JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

There’s so much to be mad about that tonight I’m just plain sad. Dispirited. Disillusioned.

Let’s take a few recent events by the numbers:

:: Two dead, one badly injured

That would be the aftermath of the horrible, horrifying crash on the 23rd Street ramp off I-435 Sunday afternoon.

A dickhead driving a black pick-up barreled down the northbound ramp about 3:40 p.m. and plowed into the back of a stopped SUV. Indications are the driver of the pick-up made no attempt to stop. The force of the crash thrust the SUV into two eastbound vehicles, including a red Hyundai. A beautiful 16-year-old girl in the SUV, Emely Raudales of Shawnee — a student at Turner High School — was killed on impact. Emely’s father, Geovanny Raudales, is hospitalized in critical condition. He suffered a brain injury.

A 3-year-old Independence girl, Ryan Hampel, who was riding in the Hyundai, was also killed.

The pick-up and the SUV continued across the four lanes of 23rd Street and crashed into a stone wall. Video taken at the scene by a bystander shows the driver of the pick-up — a scruffy guy with an unkempt beard and wearing scuffed boots and long red, polyester shorts — walking around picking up broken pieces from his truck and finally kicking a large piece.

He doesn’t appear to be the least bit interested in the havoc he just wrought on the lives of the other two families.

And one of the most disturbing things about this? Video and still photos appear to show he was flying a large American flag from his truck.

That flag must have been flapping hard and fast as this patriot flew down that ramp without a care in the world for anyone else in the world.

The patriot was questioned and released, but I fully expect charges to be filed. In the video, his reactions are those of a person in an altered state. Before the crash, witnesses told police, he was speeding and weaving in and out of traffic, presumably on I-435.

…Like I’ve said, every day we are out on the roads, we are all sitting ducks for the many irresponsible, law-breaking assholes out there. We need a lot more traffic enforcement. A lot.

:: Eight months.

That’s how long Randy Potter’s body sat unnoticed, in his vehicle, in Economy Lot B at KCI.

…Thank you, SP+ Corp., for running such a tight ship!

Here are some things about the company…Until December 2013, it was known as Standard Parking Corp., a more familiar name perhaps. Its headquarters is in the Aon Center, formerly the Standard Oil Building (or Big Stan) in downtown Chicago.

According to Wikipedia, SP+ manages more than one million parking spaces across the United States and Canada. It employs more than 26,000 people to manage 4,200 parking facilities, as well as parking and shuttle bus operations at 75 airports.

Yeah, boy, that sure is a big company. Mighty impressive. Twenty-six thousand employees…But nobody notices a truck parked in B Lot for eight months? I wonder if all 26,000 employees are sleep walking?

:: Ten days

That’s how much jail time Missouri Highway Patrol Trooper Anthony Piercy got for bouncing Brandon Ellingson out of his speeding Water Patrol boat on May 31, 2014, and then watching Ellingson thrash around in the Lake of the Ozarks waters and ultimately drown.

The Star’s Laura Bauer has done a great job of covering this debacle from the outset. I said two years ago Brandon’s family was going to be victimized again — the second time by a little-known dance called “the Ozarks Shuffle.” And that’s exactly what happened. The case was kicked around from one judge to another, one prosecutor to another, and ultimately Piercy was charged with a misdemeanor boating violation.

(Piercy also got two years of supervised probation and was ordered to complete 50 hours of community service.)

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.”

I am very sad tonight. I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut.

I learned from an email — and then The Star — that political consultant Steve Glorioso, a friend for about 45 years, died today.

Steve was one of the best political consultants to ever roam the political tundra in Kansas City. He knew politics at every level — city, county, state and national. He had the pulse of the voters, and he had incredible political instincts.

Steve Glorioso

He was a chief strategist on many big campaigns, including Kansas City’s successful $800 million general obligation bond election last spring and, in 2004, the hotel-and-rental-car tax campaign that fueled construction of Sprint Center, a key component in then-Mayor Kay Barnes’ successful crusade to rejuvenate of Downtown.

In the Sprint Center campaign, Steve managed to make the Enterprise car rental company, which largely financed opposition to the tax proposal, Public Enemy No. 1. He deftly painted Enterprise as the ogre from across the state (it is based in St. Louis) that sought to block Kansas City from having a state of the art, Downtown arena.

