After four years with a friendly City Council, Mayor Sly James must learn to play well with others
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The mayor approaches with a firm handshake and a smile.
“I’d like to apologize for being defensive the other day,” Sly James tells a reporter on the 10th floor of City Hall.
He’s talking about an interview with this newspaper that took place in his office October 23. I had come to ask James about the first few months of his second term. He cruised to re-election, but now he was surrounded by a new Kansas City, Missouri, City Council — a quizzical group that is, by all accounts, a freethinking bunch. At times during our 45-minute interview, the mayor took exception to my questions.
The Pitch: One of the biggest issues facing the council is this convention hotel. When the old council voted on the convention hotel’s public financing during its last session, was that timing to keep the new council from taking on that issue?
James: I love the way you phrase a question that already sounds like a setup for a negative answer. The answer is no — it was done because the old City Council had worked their butts off for three or four years on it and they wanted a chance to finish the job. It had nothing to do with the new City Council.
But some members of the current City Council say they feel double-crossed about the last-minute, lame-duck-session passage of the $311 million convention-hotel project, half of which will be financed through public sources, just prior to the new council’s swearing-in.
Kansas Citians often see an amiable, charismatic James — an ebullient and quick-witted booster who exudes his fondness for the city and never misses a chance to extol its virtues at public events or through social media. (James’ Twitter musings are often hashtagged with the word frosty, an expression of enthusiasm indicating that the thing or person at hand is cool.) James was often credited in his first term as mayor with towing Kansas City out of four years of economic and political doldrums, giving rise to a new wave of economic development and municipal projects as well as leading a charge against this city’s innate inferiority complex. He has sought instead to instill a sense of confidence and braggadocio.
Less seen publicly is the bombastic, sometimes argumentative mayor, a James whose cajoling can curdle into an impulse to control critics or opponents, both real and perceived.
“Compared to past mayors, in my experience — and this goes all the way back to Charlie Wheeler — he is not as comfortable with dealing with criticism as other mayors have been,” Dan Cofran says of James. Cofran is a former councilman who briefly considered running against James last year. “When Sly runs into criticism, he’s more likely to be confrontational than cooperative in finding a way to get from point A to point B. That’s just a different leadership style.”
Even less seen is a mayor who says he’s sorry for raising bruises.
But already in the new term, he has had to extend apologies to a few new council members and others who have opposed his hard-charging style.
“I think that we are not treated in every instance, or many instances, as if we are intelligent adults who were elected to the council just like everyone else, and I think particularly the mayor … you do get a great deal of paternalistic, condescending attitude,” says Katheryn Shields, a 4th District at-large councilwoman who earlier this year upended Jim Glover. That longtime councilman was a reliable vote for James.
The Pitch has heard from people working in and around City Hall that James’ office at times fails to communicate well with new council members and shows resistance to answering questions — or submitting substantive information on pressing municipal issues to the council. The mayor’s critics also say his committee structure keeps council members so busy that they struggle to tend to their regular tasks.
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James’ first-term agenda was largely, if not entirely, unimpeded by the previous City Council. But it’s clear that his second term faces headwinds from a group that has shown itself more freethinking — and more willing to act on its own volition.
“One of the reasons for things being relatively smooth in Sly James’ first term was reaction and relief from the extreme tension between the council and Mark Funkhouser,” says Cofran, who last year was also the chairman of the Citizens Association. “Everyone was ready for a kumbaya time. Speaking for myself and a number of people, we wanted to see more independent thinkers on the City Council this time around. That’s why a lot of people pushed for Katheryn Shields and Teresa Loar.”
“I do kind of sense that the council seems to work or think independently of the mayor,” adds 2nd District Councilman Dan Fowler. “That doesn’t mean we’re against the mayor. We’re just thinking independently.”
When James first campaigned for mayor — the first time he had sought political office — he cast himself as a mediator. The practicing lawyer was a man who would bring different experts, interested parties and divergent viewpoints into a room to forge a healthy consensus.
In practice, James has left little to chance.
In a city that’s often described as having a weak-mayor form of government, James has made his office as strong as it can be. His office’s budget in the current fiscal year has grown to just more than $2 million, which supports 18 full-time staffers. That’s twice the budget of his predecessor.
