Money Changes Everything

But even at that moment, the business elite were participating in the process -- their process, which most taxpayers never get to see.

Earlier in the meeting, Asjes acknowledged as much when he said, "It's my understanding that there's a poll going on by the Downtown Council. Or the Civic Council. Not this council."

That poll had come about in part because of Asjes' own actions. In early April, the councilman had told the Star he favored letting PIAC decide where to spend the money. Now he was actively working with business leaders to figure out how to skirt the PIAC process to funnel some of the money downtown using the mayor's newly formed Greater Downtown Development Authority -- of which he's a member.

Asjes had turned to another GDDA member, John Laney, the former city manager who is now an executive with the Hallmark Foundation, and asked for advice.

Laney had helped put together the CIC report five years earlier and had bemoaned the public's lack of trust in City Hall's capital improvements process. Yet here he was doing exactly what he had warned against back then.

He was no longer John Laney the CIC Man. Now he was John Laney the Downtown Council Man.

The Downtown Council is a consortium of businesspeople and property owners. This past spring, it joined forces with the Civic Council to form a political action committee to raise money for downtown-friendly politicians.

"The city council contacted us and said, 'What are your views?' And we said, 'We want at least half,'" Laney recalls. More specifically, Laney admits, it wasn't the entire council but Asjes who had called him. "He said, 'What do you think about this? Could it pass?'"

To find out, the Downtown Council paid political consultant Pat Gray to poll 500 voters. But the questions were so leading that council members Danaher and Nace later criticized them. Gray's questionnaire had asked voters whether they'd rather see the money used to heroically "jump-start revitalization of downtown Kansas City, funding new parking facilities, streetscapes, demolition of dangerous buildings and blight removal, thereby attracting private development" or to fund boring "smaller capital projects around the city."

Some choice. Still, only 45 percent of the survey's respondents opted for downtown. The unspecified smaller PIAC projects attracted 40 percent. (The rest responded "neither," "both" or "don't know.")

This was hardly a landslide. Yet a couple of weeks later, Laney was waving the results in front of the members of the Finance and Audit Committee, declaring, "These are facts that you have to deal with. You have to balance the needs of the community. This is a democracy after all."

At that same meeting, however, a representative of the voting public spoke to committee members. She said she didn't believe the half-for-downtown idea would fly on election day.

"The Southeast Neighborhood Association had a meeting on May 15, and we voted unanimously to keep the money in PIAC," said Carol McClure.

Kansas City's age-old political gulf had officially reopened.

Not even five years ago, John Laney, the city's business elite and the voting masses had been united behind the CIC report. Now they were torn over a measly $35 million.

It's not that the neighborhood people are against fixing up downtown. Virtually everyone in Kansas City would like to see some life brought back to the vacant lots and boarded-up buildings. If downtown were more prosperous, it could benefit neighborhoods by generating more tax revenue that could fix up more neighborhoods.

But when you've got more than a billion dollars' worth of busted curbs and stinky sewers, most people would prefer that city leaders keep taking the medicine prescribed by the CIC report, no matter how un-legacy-building it might seem.

"Stick with PIAC," McClure and her neighbors said.

But by the time McClure stood up to take part in the so-called process, Kansas City's corporate power brokers had already been pushing to slip the money past PIAC and give it to their new group, the GDDA.

On the same day McClure had polled her peers in the Southland, Bill Berkley, chairman of the Civic Council, had written a letter to Asjes reaffirming the group's support of the CIC report while arguing that the city council should authorize the GDDA to set priorities for spending half of the money downtown. Pete Levi, president of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, sent a letter saying the same -- though it was the Chamber that had conducted the study that led to the CIC report.

The argument for allowing the GDDA to figure out where to spend the downtown money -- which by the end of May had become the prevailing wisdom in City Hall -- was that many of the group's members were businessmen and lawyers who had profited from downtown for years. They knew the lay of the land. Who better to decide where the money should go?

But many neighborhood activists weren't buying it.

"The little rich kid who used to crowd in front of me in the grade-school drinking-fountain line has now grown up and gathered a bunch of other 'poor little rich boys' to crowd in line ahead of the neighborhoods of Kansas City," Hyde Park resident Mark Esping wrote in his often contentious electronic newsletter, The Neighborhood Hotline. "I do not think that the average working guy needs to give any of his tax money to help guard the investment of millionaire developers."