Almost every day, someone asks me: “Who’s behind this sales-tax proposal and what do they want?”
Many people seem to think that the Civic Council is involved in some sort of conspiracy designed to further enrich its individual members.
I tell people I do not believe that is the case.
In my opinion, the Civic Council’s motivation revolves around an under-the-radar aspect of this campaign:
For more than a decade, the Civic Council (consisting of the CEO’s of the biggest companies and the managing partners of the biggest law firms) has quietly nurtured the idea of making Kansas City a national center for “translational medical research.”
Furthermore, and more specifically, the Civic Council wants to make sure that the organization calling the shots is an institution of its own creation — the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute.
The Civic Council dreamed up the idea of the life sciences institute about 15 years ago, and the institute was formally established in the early 2000s. (You can read more about the institute’s history on its website, http://www.kclifesciences.org.)
The institute’s original business plan, finalized in 2000, called for KCALSI to “build a critical mass in life sciences research in Kansas City.” In its plan, the institute set a goal of coordinating the expenditure of $500 million a year on medical research in the Kansas City area.
The institute now has 10 “stakeholder” institutions (not including the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, which dropped out somewhere along the way). The stakeholders (including Children’s Mercy Hospital, St. Luke’s and UMKC, which would receive tens of millions of dollars a year in sales-tax proceeds) spend more than $550 million a year on medical research, according to the KCALSI website.
Despite having reached the $500-million-a-year threshold, however, the fact is that the life sciences institute has not grown and prospered as the Civic Council had envisioned.
It has not approached anything close to the “critical mass” it talked about in 2000.
With just three employees and depending exclusively on its “stakeholder” institutions to keep it relevant, KCALSI has failed to establish itself as a key player in the medical-research industry.
In my opinion, that’s what this tax proposal is all about:
The Civic Council is seeking to prop up and inflate the life sciences institute, making it the viable, prosperous hub around which most of the major medical-research institutions in the Kansas City area would revolve.
To me, it’s simply a matter of the Civic Council being determined to reach a long-sought goal — but at taxpayers’ expense, not the private sector’s.
Once again, it is clear that wealthy, influential individuals and big corporations would rather gamble with public money than their own.
The half-cent-sales-tax proposal on the Nov. 5 ballot in Jackson County is risky and extravagant, and it deserves to be voted down.
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See this post and much more at stopabadcure.org
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The first of three Town Hall meetings sponsored by Question 1 opponents, including Committee to Stop a Bad Cure, will be held at 6 p.m. tonight at the Mid-Continent Library in Independence. The address is 317 W. U.S. 24. Everyone is welcome. Hors d’oeuvres will be provided.
Really solid article.
Thanks, Chuck…It’s not sexy or outrageous (other than the taxpayers picking up the tab), just something that people should be aware of. I can see, in a few years, where people might be saying, “How did this life sciences institute become so important and why is it getting so much money?”
However, I don’t think it’s going to get to that stage; I think Question 1 is going down.
The story about the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute is the kind of enterprise story that we should be reading about in The Star. But with the paper down to only about two dozen reporters and what appears to me to be upper management’s lack of interest in local elections, I’m not going to hold my breath.
Thanks, Mike. I really appreciate that. When I talked about that at the Independence town hall meeting tonight (which you attended), I didn’t know if that would be too obscure to make an impact on people. But I think it did.
Also, Mike Hendricks sent me an e-mail yesterday, saying he was working on a weekend story about the tax and did I have anything new to add.
(How about that for keeping up with the action — “Send me an email, telling me what’s new on your front.”)
I laid out the angle of the civic Council’s high hopes for the life sciences institute in an attachment and returned it to him. We’ll see if it makes the paper.
…Hey, I hope you’ve gone to bed; you’ve gotta be at work pretty early!