Money Changes Everything

It took less than five years for Kansas City's leaders to forget everything they'd learned.

In the mid-'90s, Kansas City was the same as it is today: a homey place run by a government hell-bent on doing just about everything half-assed. There were potholes everywhere. Miles of streets with no sidewalks. Clogged storm drains. Flood-happy creeks. Busted curbs. Cracking bridges. Darkened corners.

In some neighborhoods, sewers hadn't been upgraded since the Emancipation Proclamation. Others had no sewers at all.

Business leaders at the Chamber of Commerce did some research and found that City Hall had a $1.5 billion backlog of unfulfilled responsibilities.

The city council's response? Form a committee.

Soon, two dozen Kansas Citians were meeting regularly, digging into the morass of City Hall, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

It was a rare convergence of Kansas City minds. The group included the Reverend Wallace Hartsfield, defender of poor people in the urban core, and attorney and former councilman Mike Burke, defender of well-heeled developers. There were City Hall insiders, such as former-assistant-city-manager-turned-Hallmarker John Laney. Neighborhood activists such as Dorothy Stroud drove in from the city's outermost ranch houses, while Jewel Scott, executive director of the Civic Council, represented the city's top CEOs.

When it came to goings-on at City Hall, these people were frequently at odds with one another. But here the city's half-assedness was the great equalizer. They all were fed up with the growing mess.

After a year, they came back with a spiral-bound volume known as the Community Infrastructure Committee report. It told city leaders to grow up.

Kansas City needed "discipline," the CIC report said. City leaders must learn how to say no to some projects, even ideas that sound good. They must stop chasing "silver bullet" cures for the city's woes. They needed "long-term commitment," "rigorous planning," "prioritization" and "responsibility."

They had to make some rules and learn how to obey them.

The committee members had found that, when it came to fulfilling its basic responsibilities, the city behaved like a hyperactive twelve-year-old off his Ritalin. Officials committed millions of dollars to new projects without stopping to consider how unfinished -- and unfunded -- current projects might be affected. Decisions were often "driven by crisis" or by whim. If state or federal matching funds suddenly became available, city leaders lunged for them like new toys; to snare the money, they'd conjure a project that fit the bill and then shift money to make it happen, never thinking about how this strategy would affect the projects from which they were siphoning money.

"We didn't find much that we liked," Laney told The Kansas City Star after the report was released in September 1997. "Trust in the capital improvements process in this city is as low as I've ever seen it."

The committee backed its scolding report with recommendations on how to do things right, how to rebuild the public's trust. It proposed spending more money on the backlog and giving more power to the Public Improvements Advisory Committee, better known as PIAC. This group of citizens -- two representatives from each city council district are appointed by the mayor and council -- had been around for years, listening to people who live in the neighborhoods and recommending which choked catch basins and broken sidewalks the city should spend its money repairing first. But often their suggestions had been ignored in the heat of the council's own passion for new schemes such as creating the "Street of Jazz" stars along Barney Allis Plaza or building a new home for the Black Archives.

"There are people out there in the neighborhoods who are absolutely screaming for basic services," Jim Rowland, then a member of PIAC (and now a councilman), told the Star at the time. "There hasn't been any substantial movement toward committing more dollars to infrastructure. To date, we've been all talk and no walk."

The remedial CIC report was instantly hailed as a classic of Kansas City bureaucratic literature. A few weeks later, the council passed a resolution adopting the committee's proposals as "guiding principles for the city to follow."

And for a few years, city leaders did follow them. They devoted an additional $5 million each year to finishing the undone work, and the city's "to do" list shortened. As more and more projects filtered through PIAC, public trust in City Hall slowly began returning. People loved PIAC. They were thrilled to see city workers pouring concrete on problems that had plagued them for years. They'd show up at the hearings giddy at the chance to be heard.

"In most cities, city staff just puts together a list of projects," says Pat Klein, an analyst for the city's capital improvement program. "Our public participation is unbelievable."

Public enthusiasm rose so high, in fact, that in February 2000, Governing magazine, a sort of Sports Illustrated for bureaucrats, gave the process a B+ grade.

That's about as good as it gets at 12th and Oak.

Then, this spring, along came an extra $35 million.