Nace Baiting

When Mary Kelly burst into tears on a Saturday morning late last June, she unwittingly set the stage for another venomous election season in Kansas City.

With Election Day nine months away, Kelly didn’t care who would be running for City Council. The only things on her mind that morning were a string of broken promises and a dirty creek that had flooded her neighbors’ yards and houses for decades.

Kelly was livid before she arrived at the Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center for the town hall meeting hosted by her council representatives, Becky Nace and Terry Riley. “I was really going to go and say some hard things,” she says. “But I didn’t think that would be right for God. If somebody is being a fool because they’re angry, then other people feed into it, and that can cause a problem.”

It would have been easy to whip up the crowd. The two dozen people who were there shared Kelly’s frustration. For years, city officials had promised them a host of neighborhood-improvement projects — level sidewalks, unclogged storm drains, smooth-flowing creek beds. Bureaucrats at City Hall had even sent some of the residents notices assuring them that the projects would be funded. A few folks had held on to those letters for more than twenty years — long after they’d given up hope of city workers ever showing up to do the jobs.

Kelly stepped to the microphone. She had barely begun telling the story of Town Fork Creek, an eroding tributary of the Blue River that meanders through the hills of southeast Kansas City, before she broke down.

“My father told us not to cry about things,” she tells the Pitch. “But after he died, I learned that you have to release whatever is in you. To me, tears is a way of release and cleansing.”

Her father had also preached against whining for handouts. Born in Meridian, Mississippi, during the Jim Crow years, Tom Bell had been an up-by-his-bootstraps entrepreneur. With nothing more than a wheelbarrow and a strong back, he had bartered for food, clothing, shelter and whatever else his family needed. In time, he moved up to a horse-drawn cart, then a truck. “My father was a legend,” Kelly says. “He was the first black business owner in the area.”

Kelly followed her dad’s example. From her small, segregated schoolhouse near the Alabama border, she went on to earn a graduate degree in nursing. She finished her 35-year career at Kansas City’s VA Hospital as a top supervisor. Now she’s a 77-year-old exercise instructor. “I’m a senior citizen,” she says. “But I don’t think like one. I don’t act like one. And I don’t look like one.”

Although he might not have approved of his daughter’s sobbing, Tom Bell would wholeheartedly have supported her having stood up and spoken out. “My father believed his word was his bond, and he expected that from others,” she says. “I take it serious when the city doesn’t follow through on promises.”

After Kelly and several of her neighbors spoke, Councilwoman Nace addressed the crowd. She explained that when she’d assumed office in 1999, she had discovered a huge backlog of unfinished neighborhood projects. In many cases, the projects had been funded for their design phases and then abandoned. In other cases, Nace said, her predecessors had secretly shifted the money to more politically salable projects, such as the brass stars adorning a “Walk of Jazz Legends” sidewalk near Bartle Hall.

Then Nace gave them more bad news. She and Riley had agreed that no new projects would be approved until the backlog was eliminated, except to fix problems that posed public hazards. That meant no new sidewalks. Or gutters. Or park equipment.

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No one was happy to hear this, but everyone understood and respected the decision. Kelly walked away satisfied that at least she’d been heard.

Kelly wasn’t thinking about the ballot box on that sunny weekend. But other, more powerful people were. The next day, former Mayor Emanuel Cleaver struck the first blow in a campaign to replace Nace as Kelly’s representative.

In a brief Kansas City Star story, Cleaver vowed to fight against Nace’s re-election in March. “I have never worked to have anyone defeated, but I will make an exception to that rule in this case,” he told the paper.

Kelly doesn’t subscribe to the Star, so she missed the story that jolted political junkies with an early buzz. But she heard Cleaver repeat his war cry a couple of weeks later from the pulpit of his church, St. James United Methodist, in a sermon that was broadcast on KMJK 107.3. Bemused, Kelly listened as Cleaver told his flock that Nace had committed a political sin by denying “repeated requests” for new sidewalks around his recently expanded church, which sits in Nace’s 5th District.

