For all the national attention that Kansas City’s proposed Green Impact Zone has received, it’s still too early to tell much about what it will look like.

Organizers know what they want to do — make the 150-block zone in the urban core more energy efficient — but they’re still hammering out the details of a plan that would spend about $200 million in federal stimulus money on green projects and job training. 

Reasons for the lack of specifics:

•There’s no money to administer the zone yet.

•At the same time, funding will be coming from all levels of government and across many organizations that normally don’t work together.

“It’s like drinking from a thousand garden hoses,” said Dean Katerndahl, who is heading up the project at the Mid-America Regional Council. “You have to figure out where they’re all coming from, what their rules are and how to bend them around.”

Government, community and neighborhood leaders met Tuesday at the Mid-America Regional Council’s offices to get an update on the zone, which aims to weatherize more than 2,500 homes, install a “smart” electricity grid, train and employ residents in green jobs and improve bus services.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Kansas City Democrat who has been the driving force behind the zone, told about 80 area leaders that the dire economic times have given Kansas City an opportunity to establish long-term growth in the impoverished zone.

“This was an opportunity I thought we had as a community to put all of our resources in one spot so we could physically alter the community,” he said.

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