City, developers don’t give a damn about us

As usual, the council persons for the City of Wichita, the largest city in Kansas, has decided to “move” a wetland area. In fact, what they are actually doing is destroying it for the sake of real state development.
Developer$ have for some time, owned the City and they do what they want. The city council never gets in there way. This protected wild life refuge used to be in the county. Now it’s in city limits and all the councilmen think of is their wallets and they don’t give a damn about wild life, the ecology or those people who appreciate wild life.
Move a wetland? What are they going to do, put up a sign in bird language to tell the birds where their new site is? Frogs and turtles have already disappeared from this site. Even opossums are becoming rare and coyotes have had to come into the city to forage for food. Soon they will be driven out also.


As reported in The Wichita Eagle, Mar. 21, 2007:

City OKs wetland development
Council members vote to allow construction -- if the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approves.
BY BRENT D. WISTROM
The Wichita Eagle
If the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says it's OK to build a Lowe's Home Improvement store on federally protected wetlands, the city will pay half the cost of relocating the wetlands.
That's an estimated $1.7 million worth of designing, digging and developing.
If the Corps denies the development, the city will have to pay for the developers' $65,000 drainage study -- an analysis the city may need someday anyway.
That's the taxpayers' side of an agreement the City Council approved Tuesday.
The 4-2 vote allows developers to build the Lowe's store, several restaurants and other stores on the wetlands east of Maize Road and south of 29th Street North.
The development will also extend to the west side of Maize Road, where there are no federally protected wetlands.