Kelly thought back to the meeting at which she’d wept before a crowd of angry citizens. Cleaver hadn’t been there. He hadn’t heard Nace explain that the backlog of unfinished work had pushed new sidewalks far down the list of priorities. Unlike Kelly and her neighbors, Cleaver’s church had never applied for neighborhood-improvement funds.

Yet Cleaver’s clout got him on the radio and allowed him to lay down the gauntlet for a new election season.

That doesn’t really bother Kelly. When she steps into the voting booth on March 25, she’ll have just as much power as the former mayor.

Heavyweights such as Cleaver are banking on Wesley Fields, a young lawyer at Bryan Cave — one of the city’s top firms — to triumph over Nace.

Fields had originally planned to run in the 3rd District, which blankets a sizable portion of the city’s predominantly black east side. The 5th District lies directly to the south, from 45th Street south to 86th, and from Troost east to Raytown, with another big chunk on the other side of Raytown.

In midsummer, Fields advertised his intention to replace Mary Williams-Neal, who has reached her term limit. At the top of Fields’ ad was a quote from Cleaver: “Wesley Fields is an outstanding leader who can bring vision, talent and intelligent leadership to the 3rd District.”

A few weeks later, Fields switched to Kelly’s district.

The move was engineered by Mark Bryant, president of Freedom Inc., the city’s black political club. “There was an overabundance of quality candidates in the 3rd District,” Bryant says. “Under the circumstances, I found it appropriate to find someone for the 5th District.”

Since its inception in 1960, the year Kelly moved to Kansas City, Freedom Inc. has been a formidable force on the city’s political scene (though its endorsed candidates have lost some high-profile races in recent years). Cleaver led the group before he was elected mayor.

Both Cleaver and Bryant know plenty about the political power of the 5th District’s at-large seat — for which a candidate is selected by voters throughout the city. In the 1980s, Cleaver served as the in-district representative — elected by constituents within the largely black district. Bryant became the first Freedom Inc. candidate — the first black — to be elected to the at-large seat.

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Kelly voted for Bryant back then. She knew him because he was the attorney for her neighborhood association.

He beat Leon Brownfield, who had been in office for thirteen years. A flamboyant character in City Hall lore, Brownfield owned a motel and restaurant near Kauffman Stadium that served as his base of operations. He also moonlighted as a state lobbyist who, according to a 1977 Kansas City Times article, “love[d] Jefferson City the way Leonardo loved Florence.” As a lobbyist, he was heralded as a major force in repealing laws against selling liquor on Sundays and for making it easier for cities to pass bond issues.

But this second job caused his downfall. By the time Bryant sought office, Brownfield was facing criticism for the way he dominated the city’s $100,000 lobbying budget. For years, he had obstinately refused to file financial disclosure forms — until prosecutors forced him to do so. After he finally coughed up the proper documents, the Star reported in 1981 that he had lavished legislators with Chiefs, Royals and Kings tickets and was “renowned for Chivas Regal scotch, Chinese food and popcorn.” (The popcorn alone cost city taxpayers $180 a week.)

Brownfield’s biggest critics served on the Citizens Association, a nonpartisan political group formed in the early 1940s in response to the corrupt Pendergast administration. In the early 1980s, members of this group met secretly with members of Freedom Inc. to form an alliance. Together, they backed Bryant, who won by 8,000 votes.

Though Kelly voted for Bryant, she doesn’t recall much about Brownfield or about the significance of Bryant’s victory over him. Her political activism at the time was directed primarily toward healthcare issues, which led her more often to the state and federal governments. But other 5th District veterans remember Brownfield well. “Leon wasn’t responsive to the people,” says Lee Bohanan, a founding member of the black activist group SAC 20 and a longtime resident of southeast Kansas City. “I couldn’t talk to him. I had to go through his people. After Mark Bryant won, the whole dynamic changed.”

Working with fellow Freedom Inc. members Cleaver and Charles Hazley, from the 3rd District, Bryant played a key role in a late 1980s budget fight that shifted more of the city’s capital-improvement money to their black-majority districts. The victory helped set the stage for Cleaver’s election as the city’s first black mayor in 1991.

