Wichita City Council member Brandon Johnson asks a question during the joint city-county meeting Tuesday in this screenshot from a YouTube video.

Wichita City Council member Brandon Johnson asks a question during the joint city-county meeting Tuesday in this screenshot from a YouTube video.

The day after Wichita learned it’s losing the only grocery store in a historically African-American neighborhood, top officials of the city and county gathered Tuesday to consider a long-term plan for reducing food insecurity in the community.

The Food System Master Plan is designed to take a multi-pronged approach to reducing “food deserts,” areas where grocery stores are scarce that covered a quarter of the city, even before Monday’s announced closure of the Save A Lot grocery at 13th and Grove.

While much of the plan engages ideas such as personal food production and urban farming, the question of the day Tuesday was what to do now that the city’s food desert is getting bigger and drier.

The problem extends far beyond Save A Lot, said Rebecca McMahon, who helped present the plan on behalf of the Health and Wellness Coalition of Wichita, which did the groundwork on it.

“There are food deserts located in all of our City Council and County Commission districts, so this isn’t a challenge that skips any one of you,” she told the assembled officials. ”These challenges are complex, they’re not easy to address and they’re not going away soon.”

The master plan has been years in the making and was already reviewed once by the City Council. Tuesday’s meeting was a joint session with the Sedgwick County Commission seeking buy-in.

Master food plan’s goals

Overall, the food plan has three broad goals:

▪ Improve access to healthy food. This goal is about reducing barriers between low-income residents and healthy eating, including such issues as the cost of food, locations and transportation to get it, as well as encouraging greater use of food assistance programs and lobbying to eliminate the state’s sales tax on food.

▪ Coordinating between small-scale producers, markets and local government. The plan envisions the creation of a Food and Farm Council that would advise local government on agricultural issues and educate the community on raising, preparing and selling local food.

▪ Increase local food production. This involves making the city more food friendly, including making vacant land available for production, using the city’s economic development process to make loans to and otherwise encourage small-scale farming, lightening zoning rules to assist neighborhood-level agricultural enterprises and revising government food-purchasing policies to favor buying from local growers.

Council member Brandon Johnson, who represents northeast Wichita, said long-term planning is important, but immediate action is needed.

“The news of yesterday, terrible, we’re losing Save A Lot,” Johnson said. “What is there that we can do?”

Johnson, who started a community garden project in northeast Wichita before he was on the City Council, said he supports relaxing ordinances that prevent people from growing and selling food from their homes. But planting season is past and the need for food security is now, he said.

“How can we . . . kind of get some services in there sooner?” he said. “Because as of July 10 we won’t have that Save A Lot anymore.”

How to look good to grocery industry

A consultant on the food plan, Eileen Horn of New Venture Advisors, said the key is making the neighborhood and its customer base look good to the grocery industry.

“There are . . . resources that the city and county have access to that may just lay the groundwork for a private operator to be interested in supporting the city with grocery retail,” she said. “Some cities across the country have invested their staff time in doing feasibility studies . . . to kind of help build the case and understand the market for grocery retail — and often that sends a signal to private investors that the city really wants to see this happen.”

McMahon suggested realigning bus routes to make it easier to get to supermarkets, helping food banks get more capability to store refrigerated and frozen foods, helping expand mobile market service and adding requirements that new stores in the community set aside at least 10% of their space for fresh food.

Mayor Brandon Whipple acknowledged that the master plan won’t provide immediate solutions for Wichitans who shopped at Save A Lot.

“I don’t want to knock this plan,” he said. “I know it’s been going on for a while, but also just kind of feels academic. The reality is, people don’t want to hear that we’re talking about this stuff. They want to hear what actions we’re going to take to address it.”

The food insecurity crisis in the area Wichita “isn’t a hypothetical problem,” he said.

“Frankly, people want to know where they’re getting food,” Whipple said. “They don’t want to know that we watched a PowerPoint. They are worried about what’s going to happen in a few weeks when they won’t have access to the grocery store they’re used to having.”

Whipple said he’s in talks with David Toland, Kansas’ lieutenant governor and commerce secretary, about what state and federal funds may be available to fill the void left behind by Save A Lot.

How to fight growing food desert, insecurity

The Save A Lot project was mostly funded with a $750,000 federal grant through the Community Development Block Grant program, but the city also created a Tax Increment Finance District around the store to help pay for infrastructure improvements.

“What do we have in the kit that would allow us to entice a locally owned — because I think that’s really what we want — a locally owned store to go into these areas,” Whipple said.

In the meantime, Whipple said he’s learning more about the creative approaches that other cities have taken to addressing food insecurity.

He sees possibilities in a plan like one in Baltimore, which has a virtual supermarket program that allows residents to order groceries online and pick them up at neighborhood drop-off locations.

“What better time than post-COVID where . . . so many people learned how to use their apps this way?” he said.

Not everyone has access to smartphones or the Internet, but Whipple said the pandemic has reoriented the way many people think about using technology.

He said another possible solution could involve a city bus route that circles low-income neighborhoods and takes people to grocery stores.

Senior Journalist Dion Lefler has been providing award-winning coverage of local government, politics and business in Wichita for 20 years. Dion hails from Los Angeles, where he worked for the LA Daily News, the Pasadena Star-News and other papers. He’s a father of twins, director of lay servant ministries in the United Methodist Church and plays second base for the Old Cowtown vintage baseball team.

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