By SJ Otto
It seems like every Summer I write about urban sprawl and
the lack of open spaces in my part of Sedgwick County .
So why should this year be any different?
When I moved to Maize, KS almost 20 years ago, it was a lot
like living in the country. There used to be an open field across the street
from me. Maize Road went from my house, to a stop light south of me. From there
Maize was a 55 mile per hour stretch of black top road that went through empty
lots—wide open spaces with wheat, weeds or something else along the way to 21st Street . It was
like most stretches of road in the country—wide open spaces and a few tree
lines along the farmed areas.
Today there is a 40 mile per hour four lane road blacktop
road lined with either strip malls, large superstores such as Menards, Sam's
Club or Lowe's Home Improvement, or buildings still being built. It looks like
there is a contest to see who can cram the most buildings on every single site
along the road from 53 Street in Maize towards 21st Street .
There are about four stoplights now. And I dread driving
down to the corner of 21st and Maize where New Market Square , is a mega market that
has lots of useless crap I will never want or use and where such mega-rip offs
as Wal-Mart are located.
My front yard is about 1/4th gone. The once lazy road in
front is now a busy street. The noise and light pollution are never ending.
Once empty spaces of wheat or prairie grass. Now just urban clutter.
There is a new plan for a park along the road were Cadillac
lake[1]
used to be. It sounds like a good idea.
According to The Wichita Eagle:
Seeking to balance nature and commercial development in an
ecologically sensitive area, the Wichita City Council reviewed plans this week
for a $7.2 million wetland park to be built at Cadillac
Lake in northwest Wichita .
The
primary features of the park will be flood-proof galvanized steel boardwalks and wildlife observation
stations modeled on the leaves of native lotus plants, said Hans Klein-Hewett,
landscape architect with RDg Planning and Design, the company hired by the city
to design the park.
The park
is planned for a wetlands area near Maize Road and 29th Street North .
This all sounds great. At fist the city originally decided
to move Cadillac Lake somewhere else, years ago, so the
rush to develop all this land was not compromised by actual wildlife. The new
plans look OK, but lets look at how the city did with Wichita 's WaterWalk. It was suppose to give
us something like they have in San
Antonio , Texas , with
all those neat canals and boats. After
15 years and $41 million in taxpayer subsidies to the WaterWalk, the city
of Wichita has
gotten no money from a profit-sharing agreement attached to the development
deal. The canals aren't built. The developers just took a lot of city development
money and they ran. So what if they do that out here? What if our water park is
just one more city development rip off. Tax payers like me will get another
area of blight to stare at.
This place already looks like clutter. There is nothing but
strip malls with large mega stores
behind them. It looks like shit. A once beautiful country drive is now a
cluttered clusterfuck of businesses and buildings of which most of them I will
never make use of.
More clutter and traffic lights.
I live in a county where most of the people vote for knuckle
headed backward people who haven't studied anything new on city development
since the 1950s. They are stupid dolts who couldn't plan a modern city if their
life depended on it.
So the rest of us pay. We have ugly over-development. The
natural beauty of this land is being ruined by these stupid dolts.
I guess for now all I can do is just put up with it and hope
they might actually do what they have promised to do with the Cadillac Lake
Park . They might get it
right for once in their lives. But I'm not holding my breath.
An endless stream of clutter.
The actual Cadillac Lake before it is gone- Last picture by KMUW.
[1] Cadillac Lake used to be a kind of swamp that was
used by migratory birds. Ecologist over the years have tried to preserve this
lake as it has been an important stop over point for migratory birds. There
have always been the dolts who wanted to drain it and develop it for many
decades.
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