Money Changes Everything

Esping might be the city's most rascally neighborhood activist. He often comes across as a man with a headful of conspiracy theories and too much time on his hands.

Yet for the last several elections, Esping has batted a thousand.

The city's business elite can't make the same claim.

Esping's newsletter rants represent the public's distrust of City Hall. Having seen downtown-revitalization plans before, the residents who showed up at the Finance and Audit Committee meetings to testify on the bond issue were dubious about the urgency of the current scheme. They wanted to know precisely what this new GDDA intended to do with the money. And what exactly was the GDDA anyway? Was it public? Or private? Or both?

More important, to whom, or what, was the GDDA accountable?

At that point the GDDA didn't even exist.

On June 19, the mayor and the city council (except Danaher) agreed to let Kansas Citians vote to renew $35 million in debt -- a puny pie that'll come presliced: 55 percent to go to the neighborhoods through PIAC and 45 percent for downtown via the GDDA.

Earlier that week, PIAC members had gathered and griped about having to share the meager spoils.

"It's hard when you have a powerful, well-organized group you're up against," said Mike Burke, the development attorney Barnes appointed to chair PIAC.

But PIAC itself is supposed to be a powerful, well-organized group (especially since Burke, who has been described as the mayor's "confidante" and who represents several private developers and is the attorney for the city's Port Authority, ought to know his way around the process). Early on, Burke had fought in favor of letting PIAC handle the whole $35 million. In one meeting, he reminded John Laney that the two of them had worked together on the CIC report that warned against abandoning procedures to pursue the latest whims of the city's power elite.

But this time, his clout wasn't enough. "PIAC doesn't really have the ability to lobby," Burke says.

Put another way: PIAC can't offer campaign money.

"The downtown interests knew they would be expected to come up with campaign money" for the bond issue, one insider observes. "So that provided them the leverage to get a bigger piece of the pie."

By mid-June, PIAC members had one choice: $19 million or nothing. And the neighborhoods needed the $19 million.

The committee members agreed to spend the money on a specific list of projects. More than half -- $9.6 million -- would go toward street-resurfacing. This is the one compromise everyone seems happy about. (In response to council members' requests for some concrete facts about what the money could do, Public Works Director Ed Wolf figured out that with just less than $10 million, the city could smooth out its 2,300 miles of washboard streets by fall 2008.)

The rest of PIAC's share would fund, in roughly equal amounts, improvements to municipal buildings, bridges, sewers, boulevard curbs and sidewalks. The folks at PIAC already have a pretty good idea where this money will go. They're the ones publicly guarding the city's long list of chores.

The GDDA, on the other hand, had no such list. So the instructions the city council gave the GDDA for spending its share were more ... conceptual. The council stipulated that the $16 million be spent on "revenue-producing parking facilities, streetscape amenities, spot blight removal and wayfinding signage improvements as well as other infrastructure improvements" at undisclosed sites in an area that's bigger than most Midwestern towns.

It'll be a challenge for them to figure out what to do with the piddly $16 million. They could blow all of it on just one parking garage. Or removing one really bad stretch of blight. Hell, they could blow it all on bringing Cinerama back to the Empire Theater.

But at the GDDA's first meeting after the resolution passed, on June 26, its members weren't ready to devise a list. They faced more pressing matters -- namely, coming into existence.

The mood was light. A few members joked about their ghostlike status.

"We're not really here," one quipped. "We're a figment of our imagination."

Though it had been holding open meetings since early February, the GDDA still hadn't filed an article of incorporation. Mayor Barnes' ambitious law would have required the city council to formally establish the GDDA in accordance with city ordinances, but her bill had died in Jefferson City on May 17.

In reality, the GDDA was nothing more than a klatch of powerful people who got together once in a while to talk about downtown.

They quickly agreed that the mayor should file incorporation papers the next day and that they should meet again soon to adopt bylaws.

Then they moved on to more fun matters: paying for an election campaign. After all, if voters won't approve the bond money, they won't be able to spend it.

To get the money, they needed money -- at least $250,000, according to Warren Erdman's estimate. He bragged that his own Kansas City Southern had already put up $10,000, and he urged his fellow GDDA members to follow suit. (DST promptly tossed in some money, too.) He told his fellow members he'd be sending them a letter asking for campaign donations.