On April 2nd, Kirkwood residents will have the opportunity to elect four council members and a new Mayor. Over the next month, I'll have plenty of coverage of the candidates for those positions, but this week I wanted to take a step back and look at the distinct electoral process by which that new five-person… Continue reading Kirkwood’s Strange Electoral System
Kirkwood is set to apply for a Surface Transportation Program (STP) grant funding for the final phase of Grant's Trail extension to Downtown Kirkwood. The application will first go before City Council at tomorrow's meeting (Jan 18) and then will be submitted to East-West Gateway (EWG) for consideration. EWG is expected to announce the applications… Continue reading Final Phase of Grant’s Trail Comes Into Focus
The natural way neighborhoods have traditionally developed was as follows: People decide to live in an area and then a smattering of businesses that cater to those people open up shop nearby. Or perhaps the opposite happens: Some place is well-suited for business (maybe a canal is built, or gold is discovered, or, as in… Continue reading Urban Villages: A Vision for a Quainter Kirkwood
Kirkwood has issued a request for proposal (RFP) for two prominent city-owned lots in Downtown Kirkwood according to a newsletter from Council member Liz Gibbons. The two lots, 107-115 W Jefferson, and 125 E Jefferson are both zoned for B-2 General Business, the city's most intensive use. The eastern lot sits right next to the… Continue reading Lots Leveraged: RFP Issued for Downtown
Update: 04/01/2024: Last week, the Webster-Kirkwood Times ran a story on cyclists' frustrations that the bring-your-bike pilot program that Amtrak had advertised all winter hadn't come to fruition due to low nature of Kirkwood Station's loading platforms. I talk about the issue surrounding the platform at length in the article below and expressed my frustration… Continue reading Kirkwood Station: Leveraging Our Greatest Asset
Update: 02/02/24 Last night's public hearing saw seventeen people comment against the proposal and just six in favor of it. Written comments submitted to the Council prior to the meeting had a much stronger St. Peter-skew with ~240 emails in favor and ~60 opposed. Council members' lines of questioning offered little insight into how they… Continue reading Jefferson, Clay, & STP’s Cul-de-Sac
There has long been a lament amongst the Kirkwood intelligentsia that maybe adding more homes is good in theory, but the development we've actually gotten in the recent past are of the wrong type. They're too big and too expensive. In other words, they're ruining the charm of Kirkwood while doing nothing to address its… Continue reading A Closer Look at Kirkwood’s Building Code
Kirkwood is the only municipality in Greater St. Louis with its own electric utility, Kirkwood Electric. This setup has several advantages: it ensures more accountability and higher levels of responsiveness than a natural monopoly like Ameren might provide. Kirkwood Electric also operates at a profit, thus allowing the city to reinvest the dividends into other… Continue reading Elective Pay: Why Kirkwood Electric Should Go Bold
Early this summer, Kirkwood released the fruits of a multi-year effort to study the extent of our attainable housing crisis and propose some solutions for how to fix it. That effort, known formally as the Attainable Housing Study , was developed by PGAV and URBRNRX, presented to the Council for comment and review, and ultimately… Continue reading Attainable Housing Study: 19 Solutions Examined
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… Continue reading Connect Our Community: Wheat from the Chaff
