Downstream As Kansas City Grows, Rivers Become Increasingly Urbanized By: Jesse Howe Kansas City is served by multiple watersheds, the Blue River being the largest. (184,998 Acres) The watershed runs through four counties before it reaches the Missouri River. 54 percent of the watershed is in Kansas 46 percent is in Missouri Approximately 63 percent of the total Blue River Basin can be characterized as urban and 25 percent impervious (USACE 1974). As urban areas along the watershed expand, development threatens to further impair the rivers. Source: USGS An Aging Sewer System Kansas City leaders say it will take $4.5 billion to replace 2,800 miles of sewer systems throughout the city. Most of the cost is from the city’s combined sewer system. In 2010, the city committed to improvements to the sewer system that are expected to take 25 years to complete. This was after a series of regulation issues from 2002 to 2010. From 2002 to 2010 Kansas City faced 1,294 illegal sewer overflows consisting of ... 138 unpermitted combined sewer overflows 390 sanitary overflows 766 backups in buildings and private properties Kansas City is one of nearly 750 municipalities in the United States with a combined sewer system. These systems are built to collect rainwater, runoff, domestic sewage and industrial wastewater, all of which are passed through the same pipes. In normal conditions, the barriers built within the pipes prevent discharge into rivers, but in heavy rain or snowmelt, the sewage flows into the river rather than the wastewater treatment plant. Of the 420 square miles covered by the system, 58 square miles — mostly within…...

Suspended In Time A Box of KC Mafia Documents Makes Its Way to Special Collections Story by: Jonathan Bender, Jesse Howe and Mike McGraw Anthony “Tony” Gizzo mug shot. (Kansas City Public Library) “That’s quite a pair of shoes that Tony Gizzo has on...do you remember him?” Flatland Special Projects Reporter Mike McGraw asks, looking at a photo of a man in a police lineup. McGraw is sitting with author and retired FBI agent Bill Ouseley, a walking encyclopedia of Kansas City’s organized crime history. Folders and photos are fanned out before them on a wooden table in the Kansas City Public Library’s Missouri Valley Special Collections room. The man in the photo could have been chosen by central casting to play the role of an old time gangster. Portly, but dressed to the nines. Flashy white dress shoes with black tips, a matching black and white pattern tie. His balding head covered by a signature fedora. The man’s name is Anthony Gizzo, once the boss of the entire Kansas City crime family. Gizzo has been dead nearly 60 years, but for Ouseley, the author of "Open City" and "Mobsters in our Midst," it might as well have been yesterday. Gizzo was a familiar name and face to Ouseley, one that became known over the course of a two-decade long career with the FBI. Gizzo’s photo, and those snappy shoes, are just part of what is captured in a loose collection of newspaper clippings, office notes and police records from The Kansas City Star. These photos and documents may shed light on…...