Who’s to blame for UMKC’s Crossroads Conservatory debacle?

The orchestra pit at the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s White Recital Hall is so shallow that recently a lanky conductor’s head kept popping into view during a performance.

That’s just scratching the surface of the hall’s deficiencies, says Diane Helfers Petrella, interim dean of the Conservatory of Music and Dance. White Hall has no wing space for performers to enter or exit. The wooden floor violates the standards of the National Association of Schools of Dance. There is no space for dressing rooms.

“There are high schools in this area with better performance spaces,” says Helfers Petrella.

We descend a flight of stairs in the aging building that serves as the home base for a conservatory that is highly regarded for its faculty and programs, but constantly loses talented students because of its decrepit facilities.

On this floor, practice rooms are the size of closets; there are 30 of them for an enrollment of about 550 students. It’s typical to see 30 or more musicians lined up waiting for a space. Percussion instruments and concert pianos fill the beat-up hallways; there is no place else to store them.

We keep going. A dance studio is battered and stuffy. “Like a dungeon,” Helfers Petrella says.

The interim dean gave a longer and even more depressing tour to members of Missouri Governor Eric Greitens’ staff last spring. Greitens was unmoved. A few weeks later, he obliterated UMKC’s meticulously assembled funding plan for a new conservatory with his trademark nastiness.

“Politicians are addicted to spending your money,” he said in a veto message June 28. “This year, they passed a bill that would put taxpayers on the hook for over $75 million to build and run a conservatory for dancers and art students. I’m vetoing the bill, and I’m ready to fight them on this.”

In those three sentences, Greitens demonstrated how little he knew about the plan for a new conservatory for the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Or about Kansas City. Or higher education. Or the arts in general.

To begin with, the “art students” part was all wrong. If Greitens, a political neophyte, had taken the time to learn anything about Kansas City, he would have understood that students of fine arts and design attend the Kansas City Art Institute, which is not affiliated with UMKC. The UMKC Conservatory enrolls students in disciplines such as instrumental studies, jazz studies, music education and, yes, dance.

Greitens’ dismissive veto message also painted a worst-case scenario of the project’s cost and ignored its potential. The new conservatory was to have been located across the street from the gleaming Kauffman Center of the Performing Arts. It would have drawn students from around the world. “A fountain of youth,” one backer called it. “Kansas City’s Juilliard,” others said, referring to the famed music academy in New York City. It was to be a signature triumph for a reviving downtown.

Greitens either didn’t know any of this or didn’t care. Then and now, the Republican governor’s connections to Kansas City’s political and civic leaders are virtually non-existent.

Before Greitens’ veto brought everything to a screeching halt, plans to relocate UMKC’s Conservatory to a new downtown location had been gliding along. Led by Julia Irene Kauffman, who pledged $20 million in foundation dollars, UMKC raised $48 million in private donations. The Downtown Council secured a city block of land in the shadow of the performing arts center. All that remained was for the state of Missouri to support a public university by matching the privately raised funds.

The General Assembly had created such a path in 2012, when lawmakers approved the “50-50 match” to fund capital projects for colleges and universities. If schools could raise private funds for worthy projects, the state has a mechanism for funding the remainder.

But Missouri was facing its usual budget crunch last year. Boosters of the downtown conservatory knew a $48 million appropriation in one chunk was too much to ask for. So they proposed spreading the cost over multiple years by authorizing revenue bonds. 

Jolie Justus, a former state senator who now serves on the Kansas City Council, expected resistance from the legislature’s sizeable contingent of fiscal hawks. She visited the Capitol to lobby for the funding, and was surprised to be greeted with almost universal enthusiasm.

“I didn’t have anything to do,” Justus recalls. “Everybody was already on board.”

Rep. Noel Shull, a Republican from Clay County and a retired banking executive, sponsored the bill in the House. He still refers to the project as “a dream.” The Republican majority leader of the Senate, Mike Kehoe of Jefferson City, carried the legislation in that chamber.