Editor’s note: The public record of the Kansas City Adopted Budget, as referenced in this story as first published on November 11, lists a budget of $2 million, supporting a full-time staff of 18. According to a clarification sent to The Pitch by the mayor’s office on November 18, the operating budget for the current fiscal year is $1.8 million, which supports 15 full-time staff members.
In selecting people to serve on important boards and commissions, he has required appointees to sign undated resignation letters. James has portrayed the practice as a means to keep members from going rogue, but others have seen it as a way to exert control.
Beyond appointments and dollars and cents, James has enjoyed surprising success, for a political newbie, in ushering in his agenda. His first four years in office, he was in the majority of every ordinance passed except for two. His was the lone vote against a 2013 resolution to support the Kansas City Health Commission’s recommendations for reducing gun violence. His only other loss came in 2014, when a majority of the council voted against earmarking bond proceeds for streetcar-expansion studies right after voters had rejected a measure to lengthen the downtown streetcar to the Plaza and the East Side.
By then, though, James had already scored arguably his biggest victory: establishing a downtown streetcar line — one funded by a transportation-development district, which involved an election within a narrowly proscribed district that was selected to ensure passage of the $150 million project.
Funkhouser used to brag that the City Council voted with him 80 percent of the time. But that’s not much for a mayor to hang his hat on, given that the vast preponderance of council votes involve routine matters: dull stuff such as plats, easements and small contracts.
When it came to the big stuff, Funkhouser’s City Council often sought to outflank the unpopular mayor. That compulsion led to a few bad decisions, such as a contract extension for former City Manager Wayne Cauthen when Funkhouser sought to fire him, and which led to a bigger payout when a majority of the council finally decided to can him.
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Scott Wagner, whom James appointed mayor pro tem two months ago, served his first term after those fractious Funkhouser years. He discounts the notion that the previous City Council was mindlessly obedient to James; he says most of the returning council members who served under Funkhouser were simply ready to get things done after four years of stagnation.
“In the last term, we were coming off of four years of Mayor Funkhouser,” Wagner says. “It was safe to say there was a pretty unworkable relationship in those four years. Half the council of the last term had just come off that experience. You have that compared to what this council has: nine new people who did not have that experience previously.”
Unlike Funkhouser, James has seen very little opposition against his big initiatives. Occasional dissent popped up among the last council, most often from political veterans Ed Ford and John Sharp, and sometimes from Scott Taylor and Scott Wagner.
“I have been, in my opinion, a pretty independent voice on the council,” Taylor tells The Pitch.
Still, the council by and large was predominantly in lockstep with James.
Some of those initiatives didn’t get wrapped up during James’ first term — notably, a future plan for Kansas City International Airport and an expansion of the streetcar system. The new council will take on these matters. And it may yet raise questions about the convention-hotel project.
According to various sources, some members of the new City Council contemplated an attempt to reverse the previous council’s approval of public financing for the convention hotel, a move that authorized City Manager Troy Schulte to work out a contract with the hotel-development team. This would have required action immediately upon the council’s swearing-in, and the idea never gained enough traction, but after the project first officially came up for the new council, during an October 1 business session, there were signs of a political hangover.
Following a long presentation that day from the Port Authority of Kansas City, the council went into a closed meeting. In such sessions, council members are allowed to discuss certain matters out of public view. This one had been called to get advice from City Attorney Bill Geary about the council’s legal options for dealing with a petition initiative against the convention hotel.
September 22, a watchdog committee called Citizens for Responsible Government had submitted 2,007 signatures on a petition calling for voters to decide whether to use public resources to finance the convention-hotel project. (Owing to low voter turnout in the most recent election, just 1,708 signatures are required for such a ballot-seeking initiative.)
Prior to the petition’s arrival that day at City Hall, city officials had signed the contracts with the hotel-development team. The fact that they were signed before the petition’s delivery is a chief argument for why city leaders now say CFRG’s petition is invalid. Geary has said petition initiatives cannot force a city to break a valid contract.
