Longtime city planner retiring Tuesday

Kent Bratton is almost ready to stop being Cape Girardeau's city planner. He's packing up his office to retire, leaving a legacy of detail built behind the scenes. Last week, he flipped the calendar behind his desk to August. Bratton is always looking ahead.

His second-floor office in city hall is awash in oversized maps, few of them folded. Stacks rest on filing cabinets and billow up from a large table. A box filled with rolled-up maps, some in cardboard tubes, sits near his desk at the back of the room.

Bratton, a slender man with oversized glasses and thinning brown hair, could pass for a science teacher. He's fascinated by rocks and what happens to the undulating earth when people decide to recast it as a foundation for a home, business or road.

On Tuesday, he retires after nearly 20 years as being Cape Girardeau's only city planner. The city will host a reception for him from 3 to 5 p.m. Monday at city hall.

On July 23, Bratton sat between the city's prosecutor and engineer for his last official city council meeting. They heard Mayor Jay Knudtson say it was "real important that the citizenry of Cape Girardeau know that Kent Bratton has made a difference in their lives."

Cape Girardeau city planner Kent Bratton looked over a geological map at City Hall. Bratton is retiring from the position he has held since 1988. (Fred Lynch)

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Bratton, 65, was born and raised in Dodge City, Kan., the second of three children and the only boy.

A stranger might have difficulty understanding his imperfect speech. Few ask, but when they do, he offers a two-word explanation.

"Cleft palate," he says, shrugging off memories of undergoing 13 corrective surgeries with, "They do them better now."

He studied geology as a major and minor subject at Fort Hayes College in Kansas, then traveled to Edwardsville, Ill., to earn a master's degree in geology at Southern Illinois University.

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He runs an index finger across one of hundreds of city maps he's used on the job. He's looking for the highest and lowest spots in the city.

"I used to know this by heart," he muses, his finger stopping at the top of Snake Hill before moving to the city's lowest point, a spot in the southeast corner below the Buzzi Unicem cement plant on South Sprigg Street.

He fostered the city's transition from buying water from a supplier to running its own water system in 1996."If you can't control the water system, you can't control anything," he says. It was a major transition, one that gave the city a secure water supply.

He pulls out a plat map, with color demarcating the city's size at various times: a small black square around streets south of Broadway existing in 1808; yellow for circa 1857; blue for the start of the 20th century; purple for 1929; orange for immediate post-World War II period; a brighter blue for the 1958 boom; red for 1967, what Bratton calls "the big annex" to Interstate 55 and Lexington Avenue; and green for everything else, little additions to the city's expanding border.

He once hand-colored those maps using markers or pencils. Now, Bratton says, maps are digital. He has ordered various kinds of maps through the years, including digital satellite images every three years. He kept a rolling record of what the city really looked like. It settles a lot of arguments, he says.

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Al Stoverink, then Cape Girardeau's assistant city manager, hired Bratton in 1988, while city manager J. Ronald Fischer was on vacation. Fischer was mad about that at first, Bratton recalls with a chuckle.

For the next 19 years, Bratton refined and implemented ideas in Cape Girardeau's first comprehensive plan, one he helped put on paper while working the Southeast Missouri Regional Planning and Economic Development Commission.

The city got a man who had been helping modernize 42 incorporated entities in Bollinger, Cape Girardeau, Iron, Madison, Perry, Ste. Genevieve and St. Francois counties.

He remembers developing a water and sewer plan for the city of St. Mary, a town of 600 people. Using funds from five agencies, he guided the 13-year project.

"You've got to have a lot of patience," he says.

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Bratton rocks back in his chair at a city hall conference room table, eyes on the stack of maps he has carried there. He earnestly deconstructs Cape Girardeau into a series of layers -- water tables, geologic elevations, platted streets. He knows the homes, hotels, churches, schools and office buildings that rise above them. He knows the sidewalks. Starting in 1986, he consumed six months absorbing the roll, pitch and yaw of the earth, walking every Cape Girardeau street from West End Boulevard to the river for a land-use survey. He documented each residential, commercial and industrial lot, making a note of the general condition of the properties.

Helping determine the future direction of a city means knowing its past, he says.

Chauncy Buchheit, executive director of Southeast Missouri's Regional Planning and Economic Development Commission, was hired as a front-line planner by Bratton in 1980. He says his former boss specializes in "the little particulars."

"He wants to make sure everything is done right before he gets started," Buchheit says. Because of Bratton, Buchheit says, he's learned to dream about a community and envision what it's going to look like in a decade, to avoid quick fixes in favor of foundational work.

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Bratton's face lights up when he explains the importance of restoring the carriage lamps now hanging on Cape Girardeau's old Mississippi bridge overlook. No one would have guessed the glimmer possible once nearly 80 years of grime were removed.

Mention the razing of old Saint Francis Hospital on Good Hope Street and a shadow crosses Bratton's face. The demolition broke his heart a little and cost the city $750,000. It fueled his passion for saving another Cape Girardeau landmark, the Marquette Hotel.

"It was a derelict building," Buchheit says. "Now it's been turned into a showplace."

Cape Girardeau's city inspector, Tim Morgan, has talked with Bratton "at least three times a week" for more than a decade's worth of city business. He says Bratton knows things in a way "that you can't write down on paper. It would take five years to even try to get it all down. ... He will definitely be missed."

Buchheit says planning is the art of moving projects from ideas to ribbon cuttings.

"It's a difficult job, because there's a lot of anonymity to a lot of it," he said. Take the Red House Interpretive Center by the floodwall for which, Buchheit says, Bratton worked tirelessly and anonymously.

In a way, that's what a planner wants. Not for people to know what kind of logistical marathon it took to fund and construct the $46 million Cape LaCroix Creek/Walker Branch flood control project, but that, when it rains hard enough to create a flash flood, Town Plaza Shopping Center stays dry, as do residents' homes.

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Bratton pulls out another map, tracing the path of excavation and engineering that channels water to a 157-acre dry detention reservoir, completed in 2005.

"I didn't think I'd ever see that basin full," he says, shaking his head a little. "But I've seen it full three times since 2005."

Bratton's job involved telling people they couldn't build, or rebuild, in certain places.

He worked on the flood buyout of 102 lots around the shoe factory on North Main Street after the 1993 flood.

Doug Leslie, Cape Girardeau's city manager, sees Bratton as a walking history.

"He has an incredible knowledge of events and issues," Leslie said. "We all rely on him as a resource for that and that will certainly be missed. No one else in the city has that."

People at Monday's reception may talk about Bratton's contribution to Cape Girardeau's history. But he's been looking into the future all along. Though retiring Tuesday, Bratton says he'll continue to work for the city periodically.

He says Cape Girardeau will continue to grow. Already more than a dozen street projects are in some planning or construction phase. "Everything is in good shape," he says. "It's ready to go."

pmcnichol@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 127