It’s just a flat patch of dusty ground now, but for Lester Pruett Jr. of Raytown, the spot next to the Blue River in southern Johnson County where Kuhlman Diecasting used to sit is full of memories.
Pruett remembers the Corvettes and Sunbeam mixers he and fellow workers made back in the plant’s heyday. He remembers the winter they put up straw bales and babysat a new building addition so they could monitor the temperature as the concrete cured.
He remembers the time he fell through the roof. As he was plummeting toward the drill press on the plant floor, he got caught on a light fixture that, as circumstance would have it, his father, Lester Sr., had welded in place some time before.
His father had worked there since the plant’s earliest days. Pruett got one of the last paychecks before operations closed.
In the time since, Pruett and the plant have gone their separate ways — Pruett to other work, the plant to abandonment and graffiti, a federal environmental cleanup and now to a possible new trail and park.
It’s a transition Pruett finds “bittersweet,” he said. He sometimes would go back to the buildings to walk around and reminisce about a job he took after three years in the United States Army and still remembers fondly.
Those buildings are gone now. But he said he likes what may come next.
“At this moment in time it looks great because the dangers to the environment have been taken care of,” he said. “There will be something nice there instead of a cold, dark, oily concrete plant.”
Just what that something will be — and when — has lately been a subject of some disagreement by county officials.
Earlier days at the Kuhlman Diecasting plant
Kuhlman Diecasting was a family-owned business with two shifts normally employing a total of about 50 people, counting office employees, Pruett said. A former machinist and foreman, he remembers a manufacturing process similar to injection molding, where a liquid is squirted between two plate molds and solidified.
“It was dirty, noisy, oily and a mess,” he said. “It was just the nature of the process.”
There were a lot of chemicals around, also as a part of that process. There were settling ponds where solids dropped out and were later pressed. He remembers green water and at one point, seeing some guys fishing in the river nearby.
“I wouldn’t want to fish out of it downstream from Kuhlman,” he said.
Pruett believes the company did what it could to protect the environment, given what they knew then and what it could afford. He said he didn’t know of anyone whose health was affected while he was there.
After Kuhlman went bankrupt and the plant was shut down in 1990, those chemicals became a problem.
The site went through environmental cleanup
Toxicity around the plant prompted the federal Environmental Protection Agency to get involved. The agency spent $2 million to clean up the chemicals that were left behind in the soil and lagoons and barrels.
A lull followed. The property was and remains privately owned, but under the authority of a liquidator because of the bankruptcy. In 2011, then-County Manager Hannes Zacharias told county commissioners that staff was looking into the idea of acquiring the 39 acres near 164th Street and Mission Road for a possible park once it is safe for the public to be on it.
Ultimately, though, the risk of liability for the environmental issues kept anything from happening for a decade.
That changed in 2021 and 2022, when law enforcement and firefighters had had enough of the steady stream of calls about urban explorers, ghost hunters and others getting hurt or leaving their cars to trespass on the property.
The site is near two schools. Two kids had been seriously injured there, according to Zacharias’ report. Ten years later, kids were still seen climbing on the same roof Pruett fell through years ago.
A fatal crash nearby on the railroad tracks that bisect the property brought it back to the public’s attention.
County Commissioner Charlotte O’Hara, newly elected at the time, began bringing it up at every commission meeting, along with backing from Sheriff Calvin Hayden, whose deputies attended the accident.
In 2021, the commissioners decided to spend $725,000 to tear down the main building and scrape the ground clean. A roofless concrete structure surrounding a lagoon is the last remaining bit needing demolition.
What’s next for the future of the site?
The county park district has studied some options about how the Kuhlman site could become a park, now that most of the structures have been torn down.
Although the Environmental Protection Agency did extensive mitigation of toxins, the land is still being monitored and is still considered unsafe for structures like shelter houses, bathrooms and playgrounds.
That makes trails the future use officials most talk about. So far, though, nothing has been funded.
Recently, there’s been pressure to do more to improve the surrounding ecosystem. Two board members of the Heartland Conservation Alliance came to the public comments portion of a recent county commission meeting to urge commissioners to act quickly to stabilize the area.
Jared Coleman and Bill Blessing said they were speaking as individuals, but the nonprofit, whose mission includes improving the quality and flood resilience of the Blue River Corridor, also supports restoration of the area as well as the proposed recreational trails.
Coleman said the county should use grant funding and unspent federal COVID-19 relief money to begin to remove invasive plants and restore the area.
He’d also like the county to take ownership of the land.
That’s a possibility because of the bankruptcy. The liquidator offered to cede the property if the county demolished the structure. Moreover, the county has a tax lien of over $1 million on the property that would be abated if the county or park district takes it over. Proponents of that idea referenced the symbolic dollar sometimes charged to transfer titles.
“This should be the easiest, least controversial and most satisfying dollar the county spends this year,” Coleman said.
Commissioners O’Hara and Becky Fast also have worked together to push for quicker action. Fast said she has been particularly concerned about invasive Bradford pear trees, as well as the need to convert more area to tallgrass prairie and reseed the bare ground where the building was.
“The longer we wait, the more restoration efforts will be needed,” she said.
Improving the health of the Blue River corridor, which wanders from the Overland Park Arboretum to the Missouri River, has been a national priority for years, she said. Conservation groups including the Heartland Alliance, Nature Conservancy and Missouri Department of Conservation in 2021 gave the Blue River watershed a C letter grade, calling the river “threatened.”
O’Hara, who often bicycles on the trails, said a trail connection through the site plus fencing and railroad underpasses would make things safer for the people who hike along the Blue River levee near the site.
“This property is already being used by the public,” she said. “We simply need to step in and get our big boy pants on and say, ‘Hey, this has been a problem for 30 years. It’s time.'”
Fast and O’Hara had hopes of getting $1.5 million in COVID spending for the trail when the commission sat down recently to discuss spending. But O’Hara’s motion to that effect was ruled non-germane and was not voted on.
That frustrated O’Hara, who said she suspects “the ugly head of politics” in Chairman Mike Kelly’s ruling that took it off the table.
“Unfortunately this is in my district,” said O’Hara, who pointed out that she and Fast are working together despite being in different parties and holding different political views.
Fast expressed her feelings as the gavel fell.
“You didn’t allow for any discussion of any other items,” she said to Kelly. “You closed it off because it’s not your idea and you don’t want to talk about it.”
Kelly said later he agreed the site had possibilities, “but we also need to be strategic about how we acquire property, especially property in need of remediation.”
Kelly would have preferred the park district take ownership and put the project through its master plan where it could be ranked in priority along with other park projects that have yet to be fully funded.
He also said adding park spending with little background information to a meeting agenda that was about other topics would have been unfair to the public.
The Kuhlman site has yet to appear on any upcoming agendas, but there will be future opportunities to discuss it, Kelly said, possibly at a joint meeting between park district officials and county commissioners in April.
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