Happy Thanksgiving!!

We wish you a great, happy and healthy beginning to the holiday season.

Just in case you missed it, here's the link to the KC Star series on rating the 'burbs. A ranking that left Prairie Village in 4th place out of all KC suburbs and the #1 Inner Ring or First Tier suburb.

Pat yourselves on the back -- the report on Prairie Village, which appeared last week and is still available on the web site -- highlighted our neighbor stability and neighborhood cohesiveness.

[as of 11/9, I took the link to the KC Star series off the blog because it was messing-up the layout. Let me know if you want it and I'll send it to you]

Reminders

Remember, as the distribution for the blog grows, please let me know if you would like to be removed from the list (pvward3@kc.rr.com). I'll take care of it immediately.

If you're on the distributrion list, you may get up to two e-mails per month. Certainly, your e-mail address will be revealed to no one for any reason.

Also, anyone with a Thursday or Friday trash pick-up this week will get their pick up a day late. Thursday regulars will get their trash pick-up on Friday and Friday people on Saturday.

Finally, I invite your input on any issue. You can post comments with any level of identity: your name and e-mail address or completely anonymously. Either way, I'm anxious to hear from you.

Conflict of Interests or Much Ado About Nothing?

I’d really like to get your feedback on this:

Last year, a “perceived” conflict of interest arose when a council member or members raised objection to certain city posts being filled with members of the Bucher, Willis, Ratliff engineering and planning staff.

One of those positions is City Planner/Planning Consultant. The City of Prairie Village doesn’t need a full-time planner and so they contract with an outside firm for planning consultant services. Ron Williamson has been the Planning Consultant/City Planner for PV for many years. He is also a partner at BWR. Ron Williamson's and BWR's post as City Planner pre-dates Ron Shafer's election to mayor.


Mayor Ron Shafer is a partner at BWR. He appoints the Planning Commission who makes the recommendation to the City Council on who is the best Planner and Firm for the post of PV City Planner.

Therein lies the perceived conflict of interest: Ron Shafer appoints the committee that selects the planning consultant and that consultant has been Ron Shafer’s business associate and Ron Shafer’s firm. The fear is the appearance of undue influence that could be exerted by the mayor in the selection of the post. Further, that influence could be translated into financial gain for the mayor or his firm.

Last night, by a vote of 6-6, a motion to retain the services of BWR – the long time planning firm for the City of Prairie Village, failed. When there is a tie vote, the motion fails.

Those are the facts. I’d like to offer my interpretation.

1) Can the mayor exert undue influence? I say, “No.” I disagree with the mayor on any number of issues but I am a strong advocate for BWR and Ron Williamson to remain in this position. In the last year and a half , I have never seen ANY hesitation on the part of ANY council member to vote against the mayor’s stance on ANY issue. I have no doubt at all that this mayor has extremely limited ability to persuade any council member to support any measure based on anything but the merits of the issue itself. The mayor has not even been present in the council chambers as we have discussed this issue.

2) Is there a planner or firm that is qualified that is being passed over because we use BWR? We don’t know. We directly contacted 7 local consulting firms and asked them to respond to a Request for Qualifications from PV. Only TWO firms responded: Gould Evans and BWR. Those two firms were interviewed for the one-year contract (in the vast majority of cases, the city can only make contracts of one year, not multiple years).

Per the Planning Commission, (which is a bunch of independent engineers and architects who I find to be not at all the kind of people that you would call Mayor’s puppets) Gould Evans does not have traffic and other types of engineers on their staff and they do not have a particular focus on city planning in their firm currently. Of course, they are a highly regarded firm that has done comprehensive plans and major project planning across the country.

BWR, of course, has in house engineering and experienced city planners. They are also an accomplished and highly regarded planning and engineering firm. As an individual, Ron Williamson is the Executive Vice President of BWR and someone intimately familiar with PV. I think it was a major asset to have someone of his experience and stature as the City Planner

No other firms even bothered to respond. Proponents of the “conflict of interest” theory say that’s because other firms think that BWR has a lock on PV. I think that’s bull. I would think that responding to RFPs from organizations that employ your area of expertise is very routine and if you want business you go for it. I highly doubt that anyone with confidence in their firm’s skills would stay out of an open application process because they think another firm has the inside track. Firms may not be responding because it’s not worth it to them. Their revenues for providing the city services are only going to be about $40,000/year. For those that think that this “perceived” conflict of interest has financial advantages to BWR, that’s not a lot of money to any of these multi-million-dollar firms.

So you have a Planning Commission, which is a team of experts who have made a unanimous recommendation, and half the council thinks that there’s a problem with the integrity of the process.

I think the Council has taken the continuity out of the Planning role right as the City approaches a critical juncture in the Village Vision process. The comprehensive plan is a $175,000 project and Ron Williamson is our professional guide in the process.

Right now the city needs a Planner and what is the solution? To contract on a short term, ad hoc basis until another solution is found. Contract with whom? BWR!!! We’ve told them with our vote that they are involved in a tainted process to the extent that they can’t be the contracted firm, but we still need them to complete our business. If you were BWR, what would you do?

Say, “No.” ??? .........

Say, “Sure, but it’s going to cost you.” ????? .....

I guess we'll find out

Which is the bigger issue for you? The lack of a competent and experienced city planner who is a senior exectuive at his firm or The perceived conflict of interest that Ron Shafer can strong arm the council in to voting the way he wants us to.

