How to connect all 319 square miles of Kansas City

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been speaking with Kansas City mayoral candidates about how they’d use the office to approach the biggest challenges facing Kansas City. (Pick up our March issue, out now, for a preview of the race.) 

Kansas City spans 319 square miles. (By comparison, St. Louis lies within 66 square miles.) Downtown, the East Side, the Northland, and South Kansas City all fall within the jurisdiction of the city government, and each area of the city has its own unique history and set of diverse issues that need to be addressed. 

Part of a mayor’s job — or a good mayor, at least — is connecting KC’s more than 240 neighborhoods and seeing to it that progress is shared between the different areas of the city. We recently asked each candidate how they’d do this should they be elected mayor.

SCOTT WAGNER

“How you do it is first understanding what their issues are. There’s not one solution, not one thing that you do is necessarily universally going to be effective. The number one problem on the East Side may not be the number one problems in the Northland, and so on, and so forth. So on the one hand, what you have to do is to be able to demonstrate that people who spend their tax dollars are seeing their tax dollars returned in things. Whether it is in infrastructure investment, police and fire department services … And so part of being able to deliver for the entire city is to be able to understand what is missing, what are people looking for, what is the problem that may be unique to their area, but nevertheless we want to address. I think that is something that I could bring to the table because I have been working in neighborhoods across the city for the last eight years.”  

QUINTON LUCAS

“One meeting at a time. It sounds cliché, but really, it is that simple. The weirdest thing about politics is that everybody cares about the same things. Everybody wants to be safe, be able to make money, have a place that’s dynamic and interesting to them. The example of that is whenever you talk to somebody who lives in the suburban communities, how many of them — if they have the means — love to talk about how they did a weekend in New York or Chicago, and they went to a show and they walked around from the hotel to something else, and ‘It’s so neat being there, and there are so many people around them.’ And maybe these are people who live in the heart of Lenexa, but at the same time, they have some view that cities aren’t good. So to me, the biggest thing is, how do we build commonality around a certain set of policies? The way you don’t do it is by pandering, right? I remember Mayor Mark Funkhouser, and I can criticize him, because nobody likes him anymore, but I remember when he was running for office he said, ‘We are really going to make sure we fix the East Side.” As if it was some like Siberia-type world of people who aren’t actually Kansas Citians, too. You know, the East Side, yeah we’ve got issues, so does South Kansas City, so does the Northland, so does so much of our community. The bigger thing is, how do we go about fixing [those issues]? And I have always been a policy guy, I think good policy is making a better city.”

SCOTT TAYLOR

“I’ve been an at-large member for eight years; my wife was an at-large member before me on the council for four years. So we’ve got great experience working with neighborhood leaders in all neighborhoods. And that really, I think, sets the candidates apart, because you’ve got some outsiders that haven’t had that experience, and it really takes a few years to understand issues and different neighborhoods because they are diverse issues … The other thing I would say is on the Economic Development Committee, we’ve had projects in every neighborhood and every part of the city on a regular basis. So that also gives you that really unique experience to understand in each neighborhood who the neighborhood leaders are, who to pick up the phone and call for input. So I will be looking at doing more of that — collaboration with neighborhoods — because I think we, quite frankly, as a city, have focused on just getting things restarted the last few years. We’ve got that. We can keep that going without spending as much time and start bringing neighborhoods more into the discussion.”

ALISSIA CANADY 

“There are a number of different ways to do it. I have observed people outside of Kansas City that don’t have this problem, but in KC, people from the Northland don’t come south of the river unless they’re going downtown, and people from the south don’t go to the Northland. I think we’ll see that start to change as we improve our transit options and add more entertainment options. My vision is making sure that all the different parts feel connected … The Northland’s concerns are very different from the East Side. My plan is to have community organizers for all the different parts of the city who report to the council on what their area needs. City Council members have a similar job, but they also have so many responsibilities. Community organizers could be more in touch with the people, and that is the kind of leader I want to be. My leadership style is very much in touch with the people.” 

HENRY KLEIN

“It’s kind of interesting to me if you’ve ever walked [the city’s different] neighborhoods — and I walked in many of those in prior campaigns — some of the needs are actually quite similar. Some of them are infrastructure needs. Some of them are not any more complicated than sidewalks … It used to be that some council districts got more attention than others because they were better at writing the kinds of projects that they needed than other areas were. That’s got to stop. There’s no reason that should be happening … We’re going to have an election in April, and maybe 10 percent of the registered voters are going to vote … It makes for a distorted city government where a very small subset of people are controlling the entire apparatus, and consequently, that’s what gets you toward the kinds of projects and things that were pursuing … By changing some of that then maybe we engage more people in what’s going on. Maybe then, they can include us in what are their needs, and if we understand those, all of a sudden things start moving in a positive direction in terms of that. Yes, there’s always going to be that schism between the Northland and the south. I don’t know if we’ll ever bridge that, no pun intended, but I think if we do some of these other things, other things will take care of themselves.”

JERMAINE REED

“The thing is that we are one city, and we have to view ourselves as one city. There are lines that divide us as a community, and I think that we have to really erase those barriers that continue to segregate us and really see ourselves as one community. As mayor, I want to be able to lead with the bold vision to eliminate those barriers and those lines that divide us and really help create and lead our city …This last year, Mayor James started a conversation about race, equity, and inclusion. That is something I want to be able to continue because I don’t think that there is a one-size-fits-all approach to this. Then when you look at the issues that are plaguing our entire country as it relates to race relations, it’s important that we really do have an honest conversation about it and really view each other in a way that really strengthens us and not divides us. One of the first things I would do as mayor is to help convene a conversation. The first words out of my mouth will be, ‘Let’s take a deep breath, folks,’ because I think it becomes so uncomfortable for folks at certain points when you started having the conversations about race and equity, but taking a deep breath and creating a space that allows everyone to feel comfortable in that space throughout this city is something that we have to do.”

JOLIE JUSTUS

“When I talk about the fact that we are seeing all of these great successes, a lot of times when people think about those successes, they only think about certain pockets throughout the city. And what we’re starting to see is this ripple effect, where you’re starting to see development that is going east and west and north and south. It’s been very organic in the sense that it’s being led by entrepreneurs, being led by small business people. And that’s the type of momentum that we need to continue to continue to keep up. So I want to spend a lot of time and partnership with those entrepreneurs, because every time we’ve had something catalytic happen in this city, nine times out of 10 it’s been because of that sort of growth….. I think the other thing is the mobility issue. In my pro bono work that I do as a pro bono lawyer, I have increasingly seen that we’re usually able to find someone a job — sometimes even a good paying job. And we’re also usually able to find someone affordable housing. But it’s very rare that they are closely located or that there is even transit that’s reliable. So we have to put a focus on the public transit piece. And I think that’s critical … I think another way we can start to break down some of the silos among neighborhoods is going back to this ambassador program — the Kansas City Neