Why do displaced trailer park residents have to beg for help from Jackson County?

Annoyed to tears and frustrated enough to even curse, residents of Heart Village pleaded with Jackson County legislators for more time and more money to move — literally everything they own — from the Kansas City trailer park where the county has decided to build a new jail.

That these homeowners and renters are angry is understandable. They’ve been displaced and disrespected. The county’s not listening and needs to step up.

The county gave 108 households until February to find somewhere else to live. Many of them have no idea where that somewhere else will be, and four months is not enough. Winter is coming. Elderly people, the disabled and single mothers with young children are terrified of ending up on the street.

The county promised to care for each resident with dignity. It promised families would get whatever money needed to relocate but then limited that amount to $10,000 for trailer renters and $20,000 for owners. That’s not enough for owners who’ve spent thousands to turn raggedy trailers into comfortable homes. They shouldn’t now have to downgrade to shabby.

The county promised their trailers would be hauled to a new location of their choice within 25 miles. Families living in trailers too old to move were supposed to get enough to pay for an apartment, house or mobile home comparable to the one they’re leaving behind.

“There’s no way to find a decent double-wide for less than $30,000. I’ve looked and there just isn’t one,” one homeowner yelled at legislators Jalen Anderson, Tony Miller and Dan Tarwater. Of the county’s nine legislators, they were the only three who showed up at the trailer park Wednesday to meet with residents.

One resident said the county is treating folks in Heart Village “like merchandise, not human beings.”

The county paid about $200,000 for the Community Service League to find out what each family needs, help them find safe and affordable housing and navigate the paperwork. Over the past six weeks, the agency has only doled out a small portion of the $1.7 million set aside to relocate Heart Village residents and has yet to meet with 80% of them.

Some residents complained that their applications for a new place to live might be tossed. CSL is supposed to pay the rental deposits from the money residents are owed. And they couldn’t get CSL to tell them Wednesday whether or not that had happened.

The deadline for at least one nervous family was that very day.

Representatives from CSL didn’t even listen to the roughly 60 people at the meeting. They chatted among themselves. And of course that infuriated residents trying to explain the challenges they face.

“The stress is overwhelming,” said Maria Serrano, speaking Spanish translated by a friend.

Serrano and her husband have three children. They own a three bedroom trailer they love. They can’t find or afford one that size or as nice and theirs can’t be moved. And she doesn’t want to pull her kids out of school.

“Please, give us until June, when school is out and it’s warm,” Serrano said.

But Miller told us an extension isn’t likely. The county intends to break ground on a replacement for its 40-year-old downtown Kansas City detention center in February and open it by the summer of 2003.

The county paid $7 million for the 100 acres beneath Heart Village. What would happen to the mobile home dwellers there was an afterthought.

“One of the key elements of planning, building, and operating a detention center, is respecting the dignity of detained individuals,” it says on the Jackson County Detention Center website.

What about the dignity of the people being displaced?

The county knew what it needed to do when it decided Heart Village was the best location for it’s new $260 million jail — accommodate every resident with as little inconvenience as possible. And it shouldn’t take folks having to beg legislators to do what’s right.