In the years that followed, the seat was held by African-Americans — first Bryant, then Ken Bacchus, a fellow Freedom member who is now head of a program that distributes federal funds to urban homeowners.

Then along came Becky Nace, a blond-haired former Raytown School Board member who was a virtual unknown to the black community. After the primary, she went head-to-head with Holli Holliday, the granddaughter of one of Freedom Inc.’s founders.

“Behind the scenes, there was a lot of ‘This is a black seat’ and a lot of comments about ‘We want an African-American to represent us,'” Nace says of the contest. “A lot of the neighborhood people didn’t know me then, so I think it frightened and concerned them.”

Kelly voted for Holliday. “I knew Holli really well,” Kelly says. “I had not heard of Becky Nace at all.”

With insurmountable support from white voters north of the river, Nace trounced Holliday in the city’s most lopsided race. Some observers believe that Nace’s victory diminished blacks’ power at City Hall. “It’s a problem, because that district is 60 [percent] to 70 percent black,” says the Reverend Nelson “Fuzzy” Thompson, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “Black people make up the majority in that district, so they ought to be represented by a black.”

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But now Freedom Inc.’s Bryant says race isn’t the issue in the 5th District contest. Bryant says he didn’t ask Fields to run because he is black. “I support him because I feel he is the best-quality candidate for City Council that I have seen in my lifetime,” he says. “Nothing against the incumbent. I just don’t choose to settle for mediocrity. Wesley Fields has the finest education money can buy. He brings both intelligence and experience.”

Fields agrees. “I not only think that me winning my race is good for the African-American community, but it is good for the entire Kansas City community,” he writes in an e-mail to the Pitch. (Fields said he was “too busy” for a formal interview, though the Pitch first contacted him nearly two months prior to this article’s publication. The Pitch agreed to accept e-mailed responses from Fields. Nace answered questions in real time on several occasions.) “My race for city council is about the quality of candidates and who has the most to offer our city,” he writes. “I invite you to place Councilwoman Nace’s background next to mine and let the citizens of Kansas City decide.”

This isn’t Wesley Fields’ first run for office. As a fifth-grader in Grandview, his classmates elected him mayor of a pretend metropolis known as Exchange City. Later, at Grandview High School, he hit the campaign trail as part of Missouri Boys State, another make-believe government, this one created by Central Missouri State University. His peers named him Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. “I realized then that if government is to operate at its highest and most efficient level, the most qualified and capable people must be leading,” he writes.

It wasn’t hard for Fields to imagine himself in that role. Beginning the year of his fifth-grade mayoral victory, he rode an eight-year streak of straight A’s, he writes. His junior-high classmates dubbed him most likely to succeed. He graduated in 1991 from Grandview High as the school’s valedictorian, the first African-American to earn the honor, he was told. He had earned a full scholarship to Yale, where he majored in African-American studies and political science.

Fields graduated in four years with honors. Along the way, he established the first campuswide Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration and served on a committee to select a dean for Calhoun College, one of Yale’s residential colleges. For his efforts, he was one of three Bulldogs to nab the school’s Cogswell Award for Leadership.

After a stint at Oxford University in England, he enrolled in the University of Virginia School of Law (where he founded another King celebration). The school has a reputation of being a runway for high-flying political careers. Among its alumni are seven U.S. senators (including our own Kit Bond), five U.S. representatives, two judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals, one governor and one former FBI director.

“I wish I could say that I had the foresight to attend the University of Virginia because of its reputation as a ‘breeding ground’ for politicians,” Fields writes. “Honestly, I wanted to attend a top-ten law school … and I wanted a break from the cold and long winters of New England.”

After graduation, one of the largest law firms in Atlanta offered him a job. But he passed on the offer, choosing instead to return to Kansas City and accept a lower-paying position at Bryan Cave. “I think too often we lose our young people to other metropolitan areas,” Fields writes. “I wanted to set a new trend and example by returning to the community that raised me.”

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Other young people are, in fact, following Fields’ lead. Denisha Tate, for one, is happy to be living and working in Kansas City — and she has Fields to thank for that.

When Tate learned last summer that she would be transferred from the Chicago office of the Boys and Girls Club to its Kansas City branch, she knew it would be a great professional opportunity. But she was less sure about the social side of the deal. Being single and in her thirties, she worried that she would be stuck in the land of Dorothy and Toto with nothing to do but pine for the vibrant, world-class city she had left behind.

But a colleague recommended that she contact Destination Kansas City, a nonprofit organization Fields established in 1998. The group’s aim is to help local businesses recruit and retain minority professionals. It became Tate’s primary support group. “I had no concept of where anything was,” she recalls. “I didn’t know where to look for an apartment or anything.”

She started attending Destination Kansas City meetings, where friendly, longtime Kansas Citians eagerly recommended doctors, insurance agents and the best place to salsa dance on Friday nights. Soon she became the group’s social director. Every month, Tate and her friends sample a new restaurant. Now she has a real estate agent working for her. She hopes to stay in Kansas City.

Tate effusively praises Fields and the support system he created for young black professionals like her. “For someone to think that far outside of the box, that’s impressive,” Tate says. “Really, he was looking out for me.”

Fields came up with the idea for Destination Kansas City while working as a summer law clerk at Bryan Cave in 1997. One of the senior partners at the firm, Herb Kohn, invited Fields to speak at a function sponsored by Fast Forward, a group Cleaver had founded in an effort to diversify Kansas City’s business community. Fields writes that his goal was to create an environment that would attract and retain minorities. “I thought there should be a group of young professionals of color to serve as ambassadors,” he explains.

As with any city, Kansas City’s business community enjoys tremendous influence over City Hall. As such, Destination Kansas City could make a significant impact on the city’s destiny.

“Wesley’s a success story for that,” says Donald Maxwell, the group’s current president. “He had a job offer in Atlanta. But instead of going to Atlanta, he chose to come here. Now he’s running for office.”

What’s his name?” asks Mary Kelly, echoing the sentiment of many 5th District voters who spoke to the Pitch. “Is it Walker Fields? I know his name is Fields.”

Told the correct name, Kelly continues without hesitation. “I’m not supporting him,” she says. “Listen, he just graduated from high school in 1991. He has no track record. You got to go out there and do something if you’re going to get my vote. I think he’s still wearing his Pampers.”

Kelly is unshakable in her support for Becky Nace. “I’m passing out her fliers because I believe in her. I don’t think she sees color. She just does what needs to be done. Or tries to, anyway. And if they want to shoot me on the courthouse steps for saying what I believe, then I guess they’ll have to shoot me.”

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One of Kelly’s friends, a neighborhood activist who is black, received a call recently from Fields’ father, lawyer Taylor Fields, who attacked her for supporting Nace.

The woman says Fields asked her, “Why would you support a white woman with no education?”

“How dare he do that!” Kelly exclaims. “He was just ugly. That kind of thing makes me more so want to vote for Becky. Nobody pushes me into something because of color. I think it’s wrong.”

Kelly says that, as a nurse who was called upon to help all races, she perfected the art of color blindness. “My father told me this years ago, back in Mississippi,” she explains. “Black folk have had a hard time. And so have some white folk. He said, ‘Black folks ain’t always wrong. And white folks ain’t always right.’ Then he turned the coin around and said the same thing.

“I ain’t about that black thing,” she continues. “No. Huh uh. [Fields is] black, and he’s young, but that ain’t sayin’ nothin’. He’s still riding his tricycle. He needs to be someone’s protegé.”

Yet Fields has been a protegé — to some of Kansas City’s most powerful players.

Upon his return to Kansas City, he became involved with the SCLC, an organization for which Cleaver once served as president. “My father has been involved with the SCLC from its inception in Kansas City,” Fields writes. “I am proud that under the leadership of individuals such as Reverend Fuzzy Thompson, Reverend Sam Mann and Reverend Cleaver, Kansas City currently hosts the second largest [Martin Luther] King celebration in the country.

“I think it is important for young adults to become involved in organizations such as the SCLC,” he continues, “so that when those who are currently in positions of leadership decide to step down, there is someone there to take the mantle. That must be the vision for any community.”

He has also been an active member in Cleaver’s St. James United Methodist congregation. Additionally, Fields has served on the Kansas City Streetlight Advisory Committee, the Genesis Charter School Board and the advisory board of the Midwest chapter of the Multiple Sclerosis Society.

But the experience he’s building his campaign around is his work as an attorney for the city’s Tax Increment Finance Commission, which oversees a program that gives future tax dollars to developers to help make their projects profitable.

Soon after Fields took the job at Bryan Cave, the firm won a contract to help represent the city’s TIF Commission, a quasi-governmental agency staffed by the Economic Development Corporation — itself an umbrella organization that’s partially funded by City Hall. Over the past three years, Fields has billed the TIF Commission for more than 2,000 hours. He’s been paid to sit through all but one of the TIF Commission’s meetings. He has also handled a slew of projects, including a strip mall north of the river and a clump of tax-funded improvements on and around the Country Club Plaza.

“I have grown to understand that if appropriately used, TIF is one of the most creative alternatives to reenergize a slumping economic community and enhance a community that is experiencing prosperity and growth,” Fields wrote in a column in the January Ingram’s magazine.

Fields credited TIF for bringing the city $1.5 billion in new investment, 1,500 hotel rooms, millions of square feet of office and retail space, and 43,000 jobs.

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But the message isn’t playing well in the neighborhoods. Mary Kelly, like many of her fellow neighborhood leaders, sees TIF as something that benefits wealthy developers and lawyers at the expense of taxpayers like herself. New tax revenue — money that might otherwise help pay for smooth sidewalks, unpocked streets and flood-proof creeks — often goes toward developments in thriving areas of the city where the need for subsidies is dubious.

Reports from the city auditor’s office back her up. “In Kansas City, the use of TIF has been driven by private developers rather than by explicit public strategies and policies,” Auditor Mark Funkhouser wrote in 1998. That’s how the city has wound up with tax-funded parking spaces at a profitable shopping mall and a neighborhood full of mansions north of the river. Since 2000, the City Council has tried to force the TIF Commission to create a policy that would impose limits on its program. But in late January, Funkhouser wrote, “The TIF Commission disagreed that a TIF policy is needed.”

Fields addressed this in his Ingram’s column, but he didn’t offer specifics. “We must … consider where TIF is applied,” he wrote. “This is not a decision that any one individual should make on behalf of our community at-large. Rather, it should be decided based upon a collective vision expressed by the community, who ultimately benefits from TIF.”

As for Kelly’s feeling left out by the process, Fields writes to the Pitch: “Actually, public hearings are held by the TIF Commission and the city council for that purpose…. I have yet to see Councilwoman Nace come before the TIF Commission and testify for the advancement of any TIF development project.”

Actually, Nace served on the TIF Commission when she was a Raytown School Board member. As a council member, she hasn’t gone to TIF Commission meetings because she sits on the council’s Finance and Audit Committee, which votes on all TIF projects before they go to the full council for approval. There, she has helped create policy changes that have brought more tax revenue into the city’s coffers. For instance, she and her colleagues made it tougher for developers to renew their TIF projects when they expire.

“It was a vicious cycle,” Nace explains. “The developers would apply first and get their tax abatement. Then, at the end, they’d ask for more money to stay in town, which they could often use for internal stuff, like computers.”

Kelly is more impressed with Nace’s TIF credentials than with Fields’. She doubts that he will include her and her fellow neighborhood leaders in the city’s “collective vision” for TIF. She says that until Fields began his bid for office, he had been a no-show in Kansas City’s neighborhood-activist community — a point Fields concedes. “Once I decided to run for city council,” he writes, “I began going to as many … neighborhood meetings that I could.”

“Listen, this little fellow is a novice,” Kelly says. “He’s maybe sitting at the table with the big attorneys that know what’s going on. But maybe he’s just getting them a glass of water. He should work from the ground up as opposed to coming from the top down.

“That bothers me,” she continues. “If they’re pushing him, they’re pushing him for a reason.”

Who’s pushing Fields? Other lawyers. Fields’ campaign records filed through December 30 show that donations from lawyers and law firms make up 43 percent of his contributions. Many of the checks came from his dad’s firm, Fields and Brown, where attorneys and family members ponied up a total of $4,800. Fields has also received 38 contributions from his colleagues at Bryan Cave, totaling $7,680 — 18 percent of his total take through 2002.

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Many of the contributors are the same attorneys who are cashing in on TIF.

Bryan Cave has earned more than $800,000 from the TIF Commission over the past three years. Fields alone has billed more than $400,000. And he continues to work for the TIF Commission even as he runs for office.

Fields is quick to point out that this isn’t taxpayer money his firm is earning. He says that “approximately 90 percent” of the firm’s bills have been paid by developers involved with TIF projects.

But Fields’ legal bills show that’s not true.

The Pitch compiled a database from 373 Bryan Cave invoices and found that half of the firm’s bills were paid out of the TIF Commission’s general fund, an observation confirmed by Laura Whitener, the TIF Commission’s top administrator. That fund is made up of 5 percent of the taxes created by new TIF developments — in other words, it’s public money.

The TIF Commission’s public meetings, at which developers pitch schemes to build parking garages, luxury hotels and, in one instance, a McDonald’s, have been particularly profitable for Bryan Cave. During the first two years of its contract, the firm sent two lawyers — Fields and Stephen Sparks — to prepare for and sit through the meetings. “There are some times when you need to have an attorney at the table,” Whitener says. “You’re never going to be able to predict those times.”

From March 2000 through January 2001, the two lawyers’ administrative activities earned their firm more than $50,000. Since then, the TIF Commission has cut back to having just one lawyer — Fields — present at its meetings.

But even the other half of Bryan Cave’s bills, the ones supposedly paid by developers, are eventually reimbursed with public money as well. That’s because current TIF policy allows developers to include legal expenses in their TIF financing agreements, labeling them “soft costs.” Moreover, developers may also be reimbursed for hours billed by their personal lawyers.

“It’s a sleight of hand,” Nace says. “The developer doesn’t own the taxes his project will generate. It’s not his money. It’s taxpayer money. On the Finance and Audit Committee, we’re working right now to limit the amount they can be reimbursed for soft-money expenses. And we’re getting a lot of resistance.”

As early as 1982, city leaders knew that the legal expenses of the Economic Development Corporation, which provides staff for the TIF Commission, were straining the city’s budget. A report issued that year by the Cleaver-appointed Citizens Budget Review Committee recommended reducing those expenses by $100,000, even though back then they were a mere $155,000 a year. Instead, the council voted to increase payments to lawyers. Now attorneys are making millions from the EDC.

A 1999 Star article cautiously suggested that these contracts are doled out as part of a patronage system. With minimal notice to the public, the EDC board met off-site to retain the services of Bryan Cave and the King Hershey law firm. Lawyers at both firms contributed heavily to Mayor Kay Barnes’ campaign. Bryan Cave senior partner Herb Kohn, for example, is one of the mayor’s chief allies. Kohn has billed the TIF Commission for more than 200 hours — more than $35,000.

Although this money creates potential conflicts of interest, Fields promises that as a City Council rep, he will shape TIF policy based on the community’s “collective vision.” It’s uncertain how he would accomplish that given that he would have to step aside from many of the TIF debates at City Hall.

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“If we still have the contract at the time, he would be, directly or indirectly, a beneficiary,” Kohn admits. “He’ll probably want to recuse himself, but that’s a decision he’ll want to make at the time.”

Neighborhood leaders like Mary Kelly aren’t the only ones who are leery of Fields. In his first bid for public office, the young Ivy Leaguer has made mistakes that have marred his reputation with some politicos.

His first blunder came at a candidate screening hosted by the Citizens Association, the group that had met secretly with officials from Freedom Inc. to back Mark Bryant twenty years ago. As Fields spoke before the organization’s board of directors in a UMKC lecture hall this past December, board member and former City Councilman Dan Cofran read through Fields’ responses to the group’s questionnaire.

“I really liked what he wrote, because he was saying what I believe,” Cofran recalls. “But as I read on, the answers became very familiar. And when I got to the third or fourth paragraph, I thought to myself, ‘This is something I wrote years ago.'”

Afterward, Cofran confronted Fields about the language.

Fields replied that he had written it himself.

Cofran went home and dug through his files. Sure enough, four sentences in Fields’ response were virtually identical to portions of a column Cofran had written in May 2001 for the Kansas City Business Journal. It wasn’t the most egregious case of plagiarism in history, but it bothered Cofran. When the Citizens Association’s board reconvened to discuss which candidates they would endorse, Cofran brought up the incident. They agreed to endorse Nace.

Later, Cofran faced Fields for another candidate screening, this one sponsored by the Downtown Council. Again he mentioned the plagiarism. “Fields still wouldn’t admit it,” Cofran says. “He said he had consulted numerous materials when he answered the questionnaire, and he forgot one of those items was my column.

“I gave the guy a chance to admit it and apologize,” Cofran adds. “And the apology would have been accepted. But he didn’t do it.”

“To the extent anyone was offended by my use of his language without attribution, I apologize,” Fields writes in his e-mail to the Pitch. “I didn’t think it was necessary to footnote the sources in a questionnaire … as I would have in a formal academic piece, such as a law review article or the many college papers I wrote at Yale or Oxford. I am new at this political process.”

Members of the Citizens Association were also bothered by Fields’ answers to questions about his switch from the 3rd District to the 5th District. At their December meeting, Fields said nothing of his conversations with Bryant. He told them he changed districts because he was about to get married and his wife-to-be wanted to live in a larger house.

But Fields already lived in a pretty big house. County records show that in 1999, he bought a three-bedroom home (with a two-car garage, a finished basement, a spacious family room, a master bedroom with his and her vanities, and a whirlpool, according to an online real estate ad) in Renaissance Place. That suburban-style housing development is in the 3rd District, a mile or so east of 18th and Vine.

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When Fields filed for the 5th District at-large race, he listed as his address a 648-square-foot apartment in Whispering Lake, a complex near Blue Ridge Mall. Whispering Lake’s brochure makes Fields’ new domicile seem better suited to a bachelor fresh out of community college than a Yale-educated lawyer at one of the city’s top firms. Called “The Cortina,” his unit is the smallest that Whispering Lake offers, with a cramped 8-foot-by-8-foot kitchen adjoining a combined living-dining room and a bedroom barely big enough to hold a king-size bed. When the Pitch stopped by the apartment on a Saturday in December, the shades were drawn and no one was home. A weeks-old neighborhood newsletter hung from a clip near the front door. A call to Fields’ 3rd District home phone number revealed that it was still in service.

“I did live there,” Fields writes to the Pitch. “The only real issue with respect to my residency is whether I have met the legal requirements. I have done this. Furthermore, where one chooses to live is a personal decision.”

No one doubts that the switch was legal. The Citizens Association members believed, however, that Fields’ answer was disingenuous. After all, the 3rd District has plenty of huge houses, particularly in the Manheim Park neighborhood along Troost between Linwood and 39th. Besides, carpetbagging is a fairly common practice in politics. “If he had said he was moving for political reasons, that would have been a better answer,” says one Citizens Association board member.

Since then, some political observers have learned that Fields’ 2001 Infiniti is registered at his father’s address south of I-470 rather than at his old Kansas City address. That’s a common practice for many city dwellers who want to avoid high insurance rates. Yet Fields provides another explanation. “It was an oversight that I am glad you brought to my attention,” he writes to the Pitch. “I lived with my parents when I first moved back home from law school and I neglected to change my registration when I moved from their house.”

He also neglected to change it when he bought a new car. County records show that Fields used his parents’ address when he got plates for his 2000 Infiniti as well as for his more recent model.

If Fields had registered the car at his own home, the $800 he paid in property taxes last year would have gone to the Kansas City School District. Instead, Fields’ taxes have gone to the Grandview School District. Meanwhile, Fields’ father, Taylor Fields, has been an attorney for the Kansas City district for years — earning a paycheck from the district while his son avoids paying taxes to support it.

“I think the use of the tax revenue to educate children, regardless of the district in which they reside, is most important,” Fields responds.

These incidents have, Cofran says, “raised concerns about his honesty and integrity.”

Fields’ supporter, Mark Bryant, says this sentiment is racist.

“This is a purposeful smear campaign to direct attention from qualifications,” he says. “If the tables were turned around and you had a Caucasian candidate that had graduated from Yale and the University of Virginia Law School, had served the TIF Commission as a member of one of the most prestigious law firms in the city, running against an African-American or a Hispanic or a person of Jewish faith, I think the white person would garner all the endorsements. Yes, I do.”

Fields agrees. “But I have accepted that as a part of subjecting myself to public service,” he writes. “When I participate in … tutoring programs, children often ask about my background. I tell them they can do anything if they stay in school and work hard … I am sure they would be discouraged to learn that my hard work and commitment to our community is rewarded with personal attacks.”

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Like Mary Kelly, most voters aren’t privy to the gossip and backbiting that occur in the city’s power circles. For them, Kansas City politics is an unseen force that shapes the potholed, trash-strewn environment they have to endure.

The Pitch called more than a dozen neighborhood leaders in the 5th District and asked them to name the key issues in the March 25 election. The area is one of the city’s most diverse, with dense urban enclaves in its northwest corner and suburban split-levels and working farms in the hills along its southeast fringe. Not one person mentioned the color of the candidates’ skin. None hailed Cleaver or Freedom Inc. as guiding forces behind their votes. Likewise, no one cited TIF as an issue.

Trash. Flooding creeks. Dilapidated houses. Crime. Sidewalks. Sewer systems. Access roads. Potholes. Streetlights. Used-car lots. And trash. And trash. And more trash. That’s what the neighborhood leaders talked about. They’re united in their desire for the 5th District to be a clean, safe place to live.

They all say Nace has listened to them and at least tried to address their concerns.

“She’s worked with us on any problem we’ve had,” says Ray Kellam, president of the Chapel Park Neighborhood Association. “In the past we have not been heard by City Hall.”

“She attends our neighborhood meetings and lets us know she has our interests in mind,” says Carl Boyd, of Eastwood Hills.

“Personally, I like Becky,” says Damian Muller, a board member for East Meyer. “She’s done a good job. She has a vision for the city and this area.”

“I think she has done well enough that maybe she doesn’t need to worry about an opponent,” says Pat Keeling, president of Blue Hills.

Nace worked as a medical supplies sales representative prior to her election in 1999. Her only political experience was as a Raytown School Board member, where she developed a nationally recognized “No Pass-No Play” policy. One of her campaign promises was to improve the city’s schools. On this, she would appear to have had little success, particularly in the Kansas City School District, which lost its accreditation her first year in office. But as a member of the Finance and Audit Committee, she has helped change TIF policy so that school districts have a greater say in how TIF projects are crafted and can retain more tax revenue.

Mary Kelly and her neighbors might not have known much about Nace when they punched their ballots in 1999, but they did soon after.

Within months of being elected, Nace visited Kelly’s neighborhood to see firsthand the problem with Town Fork Creek. She ambled down the eroding banks and tromped through the mud. “She was the first city representative ever to come out,” says Marshia Irvin, a longtime neighbor of Kelly’s. “No City Council member had ever bothered to come out.”

The neighbors had been trying to get help ever since the 1977 flood washed out most of their basements and a few of their living rooms. Back in the early 1980s, they wrote their 5th District councilman — Emanuel Cleaver. “We weren’t even given a meeting with him,” Irvin says. “We just got a letter saying we weren’t the only area in the city experiencing problems.”

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In 1995, the city coughed up a little money for the Johnson County office of engineering firm Black and Veatch to conduct a study. It outlined all the problems with the creek and suggested courses of action for the city to take. “The city just put it on the shelf,” Irvin says. “They said it’s not feasible.”

But after Nace’s visit, the city managed to find some neighborhood capital-improvement funds. Last year, the neighborhood received $500,000 to help mitigate the problem. This year, they gained approval for $1 million that will be spent in 2007. Irvin says it’s not enough to take care of the problem, which city officials estimate will cost $16 million to fix, but it’s a start.

And it’s enough to earn Kelly’s vote.