Your Tax Dollars Not at Work

After the CDC-KC started buying and tearing down houses, the area turned into an eyesore, residents say. The CDC-KC bought homes and let them sit vacant for months. Criminal activity flourished around the abandoned structures, and the ghost blocks turned into illegal dumping grounds. Paul Tancredi, the current president of Blue Hills Neighborhood Association, says it got so bad that the fire department and SWAT teams used the structures for training.

Threatt doesn't deny that the first phase was disjointed. "Their concern was valid," he says of the neighbors. "What occurred was, in those days, you'd get some funds in, and the money wouldn't go as far as you thought."

But the CDC-KC made mistakes that had little to do with having enough money. In January 2005, the CDC-KC agreed to pay Joseph Witherspoon $63,000 for his home on Wabash. Two months passed, and the CDC never closed the deal. After consulting a lawyer, Witherspoon assumed that the contract was void.

One day in late March, Witherspoon got a frantic call from his son, who was living in the Wabash home. A demolition crew had started ripping into the Witherspoon's still-inhabited house. Workers busted down the back door and began to strip the siding.

"Before we'd come to any kind of settlement, they started to destroy my house," Witherspoon says.

The infuriated homeowner filed suit against the CDC-KC. The case was settled out of court. Witherspoon says he was compensated for the damage.

Threatt insists that the crew only "clipped the side of his house." Photos from Witherspoon's case file, however, show one side of the home mostly torn off.

Demolitions continued during the summer of 2006 — and the fallout was far more serious.

In June, inspectors from the city health department determined that the CDC-KC was tearing down houses that contained asbestos.

When Thomas Gerleman, a public health specialist, visited the Citadel Plaza site on June 8 and 9, the area was scattered with debris. Eight men were loading lumber from a dilapidated house into the back of a station wagon. When he started taking photographs, Gerleman noted in his report, the demolition workers "became belligerent and threatening."

Gerleman reported that the owner of the demolition company, Delroy Fadell, "could not produce any documents or permits authorizing him to demolish any of the structures, nor was he aware if any environmental surveys had been done." The scene raised suspicions of widespread asbestos contamination.

"It looks like a hurricane or tornado did the demolition," Gerleman concluded.

In a letter to City Manager Wayne Cauthen, Threatt complained that the CDC-KC was being made a "scapegoat" and said he was "completely flabbergasted" at allegations that he had failed to abide by federal and state laws requiring special handling of asbestos. He wrote that media attention and the investigation by the health department were "designed to embarrass the City of KCMO and damage the credibility of the CDC-KC and the economics of the project."

A year later, Threatt still scoffed about reports of asbestos contamination. "It's a technical item," he told The Pitch in May 2007. "We're talking about charred little pieces of hard asbestos siding or floor tiles that should have been — we find out after the fact — remediated, taken off before and, for various reasons, wasn't."

Despite Threatt's claims, the contamination proved real and extensive. Kingston Environmental Services found asbestos in 11 of 12 standing structures and on nearly all of the recently cleared lots. Kingston also found asbestos buried as deep as 6 inches underground and suggested that there could be hidden contamination on older lots overgrown with vegetation.

Threatt expects the cleanup to cost $250,000. The state estimates a $300,000 price tag.

Threatt also told The Pitch in May that the CDC-KC had the financial resources to deal with the problem and that the cleanup would start soon. In fact, it would be another six months before the city and the state signed off on Kingston's cleanup proposal. According to city documents, the effort was slated to begin November 5 and wrap up by the end of that month.

To date, no dirt has moved on the site.

In October, Threatt acknowledged that the CDC-KC had made a mistake and said his organization had paid the price. "Were there private financiers and banks concerned by all the negative publicity? Yes. Have we lost some loan commitments, lost some investment commitments? Yes. It is one of the major reasons why the time frame has elongated," he says.

Even if the cleanup moves forward, the CDC-KC faces stiff state penalties for failing to properly dispose of the asbestos. The Missouri Department of Natural Resources issued citations in early 2007; in September, the still-unresolved issue moved up the legal chain to the state Attorney General's Office.