A City That Works?

If anyone wanted a piece of Mayor Mark Funkhouser, this was the perfect chance.

It was midday on October 31, and the banquet hall at the Argosy Casino was packed with 250 people from the city’s construction industry. Hispanic contractors, minority contractors and two organizations for women in the business were celebrating their annual luncheon.

Just a week and a half earlier, the National Council of La Raza had decided to withdraw its 2009 convention from Kansas City. The move was to protest Funkhouser’s appointment of Minuteman member Frances Semler to the parks board. And today, in front of so many Hispanic professionals, the mayor was this banquet’s first speaker.

He showed up just before dessert and sat at a table near the front. After a while, Gina Cline of the Builders’ Association introduced him.

As Funkhouser headed to the stage, the crowd applauded politely. No one hissed. No one threw cheesecake.

The mayor commended everybody for their work and said he is committed to making sure that companies owned by minorities and women get a fair share of City Hall’s business.

“I’ve been called stubborn,” he said. Enforcing the city’s rules for contracting with women and minorities is, he said, “one place where the city needs to be very stubborn.”

“I think Kansas City is a very progressive city,” he said — which sounded a little off, given how this past summer’s discussions about race often sounded like the 1950s as the Semler siege played out. But when Funkhouser said Kansas City, Missouri, had better rules for minority and women businesses than other cities, the crowd interrupted with applause.

Mostly, though, it seemed as if Funkhouser was mumbling and that he couldn’t look crowd members in the eyes. But maybe that’s because his microphone was too low and he kept looking down at his notes. Then he stopped reading.

“I’d be happy to answer questions if you have them,” he said. “If not, I’ll go back to work.”

The room was quiet. It wasn’t a particularly long silence — not long enough for someone to compose a question in his or her mind or to muster the courage to ask. It was an empty silence.

“Everybody’s perfectly happy?” Funkhouser prompted.

The line got a laugh. No one raised a hand. He waited another moment, looking a little surprised. Still nothing.

“That’s great. Thank you all.”

Then the mayor left the stage. He didn’t sit back down to finish his lunch but instead headed back through the crowd. There he was, lumbering out of the banquet hall. Apparently he wasn’t kidding when he said he’d go back to work.

It was a strange few minutes for anyone who might have expected Funkhouser to take a few lumps from a community still stewing over Semler.

Maybe they were just tired of talking about it. Or maybe they weren’t as angry as those of us in the media (particularly a certain daily newspaper) had made it seem for weeks on end.

Or maybe people were just on their best behavior. After all, it was an occasion for everyone in the room to celebrate their accomplishments — successes that often come with extra obstacles. And the vibe had been generally lively as people got up to walk around and shake hands with old friends while servers passed out hearty plates — each stacked with a beef filet and a quarter chicken — worthy of such a hardworking crowd.

In fact, some of the people in the room will be facing each other later in court.

Namely, the Hispanic contractors. Their organization, KCHACE (Kansas City Hispanic Association Contractors Enterprise), has a lawsuit pending against the city of Kansas City, Missouri, the city’s Economic Development Corporation, the TIF Commission, H&R Block, and J.E. Dunn Construction — one of this banquet’s sponsors. Filed in 2005, the suit alleges a litany of failures, negligence and breaches of contract with City Hall and minority contractors during construction of the H&R Block headquarters downtown.

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Now that H&R Block employees are counting cash in their cubicles at 13th Street and Main and Garth Brooks is leading sold-out sing-alongs at the Sprint Center, it’s easy to forget how minority contractors had to beg for a share of the downtown building boom. But the lawsuit still isn’t settled. Originally scheduled to go to court last month, the trial has been postponed until next year.

Armando Diaz of Diaz Construction, one of the plaintiffs, explains: “It all stemmed from numerous conferences with H&R Block and J.E. Dunn to have inclusiveness on that project.” H&R Block had already received its tax-increment-financing money from the city, and the building was already seven stories tall, Diaz says. But neither H&R Block nor J.E. Dunn had submitted paperwork indicating which minority- and women-owned contractors would be used. “We finally just said, you know what, we’re not getting anywhere. The city should have done their job with monitoring [participation of minorities and women], the TIF Commission should have done their job upholding the policies, and none of them did it. At that point, our organization said it was time we took some action.”

J.E. Dunn has said the suit is without merit. This week, Nicholas R. Iammartino, H&R Block’s director of corporate communications, told The Pitch, “H&R Block was committed throughout the building of H&R Block Center to utilizing the talents of women- and minority-owned businesses. H&R Block believes strongly that the allegations against us have no merit, and we will continue to defend ourselves vigorously.”

But Diaz and the other plaintiffs allege that, to meet the city’s minority-hiring requirements, H&R Block and J.E. Dunn paid fees to minority-owned businesses that acted as front companies, passing the work back to white subcontractors.

Diaz concedes that the minority contractors who cashed the checks are partly to blame for what has become a normal practice. “There are those who will say, ‘We don’t believe that’s right, and we’re not going to do it.’ There are others who want to survive and think that’s the only way they can do business…. For years, the city and the large general contractors have said they’re never going to do anything about this. We’re just as guilty if we don’t step forward. We decided enough is enough.”

Whether Hispanics get included in the city’s day-to-day business — or in a construction binge like that of the past few years — seems like the kind of issue that La Raza might have jumped in on. Maybe we could have used some boycott noise during the Kay Barnes administration, too.

Cris Medina, executive director of the Guadalupe Center, says the community’s efforts to be included at City Hall go back years.

“When you look at the demographic breakdown for employment with the city, it’s not very good for Latinos,” he says. Only 4 percent of City Hall’s workforce is Hispanic, and most of these employees work in the fire department rather than as administrators or managers. (The 2000 census puts Kansas City, Missouri’s Hispanic population at 6.9 percent; Medina says it’s 8 percent to 10 percent.) “There’s never been a department head of Latino descent,” he adds. “We’ve raised concerns about that over the years, talked many times with city officials. In the police department, after Deputy Police Chief Vince Ortega retired [in September 2006], I don’t think there’s anyone higher than sergeant.” He’s right; and the number of Hispanics in the KCPD hovers around 4 percent.

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Education for Latino kids is a problem in this town, too. “When we look at the graduation rates for Hispanics [in the Kansas City, Missouri, School District], it’s still very, very bad,” Medina says. “We need to get them through the system.”

Having met with members of the Hispanic community since he took office, Funkhouser’s office has come up with its own list of issues to work on: employment, gangs, crime in the Northeast and West Side neighborhoods, affordable housing, an office of immigrant affairs, economic development in Hispanic communities and for Hispanic small businesses.

Is it so wrong to wish that people all over town would go nuts about this sort of stuff instead of one elderly woman on a parks board?

Racial tension festers just below Kansas City’s polite veneer. The Semler summer was so painful because it nicked that surface. Foul rhetoric oozed out. And as the country heads into the ’08 election cycle, immigration is the perfect wedge issue: a distraction from the war, health care, the environment and the economy, with an easily identifiable scapegoat.

“It’s just becoming fashionable to now question and hate people from a particular country,” says William Torres, president of KCHACE. “The thing that I see happening in America nowadays is, we’re painting a picture of an ugly America.” And, he points out, “I’m talking about a generation of Americans who didn’t really gain their citizenship through the hard work of a generation past. I suppose the more a country is removed chronologically from its independence, its creation, its founding, the more we get people who don’t have the slightest clue how to fulfill the responsibilities of the freedom that they’ve been granted through their forefathers.”

In other words: For anyone who cared enough to feel relief when the Semler siege ended, it’s time to go to work on the issues that matter.