The guiding hand of Steve Glorioso is still with us, thank God. And all of us — particularly the Kansas City Council — should heed the advice he indirectly dispensed days before his death.
What he said, in an off-the-record-interview with me on Sept. 6, was that Burns & McDonnell had tried to pull the wool over city officials’ eyes when it made its play, in concert with Mayor Sly James, for a quick, no-bid contract to build a new KCI terminal.
Actually, he said it a hell of a lot stronger than that, which you know if you’ve been reading my posts. His exact words were that Burns and Mac had tried to engineer “the biggest scam in Kansas City history.”
The scam was of such an immense scale, he added, that “Tom Pendergast would have blushed.”
Tom Pendergast
I used that quote, but off the record at his request, in my Sept. 6 post. Off-the-record quotes carry far less weight than those on-the-record, but it’s not off the record anymore. It’s a damn shame Steve is gone, but the fact he is gone freed me to identify him as the author of the quotes.
And they say a lot, coming from a man who was at the epicenter of Kansas City/Jackson County politics for more than 40 years and who helped bring us the Sprint Center with a brilliantly run 2004 hotel-and-rental-car tax campaign.
What Steve was saying, although he didn’t say it explicitly in these words, was:
There is no way in hell that Burns & McDonnell can be awarded the airport job. Ever. It overplayed its hand; it tried to get the airport job at a tremendously bloated amount we airport users would have been paying off for decades.
When we do get a new airport (I think it will be a reality within 10 years), we, the flying public, will indeed be paying for the new terminal for a long time, but we probably won’t be paying nearly as much as we would have had Burns and Mac’s fast-break resulted in a slam dunk. It could have happened, but, fortunately, Councilwoman Katheryn Shields and a few other council members played defense.
So, here’s the deal that Burns and Mac tried to pull off, the rabbit it tried to produce from the hat:
:: The airlines are currently paying about $33 million a year to retire the city’s airport debt from a renovation some years back.
:: In its initial, proposed “memorandum of understanding,” Burns and Mac said it would build a new $1 billion terminal, but it wanted a payback of “approximately” $85.2 million a year to retire the debt and (although it didn’t say so) reward Burns and Mac with a handsome profit.
:: Look again at the two numbers in the preceding two sentences…The company wanted the airlines to pay more than $50 million per year more, for 30 to 35 years, than they are paying now!
:: From the get-go, the number seemed high on its face, and it would have involved a significant mark-up in air fares so the airlines could pass the additional expense on to their customers.
That’s all we knew until Burns and Mac was exposed. After the city opened the selection process to other firms, Los Angeles-based AECOM said it could build a $1 billion, 35-gate terminal for an annual payment of slightly less than $70 million a year.
Over 30 years, the saving — the difference between slightly more than $85 million and slightly less than $70) would be more than $450 million.
Game over!
Or at least it should be.
And yet, even now Burns and Mac contends it should still get the contract, that the airport selection committee unfairly eliminated it from consideration. What gall!
…I was relieved to read last week that City Manager Troy Schulte, a member of the selection committee, said the City Council cannot overturn the committee’s recommendation of Edgemoor Infrastructure and Real Estate and select one of the three other companies, including Burns and Mac, the committee eliminated from consideration.
He said attorneys had advised the council that the city’s procurement ordinance requires Edgemoor to get a “fair and equal” opportunity to negotiate a development agreement with the city. If the council dumped Edgemoor and selected one of the other firms, he added, Edgemoor would almost surely file a lawsuit.
That’s all we need, right, a lawsuit?
This Thursday the council will probably take up the selection committee’s recommendation of Edgemoor. Edgemoor hasn’t made much of its proposal public, and we need to see their numbers and whatever tentative design they’ve come up with. (They’ve got to have some sort of design, right? How could they possibly come up with a reliable estimate without having some idea representation of what they propose to build?)
I’m not too concerned about the prospect of the council rejecting Edgemoor’s bid. As I’ve said many times before, I think the city needs to start over — under a new mayoral administration — first commissioning a design, then putting the construction contract out to competitive bids that can be compared side by side, element by element, figure by figure.
What we absolutely cannot have, though, is a shell game that hands the contract to the former “Hometown Team.” It has forfeited its right to play.
We should all remember the words my good friend Steve said on one of the last days he was upright in this world: “Tom Pendergast would have blushed.”
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
Thanks for hitting them hard, Jim.
It’s sad that Kansas City strives so hard to be a major city and then hits the mark insofar as big-city corruption.
Maybe our mayor emulates Rahm Emanuel ?
The bywords here, Don, should be corruption avoided. The play was made (with the mayor’s blessing); it was stopped; and everyone should have learned a lesson: “never again.”
Jim:
Your umbrage for Burns and Mac and their aggressive business development tactics is now well documented. And the new ammunition you were gifted from Steve Glorioso should only serve to bring an end to your diatribe.
I can understand and appreciate your position on this, but it’s also important that your comments and opinions don’t paint Burns and Mac in the negative light that you’ve consistently cast them in.