I remember being so mad at Enterprise that I vowed to never again rent from Enterprise. (A few years later, however, I found myself renting once more from Enterprise, whose commitment to customer service is hard to top.)

Steve wasn’t just a high-profile presence around election time, though. On an everyday basis, he was the go-to-guy for political and government reporters (and sometimes this blogger) who needed a good quote — a quote that was lively and summarized a situation in a few words. Steve was that guy; he could always be counted on for a quote, or for inside information about what was going on behind the scenes.

Pat O’Neill, a fellow political consultant, put it best when I talked with him tonight:

“His stock in trade was information,” Pat said.

The last time I spoke with Steve at length was a week ago yesterday, Sept. 6. I hadn’t talked with him in probably two months, and I wanted to pick his brain about the airport committee’s surprise recommendation of Edgemoor, over three other firms, including Burns & McDonnell, which had been the favorite for weeks.

As usual, Steve gave me a lot of good background information, and I quoted him off the record. (Just so you know, when you quote someone who later dies, the off-the-record commitment goes away because it is impossible for the information dispenser to suffer any repercussions.)

When I asked him what Burns and Mac’s biggest mistake had been, he said, “Trying to jam through a no-bid contract.”

He went on to say that Burns and Mac had attempted to engineer “the biggest scam in the history of Kansas City.”

Then he offered up this plum: The company’s attempted coup was so brazen that…“Tom Pendergast would have blushed.”

We both laughed heartily at that, and he said he was tempted to let me use it on the record because he liked the line so much. His fear of incurring the wrath of Burns and Mac overrode his infatuation with the line, however, and he held it off the record.

**

In that same conversation, Steve told me he was retiring and he didn’t expect to be involved in the November airport election — if it, indeed, takes place as scheduled. The campaign will be run by The Dover Group, which is based in Chicago and has been Mayor Sly James’ consulting group of choice since he was first elected in 2011.

I think one reason Steve was planning to “retire,” or at least sit out the airport election, is that he got crosswise with one or more Dover strategists during the $800 million general-obligation bond campaign. A mutual friend told me the strategist or strategists rejected recommendations of Steve’s that, in hindsight, turned out to be correct.

…Steve also told me in that Sept. 6 conversation that he’d undergone major intestinal surgery three weeks earlier and that he had been in Research Medical Center for a week. In the surgery, the doctor had removed an abscess from his stomach and a section of colon several inches long. Steve told me he was recovering well, however, and he sounded good. He did say toward the end of our conversation, which must have lasted about 30 minutes, that the conversation was wearing him out. I apologized and we rang off.

I talked to him briefly one more time, a day or two later, and again he sounded good and didn’t indicate he was experiencing any problems. He signed off on that conversation by saying, “Always good to talk to you, Jim.”

That line stuck with me because — good guy though he was — gracious and genial personal comments seldom came out of his mouth. He was always preoccupied with and focused on developments in the news and how political situations were playing out. Information and using it to his advantage animated his whole being.

So, it was nice to hear him say, “Always good to talk to you.”

To the best of my recollection, I responded by saying, “You, too, Steve.”

…Steve had a setback over the weekend and was readmitted to the hospital within the last several days. Then sepsis set in. Sepsis is a complication of infection that leads to organ failure. The University of Michigan Health website says anywhere between one in eight and one in four patients with sepsis die while hospitalized.

That’s what got Steve.

I’m really going to miss him…and so will Kansas City.

The shakedown for concessions in return for organized support of the new-terminal election is now officially underway.

On Tuesday, Clinton Adams, counsel to the black political organization Freedom Inc., and Gwen Grant, president and C.E.O. of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City, went down to The Star and told the editorial board they wanted a guarantee that 40 percent of subcontracting firms on the airport project be minority owned and 40 percent of the actual workforce consist of minorities.

You could see this coming a mile away. A week ago, after the special airport committee’s surprise recommendation that low-profile Edgemoor Infrastructure & Real Estate get the terminal contract, I wrote the following:

Edgemoor will have to move quickly to convince the Kansas City Labor Council that it will provide plenty of local jobs.

Every significant voting bloc, such as Freedom Inc., the firefighters union, the Committee for County Progress and the Citizens Association, will have to endorse it (for it to pass). Freedom Inc., the city’s leading black political organization, will be in a particularly enviable position because it will be able to extract just about whatever concessions it wants and will be able to demand payment of tens of thousands of dollars to help finance its get-out-the-vote effort.

