KCMO Airport Committee tours KCI; not much is learned

Kansas City Councilman Dan Fowler won’t say if he’s leaning one way or another when it comes to the future of Kansas City International Airport.

“Cost will be the driver,” Fowler said after he joined fellow council members and others on a two-hour tour of KCI on Tuesday morning.

But costs associated with reshaping KCI remain elusive.

In the six weeks since airlines, consultants and Kansas City staffers agreed that pursuing a new terminal was the best way forward for KCI, no one has put a price tag on what a new terminal would cost. Nor has anyone said how much an alternative, such as renovating existing terminals, would cost.

But those paying attention to the KCI debate get a sense that Aviation Department and airline officials have some notion of what it will cost to bulldoze the mostly mothballed Terminal A and replace it with a brand-new facility. Part of that is because in July, they were certain that renovations would cost more than an entirely new terminal.

It’s likely they someone has an idea about the costs but would rather not say. Critics have homed in on the $1.2 billion figure attached to a single-terminal design that the Aviation Department clumsily advanced a couple of years ago. When city staffers were asked by Councilwoman Katheryn Shields when costs would be available, they indicated that “hopefully” some numbers might surface this year.

Without any dollar figures to discuss, council members were led on a tour of KCI’s worst spots. The committee was taken along underground corridors of Terminal A, which apparently are used only by visiting National Football League teams flying in and out of Kansas City. The point of the tour, through puddles of water and broken pieces of ceiling tile, seemed clear: Leave no doubt among new members of the Kansas City, Missouri, City Council that KCI should meet the wrecking ball.

Some council members said the tour turned up no big surprises.

“I think we were shown what they wanted us to see,” Northland Councilwoman Teresa Loar said afterward. 

One number that did get tossed around on Tuesday was a curious statistic: According to airport officials, fewer than 15 percent of KCI users are from Kansas City. Justin Meyer, a marketing director for the Aviation Department, based that figure on results of a zip code survey the city had done with 17,000 participants in 2013. The survey pulled zip code data from users of airport parking facilities.

When pressed on the methodology, Meyer acknowledged that the survey didn’t include passengers who had been dropped off at terminal gates by friends or family members. That would seem to leave out a large number of local airport users who skip long-term parking at the airport.

A closer examination of the survey isn’t possible. By midday Tuesday, a link to the survey on the KCI website was dead. Update: KCI has provided a working link.