When the votes were taken, it wasn’t even close. The House supported the bill 117-39 and the Senate vote was 28-4.

“It was one of the only times I can remember when rural Missouri, urban Missouri, Republicans, and Democrats all came together,” says Warren Erdman, a Kansas City Southern executive and former chairman of the University of Missouri system’s Board of Curators.

All that remained was the governor’s signature.  

In the spring of 2017, Greitens was a mystery to Kansas City. Few, if any, leaders on this side of the state had heard whispers about the affair with a St. Louis hair stylist that has led to the governor contesting a criminal indictment and fighting for his political life. People only knew that, since taking office in January, Greitens had shown more interest in jetting to out-of-state meetings with donors than he had in visiting Missouri’s largest city. Mayor Sly James waited weeks to get an audience with him. Invitations to connect with the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, the Downtown Council, and other groups were met with silence.

“We have asked for meetings and haven’t gotten any,” Pam Whiting, the chamber’s spokeswoman, tells The Pitch.

“I haven’t seen a significant relationship between Greitens and any leader in Kansas City,” says Justus.

If anyone could have gotten the governor’s ear, it was thought to be Erdman. A former chief of staff to then-U.S. Senator Kit Bond, Erdman is a go-to person in Missouri GOP business circles. But Erdman tells The Pitch he never talked directly to Greitens about the conservatory. Instead, he dealt with the governor’s staff.

“Certainly after the bill was passed, there was a concerted educational effort,” Erdman says.

People in Kansas City and the university system wrote letters and provided documentation to Greitens’ office. Erdman arranged the tour for staffers and met with them several times. “They were always very open to what I had to say,” he recalls.

But as the weeks passed with no word from the governor, the key players got nervous. On a Wednesday in late June, everything fell apart.

The University of Missouri System’s Board of Curators announced it was withdrawing the request for state funding. An official news release and statements from leaders gushed with false cheer. The project would be better off with private financing, they said. Construction could begin sooner. The university wouldn’t have to continually seek bonding revenues from the legislature. There would be a “reallocation of resources” and more entreaties to donors. University leaders would be ready with a new financing plan in September.

From the point of view of the legislature, where support for the conservatory was still strong, it looked as though the leaders of the University of Missouri system were sucking up to Greitens. By pulling the project, university brass removed any possibility that lawmakers might embarrass the governor by overriding a veto. Perhaps, the thinking went, Greitens would return the favor with more generous appropriations for higher education.

With state funding no longer in play, Greitens had no need to veto the bill. But he did, with a flourish. On his Facebook page, Greitens displayed a photo of a bill with the word “veto” slashed across it, and followed up with his “dancers and art students” message.

September passed with no financing proposal from university leaders. In late January, local journalist Kevin Collison broke the news on his blog CitySceneKC that Kauffman was pulling her $20 million pledge. Her foundation had already extended its deadline several times. The vision of a downtown conservatory seemed to have been dealt a death blow.

The news sent UMKC spinning furiously into damage control. Interim chancellor Barbara Bichelmeyer and university system President Mun Choi co-authored a curious op-ed in The Kansas City Star. While half the piece was devoted to sounding a legitimate alarm about Missouri’s stingy investment in its flagship university system, the leaders also attempted to reassure Kansas City readers that a new conservatory would somehow be realized.

“We have been hard at work with renewed energy as we develop new ideas on how we might accomplish the project,” they wrote. “Rest assured, it continues to move forward. Expect word on those new developments soon.”

And so we wait. “We’re evaluating all of the options that are available,” Choi tells The Pitch. “We recognize [the conservatory’s] stature nationally and internationally. We believe in this very deeply.”

Although the university system announced in mid-February that C. Mauli Agrawal, vice president for academic affairs at the University of Texas at San Antonio, would take over as UMKC’s new chancellor in June, Bichelmeyer remains the point person for a conservatory plan, Choi said.