So, here we are. Freedom Inc. is smacking its lips and getting ready to chow down. The Labor Council is surely poised to saw away at this big, fat hog, too. I bet we’ll be hearing from the firefighters’ union at some point. Maybe they’ll want leather La-Z-Boys in the fire stations.

This goose is laying dozens of golden eggs and a lot of hands are going to be reaching into the nest.

As has been clear all along, the vast majority of voters are not charging the doors of City Hall demanding replacement of the nostalgic dump up I-29. If this issue does make it to the ballot in November and it happens to pass, it almost assuredly won’t be by more than a few percentage points. So, like I said last week, proponents are going to need every conceivable constituency. And that puts every organization that has a constituency — however small — in an excellent bargaining position.

The unsettled nature of the situation is a big reason Freedom and the other influential organizations are wasting no time in striking.

Although the selection committee chose Edgemoor, the full City Council will have the final say on contractor selection, and the selection of Edgemoor is no sure thing.

Burns & McDonnell, the committee-spurned “Hometown Team” appears to be continuing to sniff around the edges, looking for an opportunity to elbow its way back into the picture. (A neighbor told me she had a call from a polling firm asking questions that seemed to be pushing her toward favoring a local firm. Now I wonder who that might be?)

And even if a council majority should vote in favor of Edgemoor, a memorandum of understanding (in effect, a contract) must be developed, and it, too, will require council approval. Developing and approving an MOU could take weeks, and then — whoosh! — we might find ourselves just days away from the Nov. 7 election.

It’s not a pretty picture, is it? So much has gone wrong already that it’s difficult to see how things are going to start falling into place and the pendulum is going to swing from opposition or indifference to avid enthusiasm for a new terminal.

With about half the sand already settled at the bottom of the hourglass, the two biggest questions are still unknown:

:: What will the new terminal look like?

:: Who will build it?

I’ve said all along this process has been completely ass backwards: Mayor Sly James and the other council members should have first chosen a firm to create a design and then put the project out for competitive bids. That would have positioned a selection committee to methodically compare bids side by side, point by point, before recommending the “lowest and best” bidder.

It wouldn’t necessarily be easy doing it that way, but it would be a heck of a lot easier and a lot less painful than what has taken place the last few months.

Let me say something nice about The Star before I start whaling away at the pathetic job the paper has done on three major stories in recent days.

We can be thankful for one thing, at least — that the paper’s editorial page is functioning at near full strength and very admirably.

(I say nearly full strength because when the new editorial board was introduced to readers months ago, readers were told one more editorial writer would be added. But that has not happened, and I fear funding for the job might have evaporated in the haze of owner McClatchy Co.’s wobbly financial situation.)

The editorial board’s performance has been particularly impressive on its analysis of the airport issue and its sound advice to the city through the various setbacks that have cropped up during the contractor-selection process.

From the beginning, right after Burns & McDonnell’s no-bid gambit emerged in public, the editorial board began hammering on the importance of allowing other firms to submit proposals. It held firmly to that position through all the head-spinning twists and turns the process took and through Burns and Mac’s chest-thumping, self-promotional campaign.

And then this week, when Burns and Mac cried foul and the whole dang process was on the verge of imploding, The Star continued to hold steady. Some people, including me, panicked and said it was time to trash the process and cancel the planned November airport election.

To its credit, The Star kept a steady hold on the rudder. Its pivotal editorial, which appeared on Wednesday, bore this headline: “Now Burns & McDonnell wants fairness?”

The editorial not only chided one of the city’s biggest companies for whining in the face of adversity, it also hammered Mayor Sly James for his leading role in trying to steer the contract to Burns and Mac. The editorial said, in part:

“He’s given every appearance of believing that…Burns & McDonnell’s interests and the city’s interests were one and the same. And however this goes now, he has a lot to answer for.”

And then, after the airport selection committee knocked the socks off nearly everyone by selecting the firm that had presented probably the lowest profile (Edgemoor Infrastructure and Real Estate), a Wednesday editorial correctly reminded us, “Competition has given us a better airport proposal, and a real chance for a better airport.”

…This airport drama still has several more chapters, but the book is still being written partly because The Star’s editorial board has been doing exactly what a good editorial board should be doing: Weighing in on important public issues in a calm, steady and strong voice.

