By CAROLYN SZCZEPANSKI
In front of a house where the ceiling is caving onto the porch and the south-facing windows are covered in plastic, there’s a stream of raw sewage running into the street.
The property at 3435 Holmes Street in north Hyde Park is part of the disheveled empire of landlord Charlie Williard.
For years, residents say, Williard has been violating city housing codes and has been more willing to sit in a jail cell than fix up his properties. People like Frank Stapley, who has owned his house on Holmes for more than a decade, have all but given up on trying to get the aging landlord to clean up his act.
But after five weeks of watching feces and toilet paper bubble up through a hole just inches from the sidewalk, they’ve had enough. And Williard’s not the only one on their shit list.
On one recent Wednesday night, despite a stiff breeze, the stench of sewage was stifling on Holmes. The weather had been dry for days, but the east side of the street was stained with slime. The source of the wetness was a hole the size of a basketball goal in front of 3435. Toilet paper floated just below the surface of the slightly undulating pool that had oozed all over the sidewalk and slicked the adjacent driveway.
“This morning it was just awful,” said a woman who lives across the street. “There was toilet paper and everything that goes with it.”
It’s been discharging for five weeks, Stapley said, doing little to mask the anger and disbelief in his voice. The smell makes it unpleasant for neighbors to sit on their stone porches. They've watched children hop into the middle of what they think is a puddle of rainwater. The neighbors walk their dogs down the middle of the street to avoid the mess on the sidewalk.
Williard doesn't deny the problem emanates from his rental property. Sewers get backed up, he said blithely, by tree roots and debris. At least, he added casually, the outflow at the bottom of the lawn is below the level of the home's basement, so the tenants aren't tromping through the muck.
Sitting at a paper-strewn desk in a cluttered house that doubles as his office, Williard said the problem would be cleared up by the end of the week. But on the following Monday, Williard admitted that the hole was still oozing. He said he'd hired a licensed plumber.
"I feel a little bad for them," he said of his neighbors. "But the cigarettes they smoke are a lot worse for them than that odor. Not that they all smoke cigarettes."
With little hope that Williard would fix the troubling discharge, Stapley and his neighbors have been calling City Hall, hoping public officials would fix the health hazard and bill Williard for the work. But, even with Stapley calling every single day, they suffered through nearly six weeks of human waste being flushed onto the street.
Colleen Doctorian, spokesperson for the Kansas City Water Services Department, which oversees sewers, said the sewer line maintenance division visited the site on September 16 and turned the case over to the Neighborhood Preservation Division. Doctorian says Water Services will fix the leak and bill the owner if the Neighborhood Preservation Division decides the Williard isn't cooperating. It's been nearly three weeks since that visit. But 3435 Holmes isn't on Water Services' list of repairs.
The lack of response from the city has pushed Stapley to wit's end. In the past month, he's called state agencies, the federal Environmental Protection Agency and his U.S. Congressman complaining about the mess. He knows his persistence is starting to get on the nerves of some officials. But he doesn't care.
"If this were in front of the mayor's house, it would have been fixed by now," he said.
This council and mayor were elected to deal with just this sort of problem. Looks like our votes were wasted.... as usual. Of course passing ordinances that deal with smoking and the mayor's wife are ever so much more glamorous.
Posted at: October 7, 2008 11:06 AM