- Cape Rolling Out Bloomfield Road Art Trail (8/21/19)1
- Donors Pledge Almost Two Grand To Replace SEMO's Possibly Sentient ‘Gum Tree' (8/16/18)
- SEMO and The Will To (Become A Consultant) – Part 2 (6/14/18)
- SEMO and The Will To Do (You Really Want To See That Legal Notice?) – Part 1 (6/4/18)
- Judge, Jury... Trashman (6/1/18)
- Diary of Cape Girardeau Road Deconstruction (5/11/18)
- Trying To Save A Tree From City “Improvements” (4/30/18)2
Armstrong Drive Landowners Have Won The Lottery
Sometimes people just win the lottery.
Sometimes it's by birth, having rich or famous parents, or parents with good genes that result in children that are smarter or more athletic or better-looking than their contemporaries.
Or sometimes people literally win the lottery, like the fellow from Advance who recently won $200,000 a year for the rest of his life by playing a Missouri twenty-dollar scratch off ticket.
The latest people who have won the lottery are the landowners along the proposed route for Armstrong Drive.
Armstrong Drive? Where's that?
That's what I said to myself when I first heard about the Cape Girardeau City Council voting to approve extending Armstrong Drive using funds from the Transportation Trust Fund.
I asked one of our people in circulation if they knew where Armstrong Drive was.
If you are ever lost, consider yourself lucky if you know a person who works in the circulation department of the local newspaper. Those guys tend to know every street and every landmark, and in the case of our paper, how to navigate them in the middle of the night while simultaneously delivering Southeast Missourian's to our subscriber's homes.
But in this case, Armstrong Drive was as much of a mystery to him as it was to me, so we wound up checking a map.
Armstrong Drive is the very short stretch of road that extends west of Siemer's Drive between the Shawnee Parkway and Bloomfield Road. It's only about 1/10 of a mile long, barely big enough to be considered a city street.
There's not much on Armstrong Drive, just offices for the Department of Corrections and the Division of Youth Services.
But the city plans to lengthen this street about a mile and a half, crossing Bloomfield and extending it all the way to Route K. And they're going to do it in style with a four-lane road.
The road will essentially run parallel with Siemer's Drive and open up a huge amount of nearly inaccessible farmland to commercial development.
And we're going to do all of this apparently at no cost to those landowners whose property values will skyrocket in value. Matter of fact, they not only won the lottery by now owning acreage directly adjacent to a planned four-lane roadway, the City of Cape is even going to pay them for their property required for Armstrong Drive and foot the bill for all construction.
Ironically, the city is using the Transportation Trust Fund to pay for the acquisition and construction, even though most of the project is outside of the city limits. It's in the unincorporated county. One would think that the city-funded Transportation Trust Fund should be used towards improving the existing streets in the existing city not building new ones in the county.
I'm sure the city administration feels this is a Field of Dreams situation. If the City of Cape buys access through this large tract of farmland and builds a spiffy 4-lane road, then the owners of the adjacent property will want to be annexed into our city, and businesses and developers will want to clamor to build along this roadway, and the city will expand further westward.
Build it and they will come.
Or maybe not. Since the city has historically only annexed property owners that have requested to be annexed and the city is already committed to extending Armstrong Drive, there's really not much of an incentive for those landowners to have their properties annexed. They'll still have the nice 4-lane roadway courtesy of the Transportation Trust Fund and their property will now be worth a whole lot more.
Annexing will get them better police and fire protection and automated trash pickup... for their fields, their very valuable fields.
I wonder where exactly they sell those twenty-dollar scratch-offs?
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This satellite photo from Google shows the approximate route of the Armstrong Drive extension in green. For points of reference, (A)Wal-Mart, (B)Sam's Club, (C)Kohl's, (D)Lowe's and (E)Target. |
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