**

While the editorial page has been on the upswing, the overall decline on the news side has continued. In fact, I’m afraid we readers can no longer count on The Star to regularly break big, emerging stories. And that’s completely a function of the gradual erosion of the editorial staff and the diminished staff’s necessarily reduced reach.

I’ve seen three examples in recent days of significant stories not being sniffed out in advance or being missed entirely.

In the case of stories not being sniffed out in advance (which I will address in the first two examples below), I’m talking about stories that could have been, should have been, scoops. Until several years ago, The Star routinely scooped the electronic media. But no more. Most of the time, it seems, Star reporters show up for news conferences as clueless as the other media about what’s going to be announced. That’s embarrassing.

Those examples:

:: A week ago Tuesday, reporters were summoned to a press conference called by Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker. When the reporters got there, they heard from her and KC Police Chief Rick Smith the shocking news that a suspect had been arrested in the Indian Creek Trail murders and had been charged in connection with two murders and was suspected in three others. Peters Baker and Smith were flanked by more than a dozen prosecutorial and law enforcement officials. It was almost unimaginable to me that no KC Star reporter was able to cull out that story in advance and post at least an online story suggesting what was about to unfold. Nobody got a tip? Nobody heard anything? Or, worse, did somebody hear something and not bother to exercise their “little gray cells”? Whatever the reason for the breakdown, it was horribly telling.

The serial-killer news conference that took the Kansas City media, including The Star, by surprise

:: On Tuesday of this week, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback came to Tonganoxie to announce plans for a $320 million Tyson Foods poultry complex in Leavenworth County. Hundreds of residents showed up — many to protest the complex — and once again The Star was caught with its pants down around its ankles. Oh, The Star had a reporter at the announcement — a features reporter, curiously — but no advance tipoff to readers. It was, and is, a huge story because the plant could negatively impact the quality of life and schools in Leavenworth County. But The Star doesn’t have enough reporters to cover Leavenworth County. The Wyandotte-Leavenworth bureau, which I proudly headed from 1995 to 2004, has long been closed, as have all the other suburban bureaus. If The Star got a scoop out of Leavenworth County these days, it would be the journalistic equivalent of a miracle.

:: While reading a KC Star online editorial about the Tonganoxie situation, I learned tonight that the Kansas City regional office of the federal Environmental Protection Agency has a new acting administrator. The interim leader was not appointed yesterday. Nor the day before. No, Cathy Stepp — who, among other things, appears to be a climate change skeptic — was appointed by the Trump administration last week. Puzzled, I went to The Star’s online search box to see if I had missed a news story about Stepp’s appointment. The closest thing I found was an Aug. 29 Associated Press story about Stepp resigning as secretary of Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources. The story noted in the third paragraph — that’s what we in the news business call “burying the lead” — that Stepp would be assuming the top EPA job in Kansas City. What we have, then, is a situation where The Star did not bother to produce a local story about the assignment of a new top federal official in Kansas City…No big deal, I guess. Shrug, shrug.

All of this is very galling and upsetting. McClatchy has really done a number on The Kansas City Star’s reporting capabilities. Working as a reporter at 18th and Grand these days has to be a frustrating and dispiriting proposition for anyone who understands what a good metropolitan daily paper is supposed to do.

Well shiver me timbers.

In a million years, I would not have guessed that the KCI selection committee would have recommended Edgemoor Infrastructure & Real Estate to build a new single terminal.

Not only did Edgemoor of Bethesda, MD, keep a low profile but it was the only one of the four competing companies that declined to make its proposal public.

So, we, the public, know nothing about their proposal, including what type of design they proposed or how much they bid. (It should all come out in time.)

I think this is a positive development…A release from the city said selection committee members went with Edgemoor partly because it submitted a plan “that would deliver the terminal at the best price.”

That sounds promising, but as I suggested yesterday, this whole thing could still fall apart.

At least two major hurdles remain before we can be sure Kansas Citians will go to the polls on Nov. 7 and determine if a new terminal will be built.

The first hurdle is the full City Council’s review of the selection committee’s recommendation. As disjointed as this process has been, it is foolhardy to assume that seven members of the council will vote to approve the selection of Edgemoor.

Only two council members were on the selection committee — Jermaine Reed and Aviation Committee Chairwoman Jolie Justus. The other committee members were City Manager Troy Schulte, Aviation Director Pat Klein, Aviation Deputy Director of Planning and Engineering Phil Muncy and Aviation Chief Financial Officer John Green.

