Mobile home park along Blue River is preferred site for Jackson County’s new jail
Jackson County is considering building its new jail on a 99-acre site now occupied by a long-established trailer park and former airfield along the Blue River, The Star has learned.
Officials have declined to publicly confirm the location because the site selection process has been conducted in secret, which is allowed under the state’s open meetings law.
But multiple sources confirmed that the mobile home community at 7000 E. U.S. 40 is the preferred site of project manager JCDC Partners, and that a letter of intent to purchase the property was discussed last week by a steering committee of the county’s top elected officials.
The potential deal is scheduled to be considered behind closed doors at Monday’s regular meeting of the county legislature, whose nine members will ultimately decide whether to pursue a purchase.
If that happens, as many as 100 families living at the Heart Mobile Village would have to move. That potential displacement concerns some county legislators, who are troubled with the secrecy that’s surrounded the site selection so far.
“With land acquisitions and things like that, we should be transparent sooner rather than later on that because of the impact that it may have on constituencies that we represent,” legislator Crystal Williams, 2nd District At-Large, said at last week’s regular meeting.
Two of her colleagues said it was inappropriate at this stage in the process to discuss real estate transactions openly. Chairman Dan Tarwater said public discussion at this point could drive up the price taxpayers end up paying for the land.
When asked by her colleagues last Monday about the status of a land purchase, 6th District legislator and steering committee member Theresa Cass Galvin said that “JCDC has identified a piece of land, and of course we can’t discuss what we have previously discussed in closed session.”
She said the identity of the property would become public after the non-binding letter of intent to purchase was signed and a contract had come before the legislature for approval.
The Star confirmed through its reporting that the preferred site was a trailer park owned by someone from Wichita.
Property records show that Park Holdings Inc. of Wichita bought Heart Mobile in 2019 for $3.4 million. The company is controlled by real estate investor Rick E. Hodge Jr., an attorney who was disbarred in 2017 for violating conflict of interest rules in his dealing with a client.
Hodge did not reply to a request for comment. Records show the city filed a notice of delinquency against Park Holdings in October for an unpaid water bill totaling nearly $111,000.
The company bought Heart Mobile from the estate of the late Leonard Licata, whose father, Sam Licata, established the park in 1956 on land where he had previously operated a private airstrip called Heart of America Airport.
The park has 444 pad sites for trailers, but only 100 of them were occupied at the time of the sale, said Leonard Licata’s son David. Online ads show the park being up for sale since at least 2012.
“He tried to sell it for years,” David Licata said of his father, who died in 2017 after a long illness.
Jackson County was among the potential buyers Leonard Licata thought might be interested. He and friend John Ivey pitched the idea to county officials that the land would be a good place for a jail, but the county wasn’t interested at the time.
“That would be good news,” Ivey said Friday upon hearing that the county is now showing interest.
Tarwater declined to discuss the potential purchase, but said the search for a location to build what he said would be a $180 million to $200 million replacement for the multi-story Jackson County Detention Center in downtown Kansas City has been extensive. However, JCDC says the price, minus site costs, is $260 million.
“”We’ve looked at over 45 sites,” he said.
The ideal location, he said, would be one between the courthouses in Kansas City and Independence for ease in getting prisoners to and from their court appearances, on a bus line so family members without cars can visit them, and on enough land for a one-level facility that could be expanded beyond the 1,188 anticipated beds.
The Heart Mobile Village site would appear to meet all the criteria.
But legislator Jalen Anderson, 1st District At Large, is among those with concerns. He says there hasn’t been enough public discussion about the size of the new jail, its cost, or where it might be located.
It troubles him to think that people living at Heart Mobile Village would be forced to move.
“It’s just completely unacceptable,” he said. “If we can find another place where we don’t have to move folks who are just trying to get by — I mean from what I understand, you know, these are very low-income families, they’re just barely making it through this COVID time — I just don’t know why there seems to be a fixation on this place.”
It’s unclear how long a potential purchase of Heart Mobile Village has been under consideration. Records show that the company asked the Kansas City planning department for a floodplain development review last fall. The site has been threatened by flooding in the past and fill would have to be brought in to increase the elevation, county sources said.
The trailer park’s web page says it is no longer accepting new renters.
The county began discussing the need for a new jail in 2017. The current one has suffered from years of deferred maintenance, is overcrowded and has security issues due to its multi-story layout. JCDC was hired in late 2019 to plan for and construct a new one.
Estimated completion is in 2024.
This story was originally published March 29, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
