A split Kansas City Museum Advisory Board recommends plan to separate from Union Station

A strange Kansas City Museum Advisory Board meeting on Monday ended with the board casting a narrow vote in favor of a business plan that recommends the separation of the Kansas City Museum from Union Station Kansas City Inc.

A 5-4 vote puts the business plan into the Kansas City Council’s hands. (The KCMAB is an advisory board with little in the way of actual authority and only passes recommendations to the council for their edification.) Interestingly, the two Kansas City council members on the KCMAB, Jim Glover and Jan Marcason, voted against the recommendation. Jim Malouff and Kansas City Parks and Recreation Department director Mark McHenry also voted against the plan.

The meeting started with a half-hour training session regarding the Missouri Sunshine Law led by city attorney Joe Guarino. That’s because the last time the KCMAB met, they learned they had violated the open meetings law by taking a vote approving the same business plan without adequate public notice.

A majority of KCMAB commissioners think the Kansas City Museum should separate from Union Station under the belief that the institution would be better run under a nonprofit foundation. But Marcason and Glover think the business plan is unnecessary while the city and Union Station negotiate whether to change the contract between the two parties that has kept the Kansas City Museum under Union Station’s management.