Some council members, including a few who backed Burns & McDonnell, might be looking to derail the committee’s recommendation.

The second major hurdle is development of a memorandum of understanding between the city and the selected company. That memorandum is going to be complex and lengthy — probably well over 100 pages — and it’s going to take several weeks to put it together.

All the while, the clock leading up to Election Day, Nov. 7, will be running, and the longer it takes to jump both hurdles, the less time the campaign consultants will have to convince the public to vote “yes.” An earlier survey showed that only about 38 percent of Kansas City voters would vote for a new terminal. A source told me tonight he had heard that a more recent survey now put the “pro” side at 42 or 43 percent.

If that is accurate, I’m glad to hear it, but I still think gaining voter approval will be a tortuous battle.

Here are some of the pieces that will have to fall into place for the proposal to pass.

:: The business community will have to step up with campaign contributions in the range of $500,000.

:: Edgemoor will have to move quickly to convince the Kansas City Labor Council that it will provide plenty of local jobs. (The labor council had been in lockstep with Burns and Mac and is probably as confused as everyone else at this point.)

:: Every significant voting bloc, such as Freedom Inc., the firefighters union, the Committee for County Progress and the Citizens Association, will have to endorse it. Freedom Inc., the city’s leading black political organization, will be in a particularly enviable position because it will be able to extract just about whatever concessions it wants and will be able to demand payment of tens of thousands of dollars to help finance its get-out-the-vote effort.

:: Voters will have to look past the ragged selection-and-recommendation process and be convinced the city is 1) getting a good product for its money and 2) that the terminal will be convenient and appealing.

Finally, it will be important — although maybe not vital — for Burns and Mac to swallow its pride, bury its resentment and embrace the new-airport proposal.

From the outset, Burns and Mac officials talked about how proud they would be to build a new terminal for the city they love. They were fairly busting their buttons…They realized too late it was a huge mistake to have plotted with Mayor Sly James and a couple of other council members to engineer a no-bid, sweetheart contract that would produce a huge profit for the company. (It’s ironic that James has now been reduced to little more than a bit player in this drama.)

“It was a political miscalculation of unprecedented proportion,” a source told me tonight.

Burns and Mac’s original proposal was such a scam, he said, that “Tom Pendergast would have blushed.”

Now that Burns and Mac is in a totally different role than what it expected, its civic dedication is going to be sorely tested.

And yet, I’ve heard Burns and Mac could still be in for a piece of the action. Word is that Edgemoor, if it gets the job, might bring the company on board for at least part of the engineering work.

That would certainly help get Burns and Mac representatives out of the grousing mode and back into their cheerleader outfits.

Well this is a fine kettle of fish.

Burns & McDonnell, the “Hometown Team” that for many weeks appeared to be on a glide path to landing the new single-terminal project at KCI, has now placed a big stick of dynamite under the terminal-selection process. But that’s not all: It has lit the fuse.

In very short order, we should be hearing a big explosion. Burns and Mac has decided to go scorched earth, even to the point of destroying its own chances in order to keep any of the three other competing companies from getting the contract.

The impending explosion means there will be, in all likelihood, no KCI election in November and no City Council recommendation on a contractor anytime soon.

As twisted as things are right now, we might not have an airport election until November 2018 or even 2020. And that’s as it should be: This process was horribly flawed from the outset, and it needs to be dumped.

…In a nutshell, here’s what has unfolded in the last several days.

The City Council’s bond adviser alleged there were flaws (it’s too complicated to get into) in Burns and Mac’s proposed financing proposal. In retaliation, Burns and Mac, which has seen its chances of winning reduced in recent weeks, called Tuesday for the selection process to be scrubbed and for “a new, open process” begin anew.

Mayor Sly James got this “process” — if you can call an unadulterated muddle a process — off on the wrong  foot because he wanted to rush the airport project to a start while he still had a couple of years left on his second term. It all started over a lunch at the River Club, and it mushroomed from there, after he strong armed a few other council members to go in with him.

It was going to be the whipped cream on Sly’s milkshake. It was going to be the Cuban leaf in his cigar.

So, instead of going the traditional route of having the city take bids and select the “lowest and best” bidder, he tried to anoint Burns and Mac as contractor and, in so doing, he basically invited the firm to name its price tag.