Burns and Mac is a private, for-profit corporation and world-class engineering firm. Their growth is dependent on their ability to identify opportunities that complement and match their corporate skill set with profitable, mega-projects. Whoever leads that effort at the company saw a tremendous opportunity on the home sod…and assembled a team to go “all-in” to capture it.
Their efforts in the airport quest were focused, aggressive, and innovative to say the least. But at the end of the game, I guess you could say that market forces balanced the playing field since it appears “best price” swung the deal for Edgemoor. (That’s a little sketchy, too, since they didn’t even show what they planned to build for the dollars they presented.)
Let’s not continue to excoriate them for advancing a much-needed project for Kansas City. We should be giving them a measure of thanks for getting the issue teed-up for action. Without this whirlwind of airport mania, we’d still be in the talking and whining stage ten years from now.
Heck, you can even say some positive things about Boss Tom.
Thanks for the reasoned comment, Richard, and the stout defense of Burns and Mac, which, indeed, has done a lot for Kansas City.
An equal measure of responsibility here lies with the mayor, who essentially fired the starting gun and declared it open season on the city treasury. His legacy — and his prospective effectiveness — have suffered greatly because of this debacle. (Jolie Justus and Scott Wagner, who got roped in, also lost some credibility.)
That said, Burns and Mac officials should have known better than to push a blank-check, 12-page memorandum of understanding on a $1 billion deal.
Twelve pages? Are you kidding me? From what I understand, memoranda on deals like this sometimes often run into the hundreds of pages. This would have been akin to buying a house on Ward Parkway on the basis of a couple of signatures scribbled on the back of a paper napkin!
I was in the council chamber the day Burns and Mac made its big play, and it was a “Ball of Confusion,” to borrow the title of one of the The Temptations’ great songs.
I want to like and admire Burns and Mac, but in retrospect they really tried to pull a fast one, and it was such a blatant money grab they do not deserve another chance. I would feel better about the company if their leaders, at this point, would drop out, release their bid partners to sign up with Edgemoor and promise to do everything they can to win voter approval a new airport whenever the vote takes place.
Richard,
Unfortunately after reading today’s Star article about Burns and Mac continued complaints about the selection process, I am getting the feeling it’s either their proposal or they will fight to kill any other movement on the terminal issue. If they truly did this for the greater good of the city, now would be the time to step away and support whatever proposal the full council approves.
Continued attacks and confusion means a terminal proposal going down in a November vote. I’m beginning to think this is what Burns and Mac now wants.
Bill, I agree. It’s time for Burns & Mac to let go. They got beat. The game is over and it makes no sense to continue to pad the lawyers’ pockets. Behind every marketing campaign is a story. The “we’re hometown, we’re doing this for the good of the city” was a big part of their story, but let’s be honest — first, the project — any project — has to be good for the company. The altruistic part of their pitch was icing, not the cake.
Fitz, I agree with you. I would like KCI renovated soon. Or the design and competition and bids submitted.
If this can be done, Kansas City could enter the bidding for the $5 billion Amazon (HQ2).
It is to operate as a headquarters independently from (HQ1) in Seattle.
Landing this over presumed front runners Toronto and Denver. Once operating 50,000 jobs will be created.
Amazon likes the Kansas City enough to have built four or five facilities.
The Kansa City, KS warehouse has 1.5 million square feet of usable space. And they are still hiring.
Prayers and condolences to the Glorioso family, friends and colleagues of Steve.
He deserves a lot credit.
I didn’t always agree with his views, but I knew I wanted to hear them!
I Pray to see Steve again in Heaven. 🙏🏽✝️
Bill and Richard: The prospects for consensus selection of a company and a successful November election continue to dim…Today’s news is more reason that Burns and Mac can never have this job. Even if, in Round II, they come back with the lowest bid, they can be excluded because city ordinances call for selection of the “lowest and best” bid. Too bad they blew it so badly, but they did.
Excuse me for straying from the topic of the KCI rebuild, but can someone explain how in the hell their security folks went nine months without noticing a pickup truck in one of their parking lots with a decomposing body.
Mike, I followed this tragic situation from first report of his disappearance. Additionally extraordinary to me is the fact that his wife and niece went out there (to KCI) within the first week and were told by authorities that they would look for his truck.
Isn’t it all part of the homogenization of America? Same big box stores, same restaurant chains, newspaper chains, office supply chains, parking chains all across the country?
There are advantages to rampant consolidation but the service becomes less personal and attention to detail falters. The KCI bus drivers can’t be faulted for this; they just pick up and drop off passengers. They don’t pay any attention to the parked cars. It’s the parking company’s security people who are asleep, just tooling around, I suppose. But the security people owe their allegiance to a company, SP+, based in Chicago. Out of sight, out of mind.
I’m wondering if the parking people, SP+, use a Big Chief tablet for their business enterprise software. When a vehicle enters the yard, it is electronically timed-in for obvious reasons; when it leaves, they’ll know what is owed for the parking service. It would seem likely that the office IT people could query the data to see which parked cars had not left the lot at any given interval and how much “the meter” had recorded for the car’s stay. Wouldn’t it seem logical to investigate outstanding (still parked) cars after 30 days or more and then take a look at those vehicles?
I hope they’re not using Big Chief writing tablets.