KCK mobile food pantry is moved out of a prime tourist area

A Kansas City, Kan., community service group has given up its fight to stage a mobile food pantry that had been feeding 2,200 people a month in western Wyandotte County.

Instead, Catholic Charities of Northeast Kansas has partnered with Harvesters to take over operation of the twice-a-month pantry and move it four miles to a new site at 6565 State Ave., a former Wal-Mart and now the Kansas City Kansas Community College Technical Education Center. The charity will distribute food there at 1 p.m. Saturday and on Dec. 13 and 20.

“That’s great. I’m glad the people will get fed,” said Janice Witt, president of Civitan Sisters of Charity, Hope and Integrity and the organizer of the mobile pantry that until last week had operated in a church parking lot at 88th Street and Parallel Parkway.

Why Witt’s mobile pantry was stopped is not clear. Government officials blame traffic problems that residents say were no big deal. Witt contends it was a political move to hide the fact that hungry people live in the otherwise middle-class area that’s home to many of Wyandotte County’s prime tourist attractions, including the Legends, Kansas Speedway and Sporting Kansas City’s stadium.

“The political machine wants to keep poverty on the other side of the tracks, in the inner city,” Witt said. “But there are hungry people right here in this neighborhood.”

Officials with the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kan., called Witt’s notion ridiculous.

“It is not about taking away opportunity from people in need,” Unified Government spokesman Edwin Birch said. “The intent of the congregation is admirable, but we have to consider safety, too. That is our job.”

The Civitan mobile pantry had been handing out food from Harvesters at the Crossroads Family Church, 8822 Parallel Parkway, two Saturdays each month since July.

Unified Government officials said in a statement that they had received complaints from residents “about the voluminous amount of traffic surrounding their neighborhood due to the food pantry.” And Birch said the municipality was worried that the two hours of traffic moving through the church parking lot might pose a problem for emergency vehicles at Providence Medical Center.

The hospital, which is across four-lane Parallel Parkway from the church, had not reported a problem, Birch said.

Harvesters heard from a Unified Government public works official who told it the mobile pantry was creating a traffic hazard and not to send its 18-wheel semi-truck load of food to the church. “We did not do any investigating,” said Ellen Feldhausen, spokeswoman for Harvesters.

But, she said, it is common at the six other mobile food pantries in Wyandotte County for people to line up in their vehicles ahead of start time to secure a spot, and that often causes traffic problems that are usually worked out.

Harvesters told Civitan that the 25,000 pounds of food its mobile pantry had been getting each time would not arrive until traffic problems were resolved. The truck didn’t come last Saturday, and people who drove through the church lot at noon, many of them families with children, were turned away empty-handed.

On days when the pantry was open, 30 to 100 volunteers packed boxes with 20 to 30 pounds of food for each of about 1,100 clients.

Law enforcement said it had no problems with the traffic flow through the neighborhood on mobile pantry day and hadn’t received complaints.

“We have complied with everything we were told to do,” said Witt, who also is CEO of the Reola Grant Civitan Family Life Development Center, which operates a stationary pantry at the church. “...We have city police here every Saturday helping to control traffic. If I was breaking traffic laws, why didn’t the city cite me?”

One block away, residents who live on 88th Street said they had no problem with the traffic.

Jim Yoakum, a lawyer who lives five houses from the church, wrote in a Facebook post: “No one in my neighborhood was inconvenienced more than me. I waited to get out of my neighborhood an extra two or three minutes each of the days this pantry was open. Big deal!!!!”

Terry Eidson, owner of Eidson’s Florist at 8535 Parallel Parkway, also said traffic wasn’t a problem.

“The problem I see is that the parking lot space at the church is not large enough to handle all those who need assistance,” said Eidson, who also is a director on the Unified Government Board of Public Utilities. Eidson supports the move to the former Wal-Mart lot.

Witt, who ran for mayor in 2013, grew up on the city’s west side, where she opened her Reola Grant center, named for her mother.

“We were a farming community back then,” she said, and some farmers would open their fields to the public to glean unharvested food.

“That’s not available to people nowadays,” Witt said. “That’s why I do what I do.”

Of the city, she said, “I don’t really know why they did what they did.”

This story was originally published November 12, 2014 at 9:13 PM with the headline "KCK mobile food pantry is moved out of a prime tourist area."