There’s an old adage about things that just keep showing up long after they’ve outlived their intended purpose being compared to bad pennies. Right now Kansas City has two such bad pennies in the form of Clay Chastain and the streetcar expansion issue.

Clay Chastain once again returned from his home in Virginia, just like a bad penny, to push his latest and greatest streetcar initiative – Ferris wheel and cable car gondolas notwithstanding. His two part initiative failed at the ballot box last Tuesday. Chastain vowed, like he has so many times before, that if the issue failed he would return to the Eastern Time zone where he lives and never darken Kansas City’s doorstep again. This dog is of the notion that he shouldn’t let the door hit him in the back-side on the way out. Sadly however, like a bad penny, ol’ Toy Train Clay has returned, this time threatening the city with litigation (just like last time) because his ballot initiative failed. Chastain blamed a poorly worded and ambiguous question language for the initiatives’ failure. [Insert eye-roll here.] Note to Clay: it failed because everybody is sick of your schemes. We called Clay out the last time his initiative failed at the ballot box and he promised to go home; we’re doing it again now. Go home Clay, you’re drunk.

The other bad penny for Kansas Citians is the streetcar expansion issue that both passed, then failed, all within a five-day time frame. The expansion issue passed when put to a vote inside the newly created Transportation Development District that was gerrymandered by developers to extend the toy train street car South to the UMKC Campus. That effort, however, failed at the ballot box when citizens citywide voted overwhelmingly to have a say in any future streetcar expansion. But even before the last ballot was counted, streetcar proponents were lawyering up, attempting to have Tuesday’s vote overturned and declared unconstitutional. All this to protect their hot shot developer friends who stand to gain handsomely had Question 1 failed. There’s a reason State Auditor  Nicole Galloway(D) wants to overhaul the largely corrupt system in which TDDs are created, and this dog pointed to those in last week’s column.

Note to the streetcar proponents hellbent on overturning last week’s Question 1 victory. The people have spoken. It passed, you lost. Deal with it.