But he didn’t get away with it. After other City Council members insisted the project be opened up to other competitors, another firm came along and said it could do the job for nearly $500 million less than Burns and Mac had initially projected!

A friend who has been in local politics a long time told me Burns and Mac tried to pull off “the biggest scam in the history of Kansas City.”

Now, the firm is reduced to being the spoil sport. And in that role, it will succeed.

In assembling a “Hometown Team,” it recruited as partners several powerful interest groups, including organized labor and minority and women-owned businesses. With a majority of Kansas City voters lukewarm, at best, toward the prospect of getting rid of KCI’s horseshoe terminals, the prospect of labor and important parts of the African-American community turning against the initiative spells certain doom.

…There is one more possibility, albeit remote. Burns and Mac could capitulate and try to reel back in its call for a do-over.

Won’t work. Too late.

The headlines on tonight’s story in The Star, combined with the story that will appear on the front page of tomorrow’s print edition, will sink this ship that’s been taking on water from Day One.

In the face of these hurricane-level headwinds, a City Council majority would be crazy to go ahead with a November election because the proposal would go down in flames. But I don’t think they’ll do that. They’ve been eating Sly James’ dust for many months now, and they’re tired of it.

I think they’ll throw the milkshake, the whipped cream and the Cuban cigar back in his face.

…I’ve said before I don’t like sitting in those bullpens at KCI. And it is a dump. But I would prefer to put up with the bullpens and the gloomy terminals for a few more years, until the city can show us an appealing terminal design and give us a solid bid process that will result in a good product at the “lowest and best” price.

I don’t like hot weather and can’t stand high humidity, but even so, this day — this last day of summer — is always difficult for me.

The calendar says summer goes on until Sept. 21, but the reality is it ends today. Yesterday or day before I saw a few leaves coming down. That says it all: It’s about over.

This morning, we turned the air conditioning on. By late this afternoon, if the weather forecast is correct, we’ll be able to turn it off, open the windows and let the north wind cool the house.

But today’s north wind — assuming it arrives as scheduled — won’t be an aberrational respite, like the occasional north breezes of July and August. For me, that north wind will bring a sweeping finality to summer, as well as a wistful feeling of loss and transition.

I have experienced that feeling about Labor Day more acutely since a Labor Day-weekend trip to Truman Lake many years ago. It was hot that weekend, and we and another couple and our children and a couple of theirs were camping out.

**

One of my foremost memories is that a young couple, maybe newlyweds, were at the adjacent camp site, with their big RV taking up much of the site. They weren’t particularly friendly — just gave us an occasional nod — and didn’t show their faces much. After being outside for a few minutes, they would retreat to the comfort of their version of the great indoors. It was clear to all of us on our steamy camp site that this couple was there for carnal rather than aquatic activities.

But we had our own situation to deal with. My friend, also named Jim, had hauled his speedboat to the lake, but it hadn’t been on the water in years, and we didn’t know what to expect. As a back-up of sorts, I had brought my 14-foot fishing boat, equipped with a powerful 5.5 horsepower motor I had inherited many years earlier from my father.

On Saturday or Sunday of that weekend, our group, which included our two children and a couple of theirs, went down to the marina and put Jim’s boat in the water. The rest of us piled into the boat from the dock, and, as best I recall, Jim got the motor to a sputtering and spewing start, and the boat lurched slowly away from the dock area.

We hadn’t even cleared the no-wake zone, however, before the engine conked out. With his stepson Gabe at the wheel of the boat, Jim went to the back of the boat and started fiddling with the motor. He would bark out orders to Gabe, telling him when to push the ignition button and when to back off. The shouting got testy at times, as the frustration built.

Meanwhile, the rest of us just sat there — sweating, sloop shouldered and silent — realizing this probably wasn’t going to be much of an outing.

After a long battle, Jim gave up, and we either paddled back to the dock or had another boater pull us back by rope. We piled out of the boat at the same place we had left an hour earlier, when our spirits were high and we had visions of the wind blowing our hair and cooling our faces as the boat skimmed over the water…Later I told Patty we must have collectively looked like the Clampett family as we sat forlornly on that boat, bobbing gently up and down in the wake of the cove.

**

The next 24 hours or so were entirely unmemorable, and on Labor Day Jim and his family gathered their things and departed fairly early. Patty and I had driven separately, as I recall, because we were hosting a party back home that night and she wanted to get back to prepare. I told her I would be home in a few hours but wanted to go out and do some fishing in my boat.