The downtown location remains a possibility, he said. So does a site on the Volker campus. A scaled-down version of the grand downtown campus plan seems likely. “We’re always looking for efficiencies where we can,” Choi says, “but we can’t undercut the academic purpose.”

Legislators who backed the original project say they’re ready to take another run at state funding, but they favor the downtown location.

“My sense is there is still interest in the House and Senate to provide legislation that would enable the conservatory to move forward with the original plan next to the Kauffman Performing Arts Center,” Shull says.

Jason Holsman, a Democratic senator from Kansas City, says he also thought a funding plan could be revived for the downtown location, although it seems likely the pause may extend until the new UMKC chancellor is on board.

“We were in drive and now we’re in neutral,” he says. “The good news is we’re not in reverse.”

But Choi says he doesn’t foresee looking to the state for funding any time soon. If curators had hoped to curry favor with Greitens by pulling last year’s proposal, it didn’t work. The legislature and governor cut the state’s budget for higher education by 9 percent last year, and Greitens has proposed an additional reduction of nearly 8 percent this year. “I don’t believe we’re in a position to request additional financing from the state,” Choi said.

Choi’s conversation with The Pitch, however, took place a week before a grand jury in St. Louis indicted Greitens on a felony charge of invasion of privacy, stemming from allegations that he took a photo of his lover while she was bound and blindfolded, and transferred the photo to a computer. If Greitens is forced out of office — a strong possibility at this point — then the lone stumbling block to the original funding plan will have slinked off into the sunset.

The man who would replace Greitens, Republican Lt. Gov. Mike Parson, might actually care enough about UMKC and Kansas City to sign his name to a game-changing bill. Parson already has shown interest in UMKC’s conservatory; he attended its annual Crescendo fundraising gala last fall.

But for the moment, Choi says the plan is for the university system to reach out around Missouri and the nation for alumni and other donors with a passion for the arts and Kansas City. But Choi is no longer predicting when the financing will come together. “Right now we are not in a position to have a target date,” he says. “There may be a breakthrough a month from now, or it may take a while longer.”

While awaiting that breakthrough — or a new governor — it’s worth wondering whether things might have turned out differently last year if Kansas City leaders had found a way to build relationships with Greitens.

As much as Greitens would like to think his fame as a former Navy Seal and author had spread far and wide, few people in these parts had heard of him before his longshot run for governor. Business leaders in the St. Louis area, where Greitens lives, had donated to his veterans’ charity and joined him at black tie events over the years. Campaign finance records show donors from St. Louis far outpacing Kansas City in one measure he appears to value: campaign contributions.

But donors’ generosity doesn’t seem to have bought the St. Louis area any favors — or even access. The governor has poured ice water on the idea of state credits for a Major League Soccer stadium in St. Louis. And some legislators from the area say they’ve seen no sign that he works well with their business groups.

A politician seeking to build a legacy as a great governor would work to cultivate relationships, starting with leaders of his state’s largest cities. But apart from the one that is threatening to ruin him, Greitens puts no energy into relationships in Missouri. Before the indictment, his focus was on laying the groundwork for a run at a national office.

Kansas City Mayor James, whose face time with Greitens begins and ends with a barbecue lunch a year ago, doesn’t waste time wondering if he and others could have done something better or differently with the conservatory project.

“No, because that’s not his agenda,” James says. “His agenda is to get to D.C. It’s all about slashing and cutting and burning.”

Erdman, in a telephone conversation, sounds rueful. “We had the private money,” he says. “I felt like we had a window of opportunity to take advantage of that.”

The legislative support was a significant achievement, Erdman says. “I don’t think we could have done a better job with the legislature.”

And the governor?

“I’m sure we could have done something better,” Erdman says. “I don’t know what it could be.”

Only Greitens knows. And right now he’s got more pressing matters on his plate than an explanation for why he torpedoed Kansas City’s dream.