Articles / Kansas City Green Impact Zone

The impact could take the guise of college programs, public health measures, green jobs training and a regional test ground for green energy technology. Democratic congressman Emmanuel Cleaver championed the program with the idea of focusing resources and creating a model for other neighborhoods to follow. The program's leadership is now waiting for a federal decision on the grants for which it applied. Already the local utility company, Kansas City Power & Light, won a $24-million federal grant to build a “smart grid” in the zone and on its outskirts.

A defibrillator, not peanut butter
“Instead of sort of spreading these out like peanut butter and not really having a measurable impact, we hope to demonstrate that by coordinating these resources together you can really make a difference in a community,” said Dean Katerndahl, director of the Government Innovations Forum at the Mid-America Regional Council, the non-profit Kansas City planning organization that is an instrumental partner in the project.

Switching similes, Anita Malpbia, the program's director, said, “I liken it to a defibrillator. When somebody is down and their heart is stopped, you put the defibrillator on them for a brief period of time and jump start the heart,” she explained.

According to the numbers, the region could use a jump. Unemployment has soared at four to five times higher than the rest of the city for at least the last decade. During the recession, it is up to about 50 percent, according to statistics provided by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Green Impact Zone. The poverty rate is estimated at more than 30 percent of the zone's nearly 8,500 residents.

Smart and sunny
As part of the green zone initiatives, the local utility company, Kansas City Power & Light, will install solar panels as demonstrations on a few homes and public buildings. The company is matching its $24 million federal grant to build an experimental “smart grid” that encompasses the entire impact zone plus a wide fringe of bordering neighborhoods where about 14,000 people live.

The utility will upgrade every meter to “smart” meters that read automatically, give consumption information in real time to both the utility and the consumer, and allow homes that produce their own power (for example, via solar panels) to sell it back to the grid. This experiment will “serve as a blueprint for future SmartGrids” and “accelerate the realization” that utilities in the future can deliver power efficiently and cheaply,” the company said in a statement.

Fewer tires, more gardens
For now, most of the work is in community outreach, education and data collection. Malpbia and her team ring doorbells and distribute fliers to spread news about opportunities to lower utility bills, make home repairs and learn new trades. For example, homeowners can invest in energy-efficiency improvements and receive monthly rebates on their utility bills to cover the cost, up to $1,200. The Green Impact Zone program also began training local youth in home repair and weatherization and may employ them to transform the zone's vacant lots into community gardens.

The program is fortified by 10 community organizations working in the zone and its bordering neighborhoods. The Ivanhoe neighborhood lies over a swathe of the Green Impact Zone and the director of its organization, Margaret May, has worked to lower the crime rate and clean up trash.

“Back in 2000, every place you would look on every block there was trash,” May said. “Every two blocks [there was] an illegal dumping site.” Piles of tires were a problem and May organized the collection of 2,000 tires each year. “I jokingly say that we grow tires in Ivanhoe,” she said. “Today you don’t see much trash; it’s not perfectly clean but it’s pretty clean.”

She has shared news with people about how to take advantage of the opportunities available through the Green Impact Zone. “People here tend to focus on the needs of the day rather than necessarily appreciating, say, the needs of the planet or doing things beyond the ordinary. We educate people on why it’s important to lower utility bills, to turn the lights off, use energy-efficient bulbs. Just to name a few,” she said.

The matter of funding
The question now is how to pay for it. The city already awarded $1.5 million to seed the program, paying salaries and funding its start-up costs and early outreach efforts. Now, the program’s leaders stammer a bit when asked to guess how much money will be available. The program's leadership has applied for nearly a dozen federal grants from the federal stimulus funds for a total of about $100 million. “We’re not in a position to predict whether or not we’ll get that money, but we have all of our fingers and toes crossed,” said Jody Craig, a spokesperson for the Mid-America Regional Council who helped write the grant applications.

“We started off with very high expectations and I think we’ve sort of ratcheted down our expectations [for stimulus-funds grants]” to go after different pots of money, said Dean Katerndahl. One of those pots is local business, like the utility company.

In making the case for targeting this area, however, media and spokespeople sometimes go too far in listing its deficiencies, Anita Malpbia believes. “This is an urban area in a full-fledged city, beset with some of the same issues that urban areas throughout the United States contend with,” she said. “Unemployment is too high, and the crime rate is too high, but we also have a lot of law-abiding citizens who are just trying to make it.”

In fact, the zone's similarity to other areas in the nation makes it perfect for this kind of experiment, she said. If it works here, it can be copied elsewhere.