Foregoing Sidewalks Won't Make Kirkwood Affordable

• Last week's Webster-Kirkwood Times:
  • On pg. 4-A, the Kirkwood School District enrollment is expected to continue to decline through 2028. There are probably a lot of different causes for this, but at least one of them is that Kirkwood's population continues to age in place leaving few available (or affordable) options for young families looking to move to the neighborhood. Ideally, things like Accessory Dwelling Units (and apartments and condos) allow older folks to downsize while still remaining in Kirkwood, thus opening up family-sized homes for, well, families. But first, we have to streamline the ADU process. Let's talk about it over a pint next week!
  • In the mailbag on pg. 6-A, there were some recriminations re: the Pioneer's dominance of the Turkey Day Game. I will say, I think i'm a fan of Tom's idea to allow varsity-on-JV matchups in cases where one school is playing in the state final. Competitive balance is an important part of any rivalry.
• The city council work session minutes feature some items on interest:
  • November 14th:
    • The results of the Parks & Rec survey were presented to the council and can be found at the link above
    • Kirkwood had to allocate its full ARPA funding by the end of the year, so here's the final breakdown of what we spent our $5,638,084 on:
      • Enterprise Resource Program: $2,649,100
      • Community Center: $2,415,605
      • City Hall Parking Lot: $573,379 (Parking lots are expensive!)
    • There was also discussion of the Police & Fire Pension Tax, a subset of the city's overall property taxes that funds or pension obligations. Those obligations are currently underfunded by that tax pool though, so there was some confusion earlier this fall when the council went to set the various tax rates and it was seemingly implied by City Administrator Russ Hawes that, unlike all the other subcategories of property taxes, actually the pension fund rate was not at the maximum rate allowed by the State's Hancock Amendment. That would make for an easy fix: the council should raise the pension fund rate and the city's main financial vulnerability would be taken care of. But these minutes seem to confirm that something was lost and translation and the pension fund is currently maxed out. So no easy fixes. Another reminder that the one route past the constraints imposed by the Hancock Amendment's revenue cap isn't via higher rates but rather a larger property tax base (i.e. new development)
  • November 21st:
    • This was the work session where Director of Planning Jonathan Raiche presented the Attainable Housing Study and its recommendations to City Council. I wrote up my takeaways from that presentation here, but this provides some nice additional details on what was discussed
    • It was also the session where they discussed the changing the outdoor lighting ordinance if that's of interest