Honorable Senators,
I am Bill Baird, mayor of the City of Lee’s Summit, one of the fastest-growing cities in Missouri with nearly 105,000 citizens. We are expected to grow by over 35,000 people over the next 20 years, the bulk of the population growth will be on the south side of Lee’s Summit where this landfill is being proposed.
The proposed site for this landfill is technically within the City of Kansas City, but it is almost entirely surrounded by Lee’s Summit, Raymore and Grandview. Many decades ago Kansas City annexed slivers of land between our cities such as the area we are discussing today. The impacts from this landfill on the property so remote from the bulk of Kansas City won’t be primarily felt by Kansas City but by those neighborhoods and cities surrounding the area. Because the property in question is on the extreme outskirts of Kansas City, there has been little attention paid to the area and even less active encouragement of healthy development. You might wonder why Kansas City is not taking a strong stance against this proposal when it has schools that would be within a quarter mile of the landfill. Kansas City is not taking a strong position because the students and teachers of Summit Pointe Elementary primarily live in Lee’s Summit. If you wonder why there have been such passionate pleas for your help on this bill, consider this. The wind in Lee’s Summit today is blowing from the southwest at 14 miles per hour just as it is forecasted to do for the next few days making the elementary school squarely and perfectly downwind of the proposed landfill.
M-150 Highway is the road that would lead into and out of the proposed landfill. Packer garbage trucks would line M-150 Highway putting off heavy emissions, damaging our roads, and littering our highways. These trucks would be doing this damage inside the city limits of Kansas City for a half mile, then right after passing Summit Point Elementary School they would be within the city limits of Lee’s Summit…where we actually value this phenomenal M-150 Highway corridor and are developing it in a healthy way with beautiful homes, churches, new memory care center, grocery stores, restaurants and much more. Going west, the packer trucks would be in Grandview. Grandview has been developing, reinvesting and rejuvenating its City in incredible ways. Just to the south of the proposed landfill is Raymore. Our Raymore neighbors have built wonderful homes on an absolutely beautiful golf course just a stone’s throw away from this property. Failing to amend the statute would allow a landfill between an elementary school and a luxury golf community, without any adjacent community having influence in the decision.
What it comes down to is this. We would not be here asking for your help if Kansas City were working with all of us through MARC, the Mid-America Regional Council, regarding how our region handles waste management. We would not be asking for your help if Kansas City cared about what happens on the extreme outskirts of its city limits which are smack dab in the middle of numerous suburbs. This proposal greatly impacts the students, citizens and businesses of Lee’s Summit, Grandview, Raymore, Greenwood, Lake Winnebago and more. We are asking you to ensure we have a seat at the table by passing this legislation.
The landfill company has advanced the argument that we should not “change the rules of the game midstream.” There has been no formal application to change the rules on any applicant so the “changing rules midstream” argument is not relevant. I am here representing the well-being of our citizens asking for a seat at the table on landfill decisions at our doorstep, and this is the best argument that the landfill company can advance against this legislation because it’s the only path for them to force the landfill on my community without our input.
As elected officials, we change the rules all the time by making or amending laws, statutes, and ordinances to protect our citizens and their property rights. If you amend the law, someone may have to do more work addressing neighbors’ concerns and spend more money to maintain public safety and quality of life. We need your support for this bill to ensure our Missouri citizens have a voice in a critical matter that will impact their safety, their quality of life, and their rights as citizens. The passage of this bill sends a message to all Missouri cities, but especially Kansas City to work together on issues that dramatically impact each other’s citizens. This bill is critical because it gives notice that we all are citizens of the great state of Missouri and need to act like it or our state elected officials will step in to protect our rights. I ask for your support in passing this bill and in making sure it gets to the floor for a vote. Our citizens deserve to see democracy and the legislative process work when they have followed the process in the way our cities, schools, citizens and parents have done.
Thank you so much for your consideration.