to get closer to her true ideal. You could “50 or 60 cottage homes” there she offered. I didn’t quite know what she meant by cottage homes, so I asked if she was referring to accessory dwelling units. After a brief description of what she was imagining, she seemed instead to be talking of the small home movement. The one pictures of which have become popular on pinterest boards and instagram pages. (The movement itself often seems to be a stand-in for a more holistic shift towards a simplified lifestyle and usually takes root in more rural locales, although some small-home urban communities do exist and the solution has become a popular one as a first step towards ending homelessness). Now I took a shot at reconciling our two disparate visions : “Something like that would still get you to a pretty high level of density,” I offered encouragingly. But that was clearly not the goal of Gibbons proposal and she refused to give up the basic conceit growing uncomfortable at the use of that word.

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As the interview drew towards a close, I kept thinking something else she had said while we were talking about the Flats. When articulating her opposition Gibbons said that the the project would “block out the sun” and tower over “the most beautiful street in Kirkwood that run right behind it.” Thinking of the large homes of N. Taylor and few families that will ever be able to afford to live in them, I asked Gibbons if the affordability of Kirkwood was a concern. She offered a resigned yes with a sigh. Gibbons currently lives in her third Kirkwood home; both her sons had been able to buy homes here as well. It was clearly a dream she seemed like wanted other families to be able to afford too. But she also agreed with my assessment that she was of the mind that the affordability ship had largely already sailed; that there was little left to be done about it. Finally she suggested that perhaps 50 or 60 cottage homes on the UMB Bank site offered part of a solution. I wanted to tell her that stacking those homes on top of one another offered even more of a solution. But I had asked for a conversation not to argue about things we clearly disagreed about. Instead we shifted to the final question I had sent her via email before the call: “Would she support eliminating single family exclusive zoning?” (essentially eliminating the ban on duplexes in the majority of Kirkwood that is currently zoned exclusively for single family homes). By this point we both already knew the answer. But perhaps out of sheer momentum or some shared sense of masochism we forged ahead anyway. “To have duplexes in neighborhoods with just houses, I’m not sure I’m ready to go there,” she seemed to apologize, not for her position but rather for having to break it to me.

The prevailing view of Gibbons, many of the people involved with Safer Streets for Kirkwood, and those aligned with them seems to be that Kirkwood must be more hospitable to pedestrians and cyclists, and less beholden to cars but that there is no connection between those goals and the development practices that facilitate them. They fully embrace the idea that walks (and by extension bike rides) need to be safe and maybe even comfortable (the quality provided by things like shade giving street trees and rest giving benches) but the idea that they must also be interesting and useful seems to remain elusive. Of course some people will walk and bike on paths through the woods of south county for exercise and then turn around and walk or ride home, but far more will walk instead of drive if their walk is given a purpose, if they can walk to the pharmacy, can bike to pick up their groceries, or stroll to their favorite restaurant. These kind of decisions don’t get made in a sea of single family housing where there’s nothing to walk to, nor storefronts to window shop while you do it; they don’t get made where the car is the default mode of accomplishing any sort of productive trip while the walk or bike ride is relegated to a healthy diversion for those with time and money to spare to be able to do it. To make walking and biking safe is a noble goal, but it misses an opportunity to make it a way of life. ((No, you did not miss anything, this paragraph has no interview content in it. But hey! What’s the point of having a blog if you don’t get up up on your soap box every now and then?))

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We finished the conversation talking about the things we had in common. Gibbons’ most recent work experience was in finding solutions in the field of education. I told her I had just finished a year of teaching english at a high school out in Denver. When she asked if I would keep teaching I told her that it was just a year long volunteer gig, that next year I am headed to New York to study public policy. Her son had done the same while living in Jefferson City, she told me. A few hours after the interview was over, Gibbons texted me. She told me it was nice talking and thanked me for the conversation. It was a conversation that I had asked for, and probably was not going to do a whole lot for her in terms of reaching her targeted audience or her most likely voters, but one she had taken on anyway. It’s certainly admirable. But it’s a lot to overcome, too.