KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Urban League of Greater Kansas City hosted an Urban Summit meeting on Friday to discuss the recent closure of the Sun Fresh Market at East 31st Street and Prospect in Kansas City.
The 90-minute call featured speakers Emmet Pierson Jr., CEO of Community Builders of Kansas City, Kiki Curls, a Community Builders board member and former member of the Missouri Senate, and Melissa Robinson, 3rd District Councilwoman in Kansas City, Missouri.
“It was devastating for us to have to close this store,” Curls said.
Gwendolyn Grant, the president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City, hosted the Zoom meeting. There were over 100 attendees, including media outlets, neighborhood groups, community organizations, and residents.
GG Owens was one of the residents on the call.
She’s been living in the neighborhood near the store all her life, and she worked under the store's previous owners, the Liparis.
“This store has no business being closed,” Owens said. “Why is it closed?”
She wasn’t the only person on the call demanding answers.
Questions from attendees were restricted to the chat.
“I heard no solutions,” Owens said.
Community Builders has declined several interview requests from KSHB 41.
The attorney representing the nonprofit did not respond Friday to a request for comment made by KSHB 41 on Thursday.
“We stepped up to fill a void that no one else was going to fill,” Pierson said. “We are still reeling from the sadness of having to close a community asset, and that's something that Community Builders is not used to doing.”
Pierson revealed more about Community Builders’ financial status on the call.
“Community Builders of Kansas City has not received no more than $750,000 dollars, of which we finally got the check on or about May 14 of this year,” Pierson said.
Councilwoman Robinson spoke about the $750,000.
Robinson has also declined previous requests by KSHB 41 to comment on the grocery store.
“We said back in November of last year, we allocated $1.2 million,” Robinson said. “They haven’t even received that.”
When asked why Community Builders hadn’t received the full $1.2 million allocated to them, Robinson said, "There's not an official answer as to why not.”
She did speak to potential barriers between the city and Community Builders’ progress.
“It’s a complex relationship that we have to move forward with,” Robinson said.
Pierson said when Community Builders got the $750,000, they were roughly $200,000 in the hole.
Pierson said the nonprofit has put in over $4 million into the store, a number, he said, that’s growing.
In the last two and a half weeks, he says Community Builders put in about $60,000 to the store.
Community Builders was paying roughly $9,000 each month for rent until May. The rent payments stopped after a conversation with the city.
KSHB 41’s Alyssa Jackson previously took a deep dive into the nonprofit’s tax filings and spoke with City Manager Mario Vasquez about the store.
Jackson reported the entire Linwood Shopping Center was roughly a $17 million investment, according to Vasquez.
The shopping center was completed in 2017.
The center is located in a Community Improvement District (CID), where the city collects revenue from a 1% retail sales tax on purchases to help pay for the development.
Linwood Sun Fresh Market has received more than $1 million in city funding.
Pierson and others on the call claim they’ve seen misinformation about the $17 million.
“The narrative that Community Builders received $17 million is not true,” he said.
From May until July 31, Pierson says expenses for the grocery store were approximately $1.4 million.
“Right now, there is no reserve,” he said.
Pierson said the reserve was a part of the overall loan package and comes out of the Community Builders' general operating account.
He says Community Builders filled the store after hearing complaints about items not being in stock.
“The previous operator reached out to us because he had tried to get other operators to come forward,” Pierson said.
According to Robinson, the previous owners’ subsidy from the city was significantly higher than what Community Builders has received.
“The investment that we made in Community Builders is just nonexistent in relation in what was given to Lipari. You can’t even compare the two at all,” she said.
Owens still speaks with the Liparis and several employees who lost their jobs this week.
“I had three people call me yesterday,” Owens said.
Her previous role was as a workforce and job fair coordinator when people were first hired at the rebuilt store.
“They need to reopen the store so those people could obtain their employment back, if they want to come back,” Owens said.
She says some people she helped hire years ago were still working at the store up until its closure.
“The store has no business having empty shelves,” Owens said. “That’s poor operations and management. The parking lot is full of crime. That’s poor operations and management.”
The speakers on the call attributed crime in the area as a reason for customers not wanting to shop there, and difficult for store operations when it was open.
Jackson County Prosecutor Melesa Johnson left a comment in the chat Friday.
“The Jackson County Prosecutor's Office says it remains committed to this area,” it read.
Johnson says the half-mile radius around the shopping center will remain a “hot spot” for their Crime Strategies Unit, where they “will aggressively charge all categories of cases.”
She added that they’re also talking with the city’s prosecutors' office on how to determine how more of the 1,861 reported incidents within a half mile of the shopping center can be routed to their office for charging.
Pierson says though he's heard complaints about crime, he says since the city owns the shopping plaza, Community Builders can't patrol the crime like it can at its Blue Parkway location, which it does own.
"If it’s outside of our doors, that is not us, and our lease forbids us to do that," he said.
As of Wednesday, Johnson said her office received 114 of the 1,861 incidents.
“The store’s not closed because nobody wants to buy food,” Owens said. “It’s not the fear of going in the store because of prostitution or drug dealers. They’re all over.”
The call ended with plans to stay in touch with the City Manager Vasquez and talk weekly.
Organizations also shared a link for people to learn more about a Black-led, free food program.
Owens says she hopes that results in action.
“I don't want to keep hearing rhetoric, and that's what the community keeps hearing about one little grocery store,” Owens said. “We should not have to drive outside our comfort zone of where we live to shop. That's why it needs to reopen.”
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KSHB 41 reporter Rachel Henderson covers neighborhoods in Wyandotte and Leavenworth counties. Share your story idea with Rachel.
