Thursday was a great day for Kansas City.
After years of hand wringing, steps forward and steps backward, we have a Memorandum of Understanding — 68 pages between the city and Edgemoor Infrastructure & Real Estate — to build a new, $1 billion terminal at KCI.
It may not be easy from here; there will probably be many difficult days ahead, in fact. But chances are now good we will have a new airport in the early 2020s.
I can’t wait. I’m 71 — will be 72 next month — and hope to God I’m here to see it.
Yesterday, after nearly two months of “double, double toil and trouble” (you can always count on The Bard), the council approved a new and improved M.O.U. on an 8-5 vote.
That’s hardly a mandate — just one tick above a bare majority — but good enough to move ahead.
I have no interest tonight in rehashing the battle or running down the people who voted “no.” (Suffice it to say, I will not support for mayor any of the “nay” voters on Thursday.) What I want to do is pay tribute to certain individuals and to my former employer, The Kansas City Star, for making this result possible.
But first, as I am constantly urging my friends at The Star to do, let’s enumerate the vote:
Yes: Mayor Sly James, Dan Fowler, Quinton Lucas, Jermaine Reed, Katheryn Shields, Jolie Justus, Alissia Canady and Kevin McManus.
No: Heather Hall, Teresa Loar, Lee Barnes, Scott Wagner and Scott Taylor.
**
Now, my list of heroes.
The Kansas City Star Editorial Board
I just don’t think this would have happened without the insistent prodding and holding-to-account that editorial page editor Colleen McCain Nelson and her fellow editorial writers engaged in. (Dave Helling deserves a lot of credit, too; he has written the vast majority of airport editorials.)
It was a remarkable demonstration of consistent and relentless urging of the council to do right by the citizens. (I wish I could say I was equally consistent, but a couple of times I let developments unsettle me and called for halting the process and starting over. For that, I deserve to be called “Shaky JimmyC.”)
The Star’s shining moment came the afternoon of Dec. 14, just hours after the council’s jaw-dropping 9-4 vote to dump Edgemoor. In an editorial that was updated the next morning, The Star said:
“In an astonishing display of arrogance, nine members of the Kansas City Council betrayed voters and rejected a negotiated memorandum of understanding with Edgemoor Infrastructure, the company picked to develop a terminal at Kansas City International Airport. The decision — cooked up out of the public’s eye — once again injected chaos into the airport terminal project.”
You could feel the fury behind those words. I loved the passion. It went on to slap the council up side the face and warned it, in so many words, to shape up.
“Kansas City voters should be furious about the council’s ham-handed interference with the project. Less than six weeks ago, voters overwhelmingly endorsed construction of a new $1 billion terminal at KCI — a remarkable show of faith in their elected leaders.
“Those voters knew Edgemoor had been selected in a relatively open procurement process. Now nine council members have betrayed that faith, in a stunning bait-and-switch. It confirms every claim of distrust in local government.”
I think that editorial rattled and embarrassed several council members, and, indeed, the council did shape up.
Mayor Sly James
The mayor gets a lot of criticism for being headstrong and egotistical, but, by God, people love this guy because he exhibits incredible strength, and he’s usually right.
After getting the airport project off dead center with his support of a “sole-source” contract with Burns & McDonnell, Sly had the guts to shift gears after the project was opened to other contractors. He saw that the city would be getting a raw deal with Burns and Mac (a proposal from bidder AECOM came in at $400 million less than Burns and Mac’s, and Edgemoor’s proposal came in at a stunning $776 million less. Faced with the facts, Sly knew it was Burns and Mac that had to be dumped, not Edgemoor.
At yesterday’s council meeting, before the vote, he had harsh words for AECOM and its recently cooked-up partnership with Burns and Mac.
“Heck, before Edgemoor was selected, Burns & McDonnell and AECOM privately and publicly talked about each other as if they were fighting in a schoolyard. After they were both rejected, however, they formed a convenient partnership and now Edgemoor is under attack.”
Way to go, Sly. I will vote for you for whatever you run for next.
Councilman Kevin McManus
I live in the 6th Council District, which is represented by McManus (in district) and Scott Taylor (at large).
