Gonna give you some nuggets and tidbits this week. Just to prove that every once in a while we can get informational around here.
Country singer/TV personality Blake Shelton will be performing at T-Mobile Center (I’m old enough to remember when it was Sprint Center) in Kansas City on March 18, and your Landmark will be able to get our hands on some tickets. Stay tuned for info on what you can do to get your hands on some of our tickets.
We’ll have to see if we can get Blake Shelton lined up for a conversation with our music man Brad Carl.
In this week’s edition, you’ll notice Brad has worked his musical magic on a feature story on country singer Mark Wills, who will be performing at Ameristar Casino in Kansas City this weekend. Check out the details of that conversation in the story, which begins on our front page. Tickets to the Mark Wills/Lorrie Morgan concert are available on Ticketmaster.com starting at about $40 each. I’ve passed my complimentary tickets on to Brad, so I can’t help you with this one.
So they’re going to close southbound U.S. 169, a major thoroughfare connecting the Northland with downtown Kansas City, on Feb. 6 and it will stay closed for 600 days. Roughly till the fall of 2024. That’s a long time, so you may want to consider an alternate route. That would be a long time to sit in traffic.
Reason for the closure, as you likely know by now, is they’re building a new Buck O’Neil Bridge at that location. I’m old enough to remember when it was called the Broadway Bridge.
Anyway, southbound U.S. 169 traffic will be detoured over to I-29/I-35 and the Christopher “Kit” Bond Bridge.
Access to and from the downtown airport will be available via southbound U.S. 169 at Hwy. 9. Southbound U.S. 169 south of the downtown airport will be open for airport access only.
Congressman Sam Graves is now the chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in Congress and this is great news for our area. Graves will be working to drive federal transportation dollars to his district, as he should, you can bet on that.
Graves, as the lead Republican on that committee the past four years, has already worked to secure millions of dollars to repave Missouri highways, replace one-lane bridges and build the new Buck O’Neil Bridge connecting the Northland to downtown.
“As the chairman, I’ll have the ability to improve Missouri’s infrastructure even more,” Graves says.
The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will have a full agenda over the next two years, including oversight of the implementation of the massive $1.2 trillion infrastructure law.
I’m old enough to remember when taking a domestic flight was a pretty routine experience without so many cancellations, delays and drama surrounding your flight experience.
Until things settle down in the airline industry, my vacations will all be by car. I don’t hate it.
Speaking of flights and air travel and such, as you’ll see in this edition an open house for the new KCI (officially being called the New Terminal, capitalized like that, apparently) airport is scheduled for Feb. 18 from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Read the story to find out how you can put your name down for a reservation. Apparently they’re limiting attendance to 10,000 attendees that day, so maybe get your name in sooner rather than later. Attendees must register online and book your timeslot, like a Pampered Chef party or something.
Hats off to everybody at the City of Platte City for the outstanding job they’ve done piecing together enough funding for a $17 million dollar project that will turn a 1.3 mile stretch of Hwy. 92 east of I-29 into a four lane divided highway. The four-lane stretch will run from the interstate east to Bethel Road.
Kudos to DJ Gehrt–who does a lot of the heavy lifting behind the scenes on this type of stuff for the city–for helping lead the fight to put together a consortium of funding sources including the state, Platte County, Mid-America Regional Council, developer Van Trust Real Estate, as well as funding from the city’s transportation sales tax.
City officials are pointing out this is the city’s largest-ever single infrastructure project, and it comes on the heels of the good news that Van Trust Real Estate is putting in the city’s largest single development project in the city’s history along that stretch of Hwy. 92. That project is known as the Platte City Commerce Center, and will be comprised of three industrial buildings. Platte City Commerce Center will be a multi-million square foot light industrial/logistics complex near the I-29 and Hwy. 92 interchange.
We have welcomed SmartSource coupon booklets aboard as your newest Landmark advertiser. You may have noticed the SmartSource coupon flyers inserted inside your issue of The Landmark the past few weeks. SmartSource has signed a two-year advertising deal with us, replacing the former SAVE inserts you formerly saw tucked inside our paper. You’ll find SmartSource booklets in nearly every edition over the next couple years. SmartSource, in my opinion, is the better option for readers, offering savings on more products that a majority of our users are more likely to be searching for on their trips to the store. Don’t be shy, take advantage of the opportunity to save a few bucks on every trip.
(Ivan Foley is never shy about saving a few bucks. Email him for other life hacks at ivan@plattecountylandmark.com)