Your chance

You will be putting council members in office the right way in April 06. Half the Council is up for election. NO ONE is registered yet, not even the incumbents. You have until the end of January to decide whether you want to represent your Ward.

New Ward 5 Council Member

The Mayor appointed Wayne Vennard from south PV to fill the post of Kay Wolf who is leaving the council to represent some of us in the Kansas House. Now that is a process that that I think stinks. Nothing against Wayne, but I have said on any number of occasions that before the mayor appoints a council rep, there ought to be a big ad in the paper saying that we are looking for applicants. For pete's sake, the mayor didn’t even announce to the council that he was evaluating candidates.

It’s official, you can’t smoke anywhere in PV …..

……Unless, of course, you go to a PV restaurant, then you can go right ahead and fire up!

In case I have not made it clear, I hate cigarette smoke! I was successfully indoctrinated against cigarettes as a kid -- although I enjoyed the aroma of the pipe my father smoked on occasion until he stopped even that about 20 years ago. My children even protest my six or seven cigars a year!

I am NOT a tobacco advocate. I am a sensible legislation advocate.

The council passed what I think is a terrible ordinance after what must have been a record-breaking public participation session that lasted for about 90 minutes Monday night. There was an overwhelming number of non-PV smoking ban advocates that talked about the general evils of cigarettes and second hand smoke. None of which was very convincing for two reasons:

1) THIS ORDINANCE WAS NOT GOING TO ADDRESS ANY OF THE SITUATIONS THAT THEY WERE DESCRIBING. This ordinance was so stripped-down and loaded with limitations that it was never going to impact a measurable community in PV. It specifically exempted restaurants until every city bordering PV goes no smoking in their restaurants. So as other council members patted themselves on the back, I wondered what they were congratulating themselves for …..

2) NO ONE, IN MY OPINION HAS DONE GOOD SCIENCE TO MEASURE EXPOSURE AND RISK. I expect the restaurateurs to be biased towards the status quo. They are anti-ban and they have their statistics and their rationale and I understand that.

However, the smoking ban advocates in all their zeal were not being intellectually honest either. There is a huge difference between A) the established science that smoking causes lung cancer and B) second hand smoke is a health hazard for restaurant workers and patrons. I have had conversations with several pro-ban advocates from KUMed, the county health department, the cancer society, the heart association -- all professionals and experts in the field. But they always start drifting towards the ills of smoking itself, the (in my opinion, imperfect) science that shows the health effects of ETS, the number of “known carcinogens in tobacco smoke” and the mantra, “there is no safe level of second hand smoke”.

One woman, “the Region 7 Administrator for the US Department of Health and Human Services” even claimed that it’s not the job of OSHA to become involved in regulating tobacco smoke in the workplace so it's up to municipalities to do it. WHAT? OSHA regulates hazards to worker safety from noise levels to harmful chemicals and they don’t have jusrisdiction over tobacco smoke!?!?!?! It’s not intellectually, scientifically honest and it hurts their credibility.

Okay, there is no safe level. Fine. Tell me what the dangerous level is. Fresh out of college I worked in a molecular genetics lab for a year. I worked in an environment with known carcinogens and known radioactive isotopes. There is a little device called a dosimeter (they were just film badges back then) that we all wore when we were in the lab that was monitoring our exposure to these agents and when the dosimeters were collected and processed at the end of some period of time my professor knew at what level I had been exposed to these agents.

Do you mean to tell me that we have the technology to create the iPod and the TiVo but there is nothing that can measure how much smoke a restaurant worker is exposed to?

If the health department can establish precisely how hot a restaurant dishwasher needs to be and precisely how cold the fridge needs to be (and if a business does not maintain these standards they can be closed down), why can’t they determine precisely what the level of smoke that is dangerous to restaurant patrons and workers?

The statement, “There is no safe level of second hand smoke,” does not work for me because I believe in the straw that broke the camel’s back. You have to draw a line somewhere -- on one side of the line, you’re okay; on the other side of the line, you’re not. Scientifically, I think that there is a way to calculate at what temperature cooking kills a germ that will make me sick; below that temperature, I am at risk. I think there is a way to determine when I walk through a cloud of cigarette smoke from people standing outside a non-smoking restaurant whether it’s more likely to make me cough or give me cancer.

Since I can successfully and happily avoid tobacco smoke in my recreational environment, I am very confident that everyone else can to. Janie and I choose where we go in public consistent with whether a family atmosphere is present. Cigarette smoke is not family friendly and I don’t feel cheated when we avoid those establishments. I feel that a business owner has missed an opportunity to take my money and I don’t feel discriminated against for that.

I don’t think that private citizens require government intervention in this case. The private interests of a business owner and the private interests of a restaurant patron are essentially equal; each make his or her own business decision.

So, again the only individuals that need intervention are the bartender or waiter. How can we protect them if we assume that there is no safe level yet we allow smoking on restaurant patios and decks? How can we ban smoking outside if we can’t measure the amount of smoke that restaurant workers come in contact with outside?

There is a way to do it but I don’t think either side wants to find a real answer. Like so many other real public safety issues, when it become politicized it’s not about truth it’s about winning.

No one won last night. The ordinance has a huge overlap with the no smoking rules that private property owners have in place and the existing no smoking ordinance that the city already has. NOTHING is changed and nothing advances because we’ve passed this toothless law.