McManus
Both were strongly behind Burns and Mac, which has its headquarters in the 6th District, and both voted to dump Edgemoor on Dec. 14. But of the two, only McManus had the courage to do what was right and turn against Burns and Mac in the wake of its proposal — a proposal so greedy that my late, great friend Steve Glorioso said “would have made Tom Pendergast blush.”
McManus didn’t make any friends at Burns and Mac, but I think with his show of integrity yesterday he positioned himself for bigger things down the road.
Councilwoman Alissia Canady
Canady
Along with Councilman Lee Barnes, (at large), Canady represents the 5th District. She joined him — the most strident Edgemoor opponent — in the infamous Dec. 14 vote. Like McManus in the 6th, however, she came around to see the folly of the at-large member’s position.
Thank you, Councilwoman Canady.
Charles Renner
Here’s a man who worked tirelessly behind the scenes, whose expert guidance and familiarity with public-private partnerships helped keep the council on the right path.
Renner
Renner is a partner with the Kansas City-based law firm Husch Blackwell, which, along with the Boston-based WilmerHale, has been paid more than $1 million to advise the council on the new-terminal process.
That’s a ton of money, for sure, but after the Dec. 14 debacle, members of the council’s Finance & Governance Committee said that in the context of a $1 billion project, the amount was not out of line. So true.
Renner got his undergraduate and law degrees from UMKC. He earned a B.A. in political science in 1997 and received his law degree three years later.
Thank you, Charles — and your fellow legal beagles, who kept fine tuning and explaining this deal right up to yesterday afternoon.
“Edgemoor’s proposal came in at a stunning $776 million less.”
If you click on the link below, you will read a Tweet where the KC City Manager wrote: “The statement by the @KCStar that the #BetterKCI procurement process saved $766 million is patently false.” In response, Steve Vockrodt wrote that he will send the KC City Manager the document containing the $776M, which Vockrodt says was “derived from work product by city’s hired legal staff.”
It sure would be nice if the public could see the document which supports the $776M figure. Because, at this point, it sure looks like there is only one of two explanations for this disagreement (neither of which is comforting):
1) The KC City Manager was unaware of a significant document prepared by his own staff and outside lawyers, or
2) A council member and the Star are fundamentally misinterpreting a document prepared by city staff and outside lawyers.
Here is what the KCBJ wrote:
The $776 million in savings that Canady referred to is the difference between Edgemoor’s current proposal and the $2.982 billion total cost ($85.2 million x 35 years) called for in the eventually abandoned MOU associated with Burns & McDonnell’s controversial no-bid proposal.
Vockrodt goes into a lot more detail on his Twitter account. As he notes, “The $776 million figure is obviously at one end of the spectrum.” That’s putting it mildly. $90M to $776 is an extremely broad spectrum.
https://twitter.com/st_vockrodt?lang=en
Like The Star, I was relying on numbers worked up by Husch Blackwell.
AECOM’s proposal, including construction costs, debt and profit, came it at more than $400 million less than Burns and Mac’s sole source proposal. (Its proposal totaled nearly $3 billion over 35 years, including construction costs, debt and profit.)
Husch’s numbers show Edgemoor’s proposal costing about $776 million (maybe the number is $766 million) less than Burns and Mac’s over 35 years.
You have to remember that City Manager Troy Schulte was on board with Burns and Mac’s sole-source proposal at the outset, along with Sly James, Jolie Justus and Scott Wagner. He might be trying to cover Burns and Mac’s flanks now, but I notice he hasn’t demanded a correction from The Star…Just says it’s wrong.
It’s numbers…You can bend ’em a lot of ways.
The Tweets Vockrodt has posted in the last few minutes are too massive to easily summarize, but I’m sure you will find them interesting.
https://twitter.com/st_vockrodt?lang=en
Who knows what’s going to unfold going forward, with financing, constructions costs, etc., but of the three proposals, Edgemoor appears to have put forward the most economical model, by quite a distance.
Nevertheless, it all goes back to the botched process. As Vockrodt and Turque quoted Scott Wagner the other day:
“That beginning has kind of poisoned this to some degree so that there’s always a level of distrust, there’s always a level of trying to figure out what’s really going on. I think that continues to play out.”
There’s no “apples to apples” at this stage.