Money For Nothing
Kansas City Manager Bob Collins postponed the inevitable bad headlines when he canceled the October 25 meeting of the Public Improvement Advisory Committee, a panel of citizens that tells City Hall which craggy streets, clogged sewers and crumbling sidewalks to fix first. Collins had been all set to unload some foul news on PIAC members: Thanks to City Hall’s budget disaster, he wanted to cut millions of dollars that they would have been able to spend next year on the city’s billion-dollar backlog of routine maintenance. But he put off the announcement until November 8.
“We weren’t ready,” Collins told us last week, suggesting some sort of problem with the paperwork.
But a few of Collins’ bosses on the City Council surmised that there was another reason for the delay.
“Tuesday,” said mayoral candidate Paul Danaher. “Want another guess? Tuesday.”
Danaher meant Election Day — when voters decided whether to let City Hall spend $35 million in bond money. This issue of the Pitch went to press before the returns were in — but we were so eager to hear what happened that we could barely contain ourselves.
Danaher’s theory was simple. If voters knew that the city was planning to cut more money from basic services, they might have felt deceived and may have rebelled against the controversial plan to plop a big wad of the bond dough downtown.
For once, Danaher wasn’t the lone conspiracy theorist. “That’s typical politics,” said his fellow council member Becky Nace.
Collins denied any ulterior motive for the delay. But City Hall insiders describe a behind-the-scenes battle between PIAC and Collins’ budget officers. Rather than cutting overtime and bonuses for City Hall employees, the folks in budget are trying to take money from inanimate objects such as roads and bridges, which tend not to bitch.
Collins has already told PIAC to cut $3 million from the rest of the year’s projects. But Nace has attacked that proposal. She tells us she wants an immediate moratorium on overtime pay (which could save $4 million in the fire department alone) and that she wants to eliminate the millions of dollars in bonuses Collins is proposing to give some of his cherished managers.
