Money Changes Everything

Mayor Barnes -- in a complete reversal of her initial hard-line, stick-with-PIAC vision for the $35 million -- cheerily told her GDDA appointees to be on the lookout for "Warren's wonderfully warm letter." ("It just got refined over time, and I'm very comfortable with that," Barnes says of her behind-the-scenes slide from CIC to GDDA. "That always happens.")

The meeting was nearing adjournment when Erdman leaned over and exchanged a few whispered words with the man sitting to his right, Jerry Riffel (who, as a city councilman in the 1980s, helped create PIAC).

The two stopped the meeting's momentum and suggested they adopt the bylaws before the election. Without those, they didn't have any conflict-of-interest provisions. And they had a hunch the public would want such rules in place before giving downtown development money to a group with so many members who might profit directly from downtown development.

Everyone agreed, but there wasn't much time. The election was little more than a month away. The members searched their Daytimers, tossing out possible dates. One member suggested they reach a consensus via phone or e-mail.

"Don't we need to do it in a meeting to satisfy the open-meeting requirements?" another asked.

"We do need to do that once we adopt the bylaws," an attorney replied.

Everyone laughed at that.

One member joked, "We don't exist, remember?"

Finally they agreed on a time, and the attorneys circulated drafts of the bylaws that contained a single paragraph on conflicts of interest that's most notable for what it's not: The city's official ordinance on such conflicts.

Members of most city boards -- including PIAC -- have to fill out a form in which they lay out all their connections to city contractors and specify all the property they own within city boundaries.

The proposed GDDA bylaws, on the other hand, asked for no information about connections to contractors and, most significantly, no citywide property disclosure. GDDA members would have to reveal those properties only within a given "development area," which the bylaws never defined. After that, GDDA members had to steer clear of the discussions and votes to spend public money in the areas where they owned property.

When GDDA members met July 8 to vote on these bylaws, the graft provision had changed. Instead of disclosing their properties in writing, the members were asked to police themselves by simply stepping out of the process when their properties lie within the still-undefined "development area."

Evert Asjes, city councilman and GDDA member, raised concerns about this.

He questioned the wisdom of not abiding by the city's own well-established conflict-of-interest ordinance. "I mean, it's pretty soft," he said.

"I think in today's climate, you need to spell things out as much as you can so that people understand what you're doing," he said. "I think you need to do that because, all of us, the inside folks, know how cool everybody is and how everything is OK.... But a lot of people out there think that big business stinks right now."

But, he conceded meekly, "I'm just one vote among thirteen."

The other members batted the issue around for a while. Most of their concerns, however, seemed to focus more on whether the conflict-of-interest clause was too strict. The discussion didn't last long. "We could discuss hypotheticals all day," said one of the GDDA's attorneys, Herb Kohn (who, during the last mayoral campaign, had written a few checks for Barnes, as had his firm, Bryan Cave).

The self-policing bylaws passed unanimously.

The business elite and the folks at City Hall hope that most Kansas Citians don't follow Mark Esping's recent credo: "FIX THE STREETS, FIX THE CURBS, CLEAN THE CATCH BASINS or we vote NO on everything until you get these things fixed in the neighborhoods."

He's not worried about his wealthy foes. "You know how much we spent to kill [last November's city] charter change? Eighty-three dollars and 27 cents. And you know what? Some of the neighborhood people are telling me they want to do this one for half price."

The logic frustrates city leaders. They know a "no" vote will hurt the neighborhoods as much as it will hamper downtown. A "no" vote means less money for everyone. It means no additional $9.6 million for the horrible roads.

But city leaders can't be surprised, can they? After all, this hasty split of the potential bond money was exactly what their own multipartisan committee had warned against.

"Yeah, it was," says Laney. "It was. I went through that whole report process, and I was one of the most vocal about [how] we've got to change the way in which capital improvements are done. We have to have a process by which we do it."

All rules are made to be broken, though.

"We realized that from time to time you have to make exceptions," Laney explains. "You can't always slavishly follow the policy. But when you do [make exceptions], you're going to have to justify to the public at large. And that's exactly what we did this time."

But he won't really know that until the polls close on August 6.