The natural gas explosion that destroyed JJ’s Restaurant on the Country Club Plaza five weeks ago also displaced many businesses including the Menorah Legacy Foundation. The building that housed the foundation’s offices at 4739 Belleview Ave. was severely damaged by the blast and the MLF office suffered severe smoke and water damage. Yet Gayla Brockman, the foundation’s executive director, said the foundation has been able to conduct business as usual.
Last week Brockman said she expects the search for the foundation’s new home will be concluded shortly. Her hope is that new office space will be ready to occupy by May 1. While the past few weeks have been a little stressful, she noted they “could have been so much worse.”
“We were so lucky. The foundation is fortunate. It’s just an office. It’s just little things. These are replaceable things. We don’t have employees in the hospital or worse. It’s a hassle, but we’ll figure it out and in a few months it will be like it never happened,” she said.
The day after the blast Brockman, who has set up a make-shift office on her dining-room table, went to work to salvage as much as she could from the now uninhabitable office.
“We were able to salvage important data from the server, but the server itself is gone. It took on too much moisture,” she said.
All of the furniture in the office, except for the file cabinets that housed all of MLF’s paper files, was destroyed. “The paper files are being restored,” she explained.
Fortunately for MLF, Brockman said the foundation had “pretty decent insurance.”
“We had a special policy just for valuable papers because some of our documents go back to the 1930s and ’40s,” she said. “Not everybody was so lucky. I think there was a business next door to JJ’s that isn’t going to come back. I don’t think they had the insurance coverage that they needed.”
Brockman stressed that the foundation has been conducting business as usual since the blast, including holding a regularly scheduled board meeting. In that same spirit, the lack of physical office space will not change the due date for the next round of grant requests, which are due April 1.
“That is a firm deadline. We are definitely still in business,” she said. “Our staff is staying on top of everything.”
Besides Brockman, only one other foundation employee, a part-time operations/grants manager, has been affected by the lack of office space. The Kansas City Beans and Greens Program, a MLF program, employs a full-time mobile market manager and a full-time consultant, both of whom are remote employees.
Brockman explained that the back wall of JJ’s, which was the restaurant’s kitchen that blew up, abutted the south wall of the building that housed MLF.
“Fortunately our offices were on the north side of the building,” she said.
That building and two others located near the restaurant at 4732 and 4734 Belleview were also damaged by the Feb. 19 blast and are owned by Steve Rothstein.
“He’s been great throughout all this. He’s been very helpful and responsive to us and he’s even helped us try to find space, which is super,” Brockman said.
“The building is structurally sound, but you can’t be in there,” Brockman added. “I don’t know how long it will take to renovate the building.”