Blight Fight Continues

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

Kansas City is on the cutting edge nationally on the issue of how to reduce the number of abandoned properties in the city’s urban core and Legal Aid of Western Missouri’s Economic Development team is playing a key role in that work.

In the last week, there have been two articles in the Kansas City Star discussing Legal Aid’s partnerships with the city, neighborhood associations, law firms, banks and others to turn blighted, abandoned property into high quality, occupied housing. The first dealt with beneficiary deeds that keep money (in the form of home equity) that is desperately needed in the urban core, in the urban core.

The second was on the front page of the Star yesterday morning and dealt with an initiative conceived by the Post-Foreclosure Task Force, which Legal Aid’s Michael Duffy leads and in which the city is a close partner. The idea is to get local banks to provide financing for high quality rehabbers to rehab many more abandoned properties than they are able to do now.  You may have seen this on TV as well.

This is exciting work that can make a gigantic difference in increasing property tax revenues, decreasing crime and, most importantly, improving the quality of life in the city’s urban core.

We have a lot of great partners in this work including, just to name a few—city manager Troy Schulte, Council members Ed Ford and Cindy Circo (and really the entire City Council), John Wood and David Park who lead the city’s efforts to address abandoned and dangerous buildings in the urban core, and neighborhood leaders too many to mention.

In the coming year, I’m hoping that you’ll hear more about the expansion of these excellent projects.

SCOTUS Rulings Bring Us Closer to Justice for All

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

 

If Justice for All means anything, it should mean that the law should treat everyone equally and should not favor or punish a group of people for things that are beyond their reasonable control.

In the last century, our country has made impressive progress towards equality based on gender, race, national origin, religion and disability. Before yesterday, however, federal law openly, blatantly and intentionally discriminated against millions of Americans based solely on their sexual orientation.

Yesterday’s Supreme Court rulings will stop a good deal of that discrimination. And while we still have a long way to go to reach equality on all of the numerous forms of our historic discrimination, I’m excited that our Supreme Court had the wisdom and courage to bring us one step closer to truly having Justice for All.

Legal Aid Steps Up and Shares Resources

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

Pictures and stories of the horrible tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma yesterday bring back vivid memories of the May 2011 tornado that ravaged Joplin, Missouri.

The talented staff in Legal Aid’s Joplin office have learned a lot in the last two years about the recovery process from a tornado and what a legal aid program can do to get a community back on its feet. I have talked with Janice Franklin, the Managing Attorney of the Joplin Office, and we have reached out to Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma to make sure that they get the benefit of everything that we have learned in the last two years.

Resources we are offering include: our comprehensive disaster-relief manual; tips as to legal issues that are most likely to appear immediately after a disaster (rental price gouging being one of them); lists of likely funders for disaster relief work and sample grant applications; suggestions on how to help their staff deal with their own emotional trauma from the storm; and ideas on how to staff up after the storm.

Helping people in need is what we do best and we will make sure that the people of Moore get all the help that we can give them. Many thanks to Janice and her staff for sharing their knowledge.

From Eyesore to Asset: Neighborhoods Win

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

In case you missed it, there was an excellent article on the front page of the Kansas City Star this morning highlighting the community development work that is being done by Legal Aid’s Economic Development team, including: Michael Duffy, Jeff Williams, and Ron Nguyen, along with former Legal Aid attorneys Gillian Ruddy and Kendra Mosley.  

 

(Click here to read the article.)

 

As the article shows, the work that Michael, Jeff and Ron are doing, now with Jennifer Wieman, Rachel Hogan and Peter Hoffman joining in, is on the cutting edge nationally in fighting urban core blight caused by abandoned housing.

 
Like so many other Legal Aid projects, even though the Economic Development team is doing fantastic work, very few people in the area know about it.  The article in the Star will help change that and, by doing so, will help solidify the funding that we get for this work from the City and from private foundations for the team’s work.  It will also help us make a strong case for increased funding for this important work in years to come.

Thanks and congratulations again to Michael, Jeff, Ron, Gillian, Kendra, Jennifer, Peter, and Rachel for the recognition for jobs well done.