It was a great feeling when the motor fired right up and I moved out into the body of the lake. Propelled by 5.5 horsepower, I didn’t go very far or very fast, but at least I could glide along and feel that breeze I had been anticipating in a much bigger way.

The sun was out. Lots of boats were on the water. I fished for a few hours — don’t remember catching anything — and as the afternoon wore on clouds began to roll in, the wind picked up and the temperature began to fall.

I was reluctant to leave, partly because I knew this was probably the only boating and fishing I was going to get in possibly for the rest of the year. Late in the afternoon, though, a decided chill set in, and I headed for the marina. A lot of other boaters had the same idea. In the cove, a slew of boats was idling, each boater waiting to approach the dock and get his boat on the trailer and get out of there.

Operating on my own, I had to first tie the boat to the dock; retrieve the car and trailer from the parking lot; back the trailer into the water; then get back in the boat and drive it onto the partially submerged trailer. By the time I did that, I was one of the very last boats in the area. After pulling the boat from the water, I stopped a short distance up the ramp to get my fishing tackle and other items out of the boat.

It was starting to get dark. The wind was blowing, and it was chilly. I looked around and saw the cove was clear of boats and only one or two other stragglers were in the ramp area. As I tossed my gear into the trunk, a feeling of emptiness set in. Summer was over. Really over. And I was going to be late for the party.

Well, it’s the first big college-football weekend…Who am I going to be rooting for?

Nobody.

I’ve written in the past about my effort to wean myself off pro football because of the game’s clearcut association with degenerative brain disease.

I was moderately successful last season: I watched relatively little of the Chiefs’ games and went to just one — on a frigid night against the Raiders, when a friend offered me a club-level seat. (Temptation at that level is hard to turn away from.)

This year, I’m going to try to avoid the pro game altogether, and I am vowing here and now to extend my self-imposed ban to college football.

This is going to be extremely difficult, mainly because I love going to KU football games — not because it’s quality football, which it hasn’t been for years, but primarily to watch the KU Marching Jayhawks and listen to the band play “Home on the Range” after most of the fans have left and the field has long been cleared.

I know…A lot of people might think it’s a bit weird, going to Lawrence to watch a marching band and listen to one song. But that’s me. I pick up on obscure stuff and stick with it. (Example: Several years ago, when a certain women’s college basketball referee — a woman — caught my eye, I sidled up to her at halftime and introduced myself. Through downright perseverance, I befriended her over the course of a few seasons. We still see each other about once a year…In case you’re wondering, Patty doesn’t mind: My friend is gay and has had a partner for more than 20 years.)“

A neuropathologist has examined the brains of 111 N.F.L. players — and 110 were found to have CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), the degenerative disease linked to repeated blows to the head. The New York Times, July 25, 2017

**

You might be wondering what brought me to my present vow to try to abstain from football altogether.

The turning point was a recent New York Times story about a longtime ESPN and ABC college football analyst named Ed Cunningham, who last spring announced he was stepping away and giving up his six-figure-a-year job. At the time, he said he was resigning because he wanted to spend more time with his two young sons and because of his workload as a film and television producer. Only recently did he come out with the real reason — “my ethical concerns.”

Ed Cunningham

“(T)he real crux of this is that I just don’t think the game is safe for the brain,” he told The Times. “To me, it’s unacceptable.”

I decided that if a guy who has been making more than $100,000 a year (by his own account) as an analyst is willing to act on the courage of his convictions, I should do likewise.

“I take full ownership of my alignment with the sport. I can just no longer be in that cheerleader’s spot.” Ed Cunningham

**

I don’t think I’m going to be able to make a complete withdrawal, however, for one main reason: Patty is an MU graduate, and she loves going to Columbia at least once or twice a season. Although she likes to go to the games, the bigger attraction for her is tailgating at the Phi Sigma Pi house, a few blocks from Memorial Stadium.

Patty was a Phi Si “little sister” when she attended MU, and many members of her old gang gather at the frat grounds on football weekends. I go with her at least once a year, and I’m sure I’ll be going again.

On “Phi Si” weekends, I’m going to give myself a pass and try to keep my focus on the socializing and not get caught up in the football…which is going to be a big challenge.

