Money Changes Everything

She offered a compromise: Direct the PIAC members to devote 15 percent of the money to downtown projects. They'd done that before, in 1998 -- more than $10 million for downtown without so much as a yelp from the neighborhoods. Barnes said this approach could mean more for downtown in the long run -- instead of blowing its meager cache of political capital with the masses in one $35 million ballot-box showdown, downtown could quietly spoon 10 or 15 percent out of the community kettle for God knows how long.

Asjes closed the meeting by saying he wanted the business elite -- "the Civic Council, the Downtown Council, the Chamber [of Commerce]" -- to show up and officially say what they thought should be done with the money.

"Because those are the key groups in this deal," he explained, "and I think they need to participate in the process. I don't know how to get them over here other than to make a heartfelt appeal. Because the last time, I forget what the issue was, but they were standing down on the 24th floor handing out position papers to the council as we were coming up to the business session on the 29th floor. And I think we can have better participation than that," Asjes said.

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.