Not everyone is into Hyatt’s catering, not everyone is moving into One Light — and no one is leaving GTMO just yet

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When the news is good, Kansas City loves to throw a party.

Take, for example, the jubilant September 10 announcement that the Shriners would hold their 2020 convention in Kansas City, two years after the projected opening date of the new convention hotel, which is slated to go up next to Bartle Hall. A band made up of men in funny hats, including former Kansas City Councilman Chuck Eddy on the drums, played in the foyer of Municipal Auditorium as Mayor Sly James lauded the fraternal order’s decision to return to Kansas City.

Sometimes, though, the news isn’t so good, and the fezzes and the drums stay in the cupboard.

Last week, three organizations wrote to members of the Kansas City, Missouri, City Council to express reluctance about coming to Kansas City in the future. The convention-hotel deal, all three groups say, comes with a big, problematic Easter egg: an exclusive contract for Hyatt to cater any event in Bartle Hall’s Grand Ballroom.

The Hyatt catering deal will nudge several local companies out of lucrative Grand Ballroom contracts. City Manager Troy Schulte has said the exclusive catering contract was the stickiest part of protracted negotiations for the 800-room, Hyatt-flagged convention-hotel proposal. But he has said the agreement was necessary in order to craft a financing package that would keep the city’s general fund out of the hotel project.

Such arrangements aren’t necessarily unusual in cities that are vying to book conventions. But at least one event planner told council members that one reason he had picked Kansas City in the past was because he had catering choices.

“As someone that has planned large conventions for over 18 years, I can tell you very few convention centers have open catering policies,” writes Scott Hartman, planning coordinator for the Mennonite Church USA’s convention. “Having the opportunity to look at multiple caterers and have them bid on our business helped us control costs.”

What kind of costs? Hartman’s letter to the council doesn’t say. But a letter from Educational Testing Service does.

“In 2015, our catering spend was just short of $2.3M to a combination of three KC caterers, so you can see the impact of not being able to competitively bid out this work could be considerable,” writes Patric Mills, contracts manager for the education nonprofit. “ETS is very concerned about the potential for allowing the proposed new hotel to have exclusivity for catering in the Grand Ballroom and Convention Meeting Space.”

The Evangelical Free Church of America comes to Kansas City every four years. It last arrived in 2014, a visit that local officials say brought a $4.7 million economic impact from 7,000 conventioneers.

“If the open catering policy changes, we will definitely revisit our plans,” EFCA event director Laurie Seay writes in a letter to the City Council.

Kansas City probably won’t heed these concerns, not least because leaders are hungry for bigger conventions. The 2020 Shriners convention — the occasion for that boisterous announcement back in September — promises about three times as much economic impact as the EFCA meeting.

Mike Burke, the Kansas City real estate lawyer who is shepherding the convention-hotel deal, says he’s confident that the Hyatt catering contract will be good for conventioneers.

“I’m aware there’s an organized effort by some of the caterers to write letters,” he tells The Pitch. “Hyatt is a customer-service organization. They’re going to work with their customers and clients to produce a product the city can be proud of.”

Not that anyone will have a choice about it.

One Light, downtown’s ultra-shiny new apartment building — touted as the first residential high-rise construction project here since the San Francisco tower went up at Crown Center in the 1970s — opens to its tenants this week.

Press reports have suggested that move-in day will be a busy affair. The Kansas City Star and other sources have quoted the Cordish Companies, the project’s developer, as confirming that One Light is 98 percent leased — with a 1,000-person waiting list.

But some advertising visible on local social-media users’ pages says units are still available for lease. Doesn’t a giant waiting list convey the idea that anyone not already signed up to live at One Light is out of luck?

Actually, no.

Nick Benjamin, executive director of Cordish’s Power & Light District, tells The Pitch that One Light is 80 percent leased. And that waiting list, he says, is more of a “hey, maybe I’m interested” list.

“Our messaging has been consistent throughout. From early after our construction start, in April 2014, we had a rapidly growing waiting list of people who had expressed interest in leasing in One Light but had not yet signed leases,” Benjamin says. “We did not actually start signing leases until November 2014, at which point there became a distinction between those on the waiting list and those who had signed leases.”

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By April, 35 percent of One Light’s 315 apartment units had been leased, Benjamin says. One Light’s pace of weekly leasing, he explains, allows Cordish to put that figure at 95 percent by March 2016.

That means, if you don’t want to wait for Two Light, Cordish’s planned nearby sequel, you might still have a shot.

“If you were to walk into the leasing office today and say you wanted a one-bedroom, you would need to fill out an application,”Benjamin says. “If your application was approved, you would put down a deposit and then could sign a lease for one of the available units.”

And if you’re on the waiting list? Benjamin says that gives you priority information and an invitation to One Light events. That list, he adds, is up to 3,500 people now.

Pat Roberts is grandstanding again.

The senior senator from Kansas is upset that President Obama wants to shut down prison camps on U.S.-controlled land in Cuba and transfer detainees to select prisons in the lower 48 states.

Closing Guantánamo, where detainees with suspected ties to international terrorism are held (often with no formal charges or regular access to lawyers), was one of the first things that Obama said he wanted to accomplish when he reached the White House. During the president’s first presidential campaign, the prison was already widely viewed as an international symbol of America’s disregard for human rights and its increasingly misguided war on terror.

Things haven’t gotten better — and Roberts is a big reason.

The senator has been perhaps the most vocal opponent to detainee transfer, particularly because his home state’s prison complex in Leavenworth is a potential home to at least some of the detainees. Last week, Roberts cited the issue again. After having learned that the Pentagon had visited Leavenworth to see whether it could hold the detainees, he put a hold on Obama’s secretary of the army nominee, Eric Fanning.

“There are a lot of concerns,” Roberts spokeswoman Sarah Little tells The Pitch in an e-mail. “First, he is worried about putting a high value target in Leavenworth (or anywhere else). It would certainly be a significant target with several of these detainees in one spot on American soil. There [sic] friends and sympathizers would be in our communities, in our airports, etc.”

There already is one place in the continental United States where prisoners who have committed terrorism, or been linked to it, are held. That’s Florence, Colorado, which is reputed to have the highest-security lockup in the Federal Bureau of Prisons system.

That, for example, is where Ramzi Yousef is spending the rest of his days. Convicted for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Yousef was also linked to a plan to hijack several commercial-airline flights in the United States and blow them up simultaneously. Called Project Bojinka, it’s widely seen as a precursor to the 9/11 plot. (Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols was in the Philippines while Yousef was planning Project Bojinka, fueling conspiracy theories that there was a Middle East connection to the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Nichols is also imprisoned in Florence.)

There have been no reports of terrorism in Florence. There has been no talk about the presence of terrorist sympathizers there, either.

Still, Roberts says he’s worried that participation in the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Leavenworth would decline if GTMO detainees were nearby.

“He does not want Leavenworth to be simply ‘GITMO [sic] North,'” Little continues. “He does not agree with the President’s argument that closing GITMO will remove a recruitment tool for terrorists. There will still be indefinite detention if GITMO is closed since the Administration does not have a comprehensive detainee plan. So rather than calling it GITMO, the terrorists will simply recruit and call it Leavenworth.”

If only Roberts had always been so prescient about just what terrorists were going to do and why.