“Repeated blows to the head cause the buildup of an abnormal protein that degenerates brain tissue. Areas of the brain vulnerable to CTE include those that govern cognition, working memory, abstract reasoning, planning, emotional control and aggression.” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 6, 2017

**

The hardest part of living up to this vow, though, is going to be finding other fall and winter-time diversions.

I already play golf through most of the winter; I play when the temperature is as low as the upper 30s, as long as the wind isn’t strong. And with the “wrap-around” professional golf season starting in late fall, it’s not hard to find a golf tournament on TV.

As many of you know, I like women’s college basketball and go to some KU games every season. (Fortunately, the pep band plays at those games and I can get my “Home on the Range” fix, although it’s nothing like hearing the song played by the 270-member Marching Jayhawks.)

So, I’m in the market for new possibilities for fall and winter activities and interests.

— Maybe I could expand my basketball horizons and start following men’s college basketball more closely. MU is expected to be much better this year, and it’s only a two-hour drive to Columbia.

— Maybe I could take Patty’s suggestion and start doing some volunteer work, you know, “giving back” to the community instead of focusing mostly on my “fat self.”

—  Maybe I could get a weekend job working at the 7-Eleven in Brookside.

Wait, what am I thinking about? Scratch that.

As you can see, I need help.

Any suggestions, constructive or otherwise?

**

“He ended his life living out of a car, unable to get his thoughts together and fighting anger and confusion. At one point, he destroyed all his football pictures, slashing them apart.” The New England Sports Network, writing about the late Mike Webster, former Pittsburgh Steelers and Kansas Chiefs center, who died of a heart attack in 2002. An autopsy showed his brain was filled with an abnormal protein associated with CTE

I theorized in a comment in my last post that 22-year-old Fredrick Scott, who has been charged with two murders and in all likelihood committed three others, was “a frustrated young man and a flat-out racist.”

Information made public before and after I made that statement confirmed the accuracy of that opinion, but new information I’ve come upon — as well as an interview The Star got with Scott’s mother — indicate Scott probably had mental problems.

Scott

His mother, whom The Star did not name, has said her son suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. The symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia include, among others, violent tendencies, anger, hearing things that are not real and emotional disconnectedness.

Well, clearly Scott had violent tendencies. And we already knew he  was angry because he told police he had been that way since his brother was murdered in 2015. (Killed by one or more black men, it should be noted.)

The information I received last night indicates he was also emotionally disconnected and perhaps was hearing voices.

The source of my information is someone who had spoken with two people who worked with Scott at a Pizza Hut at 103rd and Wornall, which is just a few blocks from where two of the five victims — Mike Darby and David Lenox — were killed.

Here’s what those employees said:

:: Scott, who was known as Freddie, “talked to himself all the time” but said very little to his fellow employees.

:: He was a terrible employee, couldn’t even bake a pizza. About all he could do was wash dishes and sweep.

:: He “creeped everybody out” and was transferred to another Pizza Hut.

The employees thought he might have a drug problem but never saw him actually taking drugs. (I am skeptical about the possibility of drug use or addiction because there is no indication any of the five victims was robbed. If he was a drug addict, you can bet he would have been taking whatever valuables the men had on them.)

Here’s another piece of information I found startling: Scott apparently knew one of his victims.

Sixty-six-year old David Lenox, who was shot down steps from the door of his residence at the nearby Willow Creek apartment complex, was a co-worker of Scott’s at the Pizza Hut. Lenox, a former Army medic, had “just started working there as a delivery driver,” I was told.

David Lenox, right, at a 2016 MU football game with son Mike and daughter Mindy

Lenox was killed on Feb. 27, apparently while either walking his dog or letting the dog outside…The “statement of probable cause” filed by the Jackson County Prosecutor’s office says police responding to the scene found “a small brown dog on a leash standing next to the victim.”

The day after Lenox was shot by someone whose blood ran cold, Freddie Scott showed up for his shift at the Pizza Hut.

Further evidence of Scott’s familiarity with Lenox is the fact that Scott had become friends with a person who, at the time, lived at Willow Creek. Scott frequently came around to visit the friend.

This from the probable cause statement:

“The former tenant stated he and Scott would walk the complex sometimes and talk. Officers noted that the former tenant’s apartment was a short distance from the Lenox homicide. Scott would regularly stop by, sometimes daily, prior to the tenant moving out shortly after the Lenox homicide.”

I’m pretty sure I would have been moving out, too.