Council members tell The Pitch that they received an e-mail from Schulte the morning of September 22 with the hotel contracts attached, indicating that they would be signed later that day.
James says those contracts weren’t signed to throw off the petition process.
“The petition could have been filed at any time,” James says. “This was not a secret. There were eight hearings on this before. If they didn’t like it, they could have filed it anytime. Have you asked them whether or not they filed their petition initiative to wreak as much havoc, for example, on the earnings-tax election, so they could get this on the April 6 vote?”
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Kansas City residents will head to the polls April 6 to determine whether to renew the 1 percent tax on earnings of residents and those who work in Kansas City, as well as on the profits of businesses, for another five years. City leaders are concerned about the vote because the earnings tax represents more than $200 million in annual revenue. Without it, they say, the city’s budget would descend into chaos. And a springtime ballot complicated by other issues could imperil the renewal of the earnings tax.
Dan Coffey, the south Plaza resident who is the public face of CFRG, says the group’s hotel petition has nothing to do with the earnings tax.
“I think they’re the ones concerned about that,” Coffey tells The Pitch. “We’re not the least bit concerned with that.”
Teresa Loar, a Northland councilwoman who served on the City Council in the late 1990s and early 2000s, raised concerns in the closed session about whether the city should take the petitioners more seriously.
“Two thousand signatures, no matter where they got them, that’s a lot of people out there,” Loar tells The Pitch. “There’s some concern about this.”
During the closed session, Loar and James raised their voices at each other. James declined to discuss what he or others said during the closed meeting, but according to people who were present, James said the City Council sometimes has to clean up messes from previous councils. To illustrate his point, he mentioned the millions of dollars that taxpayers spend each year to satisfy bondholders on the underperforming Power & Light District.
Then he offered another example: a disastrous development plan that was approved during Loar’s last term on the council. That deal, Renaissance North (sometimes called Prospect North), was an ill-fated tax-increment financing, passed in 1999, that was supposed to lead to mixed-use development and new housing subdivisions in Clay County. The original developer on the project died, and nothing was built in the years that followed. A later developer eventually sued the city over the matter and settled for $6 million.
“It was a cheap shot,” Shields recalls. Loar, Shields says, “got upset and left.” (James says he recalls the incident differently, but he declined to elaborate.)
This was one of the first visible signs that James’ free ride with the City Council may be coming to an end.
Loar and James met the following week in his City Hall office. “There’s a bottle of scotch over there she brought me,” the mayor says. “We sat here and talked. We had a good time. Teresa and I get along fine.”
“Every mayor has their own quirks,” Loar says. She has served with three Kansas City mayors. “I was pretty spoiled working under [Emanuel] Cleaver, who was and is a mentor for me. He was always inclusive, shared credit with everybody. If you wanted information, he shared it with everybody. Kay [Barnes] was very different but, again, a mentor of mine. Kay and I got into it a few times because we are both hardheaded, but we worked it out.”
Loar adds, “I was hoping it would be the same with this mayor, but I think he was given a lot of negative information about me.”
Jolie Justus is serving her first term as a Kansas City councilwoman, after eight years as a Missouri senator. A Democrat, 0x000AJustus received credit for working well with Missouri Republicans in a Legislature that, like Congress, can be an inflexible bunch.
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In Jefferson City, legislation moves slowly. Justus says bills that weren’t even partisan or particularly controversial could take three years to ultimately reach passage. And for bills that needed to move quickly, by Jefferson City standards, she says, there was an unwritten rule in the Missouri Senate that lawmakers couldn’t vote on a measure during the same week it was first heard on the floor.
“That way, you could have a week to do the due diligence you need,” Justus says. “As crazy as people think Jefferson City is, we were deliberative.”
City Hall moves at a quicker pace, and Justus isn’t the only one getting used to the speed.
During the first full City Council meeting of the new term, the council took up a renewal plan for the East Crossroads that would establish a framework for developing the area between the West Crossroads and U.S. Highway 71. The plan encourages mixed-use development through a patchwork of incentives. The vote narrowly passed 7-6.
