A City That Works?

J.E. Dunn has said the suit is without merit. This week, Nicholas R. Iammartino, H&R Block's director of corporate communications, told The Pitch, "H&R Block was committed throughout the building of H&R Block Center to utilizing the talents of women- and minority-owned businesses. H&R Block believes strongly that the allegations against us have no merit, and we will continue to defend ourselves vigorously."

But Diaz and the other plaintiffs allege that, to meet the city's minority-hiring requirements, H&R Block and J.E. Dunn paid fees to minority-owned businesses that acted as front companies, passing the work back to white subcontractors.

Diaz concedes that the minority contractors who cashed the checks are partly to blame for what has become a normal practice. "There are those who will say, 'We don't believe that's right, and we're not going to do it.' There are others who want to survive and think that's the only way they can do business.... For years, the city and the large general contractors have said they're never going to do anything about this. We're just as guilty if we don't step forward. We decided enough is enough."

Whether Hispanics get included in the city's day-to-day business — or in a construction binge like that of the past few years — seems like the kind of issue that La Raza might have jumped in on. Maybe we could have used some boycott noise during the Kay Barnes administration, too.

Cris Medina, executive director of the Guadalupe Center, says the community's efforts to be included at City Hall go back years.

"When you look at the demographic breakdown for employment with the city, it's not very good for Latinos," he says. Only 4 percent of City Hall's workforce is Hispanic, and most of these employees work in the fire department rather than as administrators or managers. (The 2000 census puts Kansas City, Missouri's Hispanic population at 6.9 percent; Medina says it's 8 percent to 10 percent.) "There's never been a department head of Latino descent," he adds. "We've raised concerns about that over the years, talked many times with city officials. In the police department, after Deputy Police Chief Vince Ortega retired [in September 2006], I don't think there's anyone higher than sergeant." He's right; and the number of Hispanics in the KCPD hovers around 4 percent.

Education for Latino kids is a problem in this town, too. "When we look at the graduation rates for Hispanics [in the Kansas City, Missouri, School District], it's still very, very bad," Medina says. "We need to get them through the system."

Having met with members of the Hispanic community since he took office, Funkhouser's office has come up with its own list of issues to work on: employment, gangs, crime in the Northeast and West Side neighborhoods, affordable housing, an office of immigrant affairs, economic development in Hispanic communities and for Hispanic small businesses.

Is it so wrong to wish that people all over town would go nuts about this sort of stuff instead of one elderly woman on a parks board?

Racial tension festers just below Kansas City's polite veneer. The Semler summer was so painful because it nicked that surface. Foul rhetoric oozed out. And as the country heads into the '08 election cycle, immigration is the perfect wedge issue: a distraction from the war, health care, the environment and the economy, with an easily identifiable scapegoat.

"It's just becoming fashionable to now question and hate people from a particular country," says William Torres, president of KCHACE. "The thing that I see happening in America nowadays is, we're painting a picture of an ugly America." And, he points out, "I'm talking about a generation of Americans who didn't really gain their citizenship through the hard work of a generation past. I suppose the more a country is removed chronologically from its independence, its creation, its founding, the more we get people who don't have the slightest clue how to fulfill the responsibilities of the freedom that they've been granted through their forefathers."

In other words: For anyone who cared enough to feel relief when the Semler siege ended, it's time to go to work on the issues that matter.