Mission Road improvements in Prairie Village take shape

Prairie Village has signed off on a plan to improve pedestrian safety along Mission Road between 71^st and 75^th streets.

A final vote won’t take place until at least December, but City Council members on Monday voiced no concerns with an estimated $1 million proposal to shrink the section of Mission Road from four lanes to three and use the extra space to widen sidewalks and provide more buffer between traffic and walkers. Half of the money would come from state funds.

Public Works Director Keith Bredehoeft said he plans in the next few weeks to schedule a public meeting to get resident input on the proposed changes. He said the proposal received the most support during a previous public meeting held this summer as well as a series of internal meetings with city staff and engineering consultants.

Residents this spring pushed the council to improve the section of the road in 2016, a year earlier than scheduled, arguing that the narrow sidewalks directly next to the street created a safety hazard, especially for the families and children using the sidewalks to travel to Shawnee Mission East High School and St. Ann’s School.

The plan would leave single 11-foot-wide eastbound and westbound lanes separated by a 12-foot-wide middle turning lane. On the west side, the city would install an 8-foot-wide walking trail separated from the street by a 7-foot-wide “greenspace” median. An existing sidewalk on the east side would remain 5 feet wide but would be pushed farther from the street, a plan that Bredehoeft said would likely require the city gaining some additional easement from property owners along the route.

Other proposals considered included added smaller buffers to both sidewalks, leaving the road as is with a few improvements or incorporating bike lanes.

While the central plan for changing the section of Mission Road met little resistance, the council members were far more divided on whether and how to pay for a series of potential “aesthetic” additions to the corridor proposed by staff such as landscaping, ornamental trees, park benches, brick pavers, street name tiles built into the sidewalk and pedestrian pole lights with banners.

Robert Whitman, a landscape architect with Gould Evans, said the additions would replicate efforts being used to beautify Prairie Village Shops.

“This corridor is really the main corridor for the city of Prairie Village so the goal for this is to express some sort of design language that is an expression of what Prairie Village is all about,” Whitman said.

The additions would cost an estimated $150,000, which some staff recommended drawing from the city’s economic development fund. The fund was mostly created a decade ago from the city’s share of a sales tax aimed at school construction.

Councilman Andrew Wang voiced concern with the aesthetic additions in general and said he opposed siphoning cash from the fund without a better policy on how that money should be used.

“I just feel that some of this is ‘yeah, it’s nice to have a corridor through the center of the city,’ but I think we also can’t kid ourselves that there’s $150,000 worth of road and asphalt work in front of somebody’s house — somebody who’s already a resident — that’s not going to happen because of trees and benches and tiles and plates,” Wang said.

Mayor Laura Wassmer defended using the fund, which currently contains about $1.8 million and has been used only to provide property owners small grants for renovating the exterior of their homes. She said ultimately she’d like to see the design elements continued down Mission Road connecting the Shops of Prairie Village and Corinth Square.

In reaction to disagreement over the aesthetic options, Wassmer said she favored not presenting them to the public at all.

“I know that once we show things to the public it’s hard to take things away,” she said.

Ultimately, the council agreed that Bredehoeft can present the aesthetic options for the underlying changes to Mission Road but without guarantees they will be added.

Bredehoeft said that assuming the proposal is approved, the city plans to put the project out for bid in February and begin construction early next summer.

In other business, the council got its first look at a proposed hotel tax for the city that figures prominently in the planned development at Meadowbrook Golf Course and Country Club. If approved, the tax would add a 9 percent charge to the bill of any person who occupies a room in a hotel, motel or tourist court within city limits for 28 consecutive days or fewer.

There currently are no hotels or motels in Prairie Village. But developers at Meadowbrook plan to build a small boutique inn within the mix of single-family homes, town houses and apartments on the property.

The revenues generated by the hotel tax, estimated at around $100,000 a year, would be mostly earmarked to help pay off bonds used to pay for an 83-acre park on the site.

Seven other Johnson County cities currently have transient guest taxes, ranging from Overland Park and Mission with a similar rate of 9 percent to Shawnee and Olathe charging a smaller 6 percent.

Councilman Eric Mikkelson said that while he was not advocating one way or the other, he said the council needs to determine when it votes on the new tax whether it should apply to home and room rentals coordinated through online services like Airbnb.

The council also adopted an amendment to the City Charter that helps change when the council members and mayor go before voters for reelection.

The amendment revokes sections of the charter that deal with city elections, which currently are held in the spring. Following a new state law, Kansas cities are being forced to move their elections to November.

Under a new ordinance also approved by the council, one group of council seats would go up for election next April and serve a shortened term until the end of 2019 while a second group would be elected in November 2017 and serve until January 2022. The mayor’s seat would be staggered to be up for election in even-numbered years, beginning in 2018 and serving until January 2023. After the initial shortened terms, both the council members and the mayor would serve full four-year terms.

The new rules don’t go into effect until January to give potential opponents of the changes an opportunity to push for a referendum vote.

This story was originally published November 3, 2015 at 10:52 AM with the headline "Mission Road improvements in Prairie Village take shape."