                                                                       

TMC Medicaid Appeals Project Follow-Up

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

There was a great article in the Kansas City Star this morning about the Medicaid Appeals partnership that Legal Aid of Western Missouri has with Truman Medical Center.

http://www.kansascity.com/2012/10/04/3848419/alan-bavley-hed-like-to-lose-this.html
 

As the article pointed out, the project has gotten more than 1,000 Truman patients who are permanently and totally disabled access to long-term, proactive medical care. It has also generated more than $11 million in sorely needed revenues for Truman.

 

The article, however, failed to mention the tremendous team that does this work. Effie Day as Project Director and Stacy Schaub as Supervising Attorney of the Public Benefits teams have done excellent work in making sure that when Truman’s patients are wrongly turned down for Medicaid, they have the best possible representation they can have to make sure that they get the benefits they deserve. And the same holds true when the patients come from our other referral partners, including K.C. Free Health, KU Medical Center and St. Luke’s Hospital, as well as when the wrongfully denied client just calls us on the phone.

 

The fact that Legal Aid wins more than 85% of all of the Medicaid Appeals cases is the result of the excellent work of everyone on Legal Aid’s Public Benefits team, including the case handlers: Effie Day; Stacy Schaub; Karen Karnes; Katie Wood; Maura Weber; and, Megan Simpson and our talented paralegals: Tracie Griddine and Kim Morris, along with the team’s legal secretary—Sandy Kincaid.

 

We also could not get the results we get at Truman without the excellent work of the Financial Counseling Center staff, the assistance of the social workers and medical staff at Truman and the support of Lydia Jones and Bill Colby who oversee the project at Truman.

 

It’s a wonderful project and the true credit should go to the front line staff who get the job done.

 

Scooter Commuters

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

I’m working on becoming a scooter-commuter. This spring I started riding a scooter to work once or twice a week.  Over the summer, I’ve racked up over 1,000 scooter miles and my goal is to ride it over 2,000 miles per year. If you drive down Gillham Road during rush hour, I’m the guy with a button down shirt and khaki’s riding a little, red, Buddy scooter.

I figure that scootering combined with my switch to a Prius will save about 250 gallons of gas per year. By itself that won’t have a lot of impact on global warming, depletion of fossil fuels and U.S. energy dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

But, if you think of 1,000 K.C. area commuters making a similar switch (that’s well under 1% of the commuting population), then we’d be talking about saving a quarter million gallons a year. And if the same change happened in 50 other cities around the country, then we’d be turning at least a few super-tankers of oil back to the Middle East every year.  The price of oil might even go down and the air might just be a little easier to breath.

That’s a nice thought to enjoy while I scooter around.

Legal Aid's Fight to Re-purpose West High School

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

31 years ago this month, the Kansas City Missouri School District closed West High School.  Ever since the District closed West, Michael Duffy, who leads Legal Aid’s Economic Development team, has been fighting to either get it re-opened or repurposed.

Thanks in good part to Michael’s work and the work of the many other people and organizations that Michael has partnered with, Kansas City’s West Side has been revitalized and is now a wonderfully vibrant community. Through all this time, however, West High has been a decaying eye sore in the middle of the neighborhood.  Still, Michael has never given up the fight to get West High redeveloped.

Five years ago, Michael and Westside Housing Organization (WHO) approached the District with an acquisition and financing proposal that would have redeveloped the building as a mixed use apartment complex with low-income and market rate apartments.  A similar project that Michael helped create nine years ago at Villa Del Sol on the West Side is a national model for urban core redevelopment.  The District, however, turned down the Michael’s West High School redevelopment proposal three times.

Finally, last night, with the building in much worse condition than it was five years ago, the District preliminarily accepted a new, similar plan that Michael and WHO put together.  Again, the project would be mixed use revitalization of the buildings and will require Michael and WHO to assemble roughly $40 million in funding to make it work.

I am confident, that they are up to the task.  The result will be one of the biggest improvements in the urban core of Kansas City in a long time.  Congratulations to Michael, his partners at WHO and to everyone else who has worked on this project.