Missouri gubernatorial candidate Sarah Steelman is campaigning against the earnings tax. If only she’d sub it out for a land tax

A plaid work shirt straddles razor wire that guards points of entry to the old Greyhound station in downtown Kansas City. The garment rests atop the security fence with what appears to be purpose, suggesting an attempted breaking and entering.

The shirt’s former owner must have been desperate for warmth or a place to get high. The old bus station, which covers an entire block near 12th Street and Holmes, is one of downtown’s ugliest and most forbidding pieces of property.

City inspectors visited the site on March 27 and found broken windows. An emergency order was stapled to the vacant building’s east face. The premises, the city said, was “open to unauthorized or unlawful entry.” A second inspection, on April 18, revealed no apparent action by the owner. So a SWAT team cleared the vagrants, and the city hired a company to board up the glass exterior.

The building is more than just the subject of nuisance orders. It’s a testament to the pain inflicted on cities by indifferent property owners. The old Greyhound station provides no jobs, produces piddly tax revenue and tells pedestrians that they’ve taken a wrong turn. It is the definition of blight, caked in pigeon poop.

The city filed a condemnation suit last summer in an effort to take the property from its owner. A hearing is scheduled for June 11. Once the court settles upon a sale price, the city will bring in a wrecking ball. Then, it is hoped, a structure befitting the land’s prime location — City Hall is just two blocks west — will rise from the dirt.

The city’s redevelopment agencies have come under criticism for lacking thought and discipline. Leave no developer behind often seems to be the guiding principle. I complain as much as anyone about the way that tax-increment financing (TIF) is deployed in Kansas City. But relics such as the old Greyhound station make me thankful that the TIF Commission and other inscrutable quasi-government agencies have the power of eminent domain. Because if ever a guy deserved to feel the crushing weight of the Man, it’s the bus station’s owner, Anthony Barber.

Barber mines rock and sells cigarettes for a living. Barber and Sons, his limestone operation in southeastern Jackson County, has frequently run afoul of regulators. In 1989, the quarry paid a $40,000 fine to put to rest a lawsuit alleging eight violations of air-pollution laws. In 1997, Barber and Sons paid $300,835 to settle alleged violations of the Clean Air Act. Barber has made repeated attempts to expand the mine over the objections of his neighbors at Lake Lotawana. Barber countered their complaints about noise, dust and truck traffic with lavish campaign contributions to former County Executive Bill Waris, the political club Freedom Inc. and others. In 1994, then-Jackson County legislator Sylvia Rizzo sponsored an ordinance allowing him to incorporate his own town. (The ordinance went nowhere.)

Barber’s attention turned to city politics when the old Greyhound terminal became available. Greyhound left the site when it built a new depot on Troost in 1988. A sporting-goods retailer moved in and lasted until 1993.

MAST, the city-funded ambulance company, eyed the property as a possible site for a new headquarters. But there was competition. Barber said he wanted the space to accommodate his tobacco and candy wholesale business, which occupies a smaller building at 12th and Charlotte, catty-cornered to the old depot.

Barber made the purchase while the city dithered. A City Council vote in 1994 to approve the MAST deal resulted in a 6-6 tie, opening the door for Barber, who had given a total of $13,000 to three council members.

Downtown would have been better off if an arsonist had beaten Barber to the sale. Barber and Sons Tobacco used the old bus station for a time, I’m told. But it has been empty for years. The suspicion, according to a city official familiar with events, was that Barber bought the property in a failed effort to attract a regional jail. (I left phone messages at Barber and Sons but heard no response; an e-mail to the company’s attorney went unreturned.)

Here’s the insanity: As the depot fell into disrepair, so did its tax bill. In 2007, Barber and Sons paid a mere $18,432 in taxes. For comparison, the hardly palatial Interstate Building, at 13th Street and McGee, paid $39,540, even though it sits on a smaller parcel.

Measly tax bills create perverse incentives for speculators and slumlords. The crappier that buildings and surface parking lots become, the less they pay to the schools, the city and the library system.

If Kansas City leaders were feeling radical, they could try to move to a system where property taxes were based exclusively or mostly on land value. (The present system taxes buildings more heavily than the ground under them.) A 19th-century progressive named Henry George first proposed the idea, and it maintains a small but loyal following. Pittsburgh implemented a modified “land tax” in 1913, and it is widely used in Australia and New Zealand.

The idea surfaced a year ago in a Missouri think tank’s proposal to abolish the earnings tax that Kansas City and St. Louis use to balance their budgets. Founded by retired investment banker and Republican kingmaker Rex Sinquefield, the Show-Me Institute released a study on January 25, 2007, urging Kansas City to phase out the 1 percent tax on income and put in its place a tax on land. The author, Joseph Haslag, an economics professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, calls the land tax a “slam dunk” in terms of promoting growth.

Missouri Treasurer Sarah Steelman, who wants to be governor, and other state candidates supported by Sinquefield’s political action committees, are campaigning against the earnings tax. Alas, no one but the academic is talking about replacing it with a land tax.

The beauty of the land tax is that it essentially makes available to everyone the tax abatements that big-shot developers are always getting at City Hall. It would also save the city from having to go to court to pry valuable real estate from the bony fingers of people like Barber. When the land tax works as intended, speculators are forced to develop their holdings or sell them to somebody who will.

The city has offered Barber more than $2 million for his block of poorly maintained junk. He is reportedly seeking $17 million.

His asking price goes to show that some bums don’t creep into derelict buildings in the dead of night. They own them.