Among the no votes was Quinton Lucas, a first-term 3rd District at-large councilman. Lucas is one of eight lawyers on this City Council, and he draws on the profession’s calculated and Socratic thinking to analyze his legislative decisions. He says he was against the plan because it didn’t go far enough into the East Side. He adds that he didn’t receive enough information ahead of the vote.
“It would be nice to know sooner information that’s going to find its way into a fact sheet or ordinance,” Lucas says. “My hunch or belief is that others, including city staff, knew more than I did.”
Justus also voted no, and she tells me that the council didn’t receive training on the rules of City Hall’s legislative process until the week after that vote. She adds that prior to being sworn in, council members had been through hours of orientation by city staff on more mundane topics, such as social media.
“A no vote is always the safer vote when you don’t understand the issue,” Justus says.
She goes on: “I think there’s this narrative that we’re fractured,” Justus says. “I’d like to start the narrative that because we ask questions and not everything passes 13-0, we’re not fractured.”
The work of elected officials in Kansas City is broken up into committees. The mayor appoints council members to various committees, where ordinances and resolutions are first heard. The power of appointment is one of the few advantages that the city charter gives the mayor.
During the Cleaver years, there were only three committees: Finance; Planning and Zoning; and Audit and Operations. During James’ first term, there were five committees. Now there are 10. He says he created a separate committee for housing, which used to be part of a larger committee for Neighborhoods and Public Safety, because the Housing Authority of Greater Kansas City emerged from federal receivership in 2013. And the Airport Committee was created in anticipation of major discussions about KCI’s future.
Of the now 10 committees, three receive the bulk of legislative activity: Planning, Zoning & Economic Development; Finance and Governance; and Transportation and Infrastructure. Eight of the committees are supposed to meet regularly.
“There is frustration because we’re just overwhelmed trying to get to committees,” Loar says.
“We’re constantly going to something,” Shields says.
But Shields, who served on the City Council in the 1980s and ’90s, followed by 12 years as Jackson County executive, initially sat on none of the busiest committees. In fact, there’s no one from the 4th District — which covers portions of Brookside and midtown along with most of downtown and Briarcliff — on the Planning, Zoning & Economic Development Committee. That committee handles ordinances related to real estate development, and the 4th District is historically the most active district for such projects.
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Shields is retired professionally, so she started attending other committee meetings in her spare time, a move that eventually got her placed on Planning, Zoning & Economic Development. James says he let her on simply because she asked.
James was the lead speaker at a September 25 announcement at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.
The mayor and others were unveiling plans for the Urban Youth Academy at Parade Park, which borders the 18th & Vine District. The $14 million project was hailed at the announcement as a development boost for the long-struggling historic area and entertainment district. Partnering with Major League Baseball and the Kansas City Royals, city leaders expect that the Urban Youth Academy will provide inner-city children with an opportunity to discover baseball firsthand. Secondarily, it might help the public rediscover the financially troubled 18th & Vine District.
Many City Council members see the development as a good thing. They just wish they had known more about it ahead of time; they had received notice of the September 25 press conference, but several were not briefed ahead of time about the details of what was being announced.
“Some were. Some weren’t,” James told me later. He declined to elaborate further.
First-term Councilwoman Alissia Canady apparently was one who didn’t.
“That’s a great project, but I didn’t know about it until the day before,” Canady says. “I get calls from people, and their perception is the white people are taking over Parade Park and putting them out of their homes.”
Canady’s observation is in keeping with a frequent complaint among members of the new City Council: Key information isn’t always readily available. In this case, they can credibly argue that they deserved to know because local public funds make up part of the project’s financing.
“I represent the 5th District,” Canady says. “I enjoy working with the mayor and want to work with him, but he’s got to give me enough information. If he can’t provide it, he can’t count on my vote.”
For his part, James acknowledges that he’s honing his leadership style to better work with the new council.
“I think I need to try and figure out the individual issues with each councilperson, which I started when I met with each councilperson before they took office. And I asked them, ‘What do you want to do? What’s important to you?'” James says. “And then I try to match them up with the things they wanted. With one exception, and I won’t tell you who, everybody said, ‘I like this. This is what I want to do. Thank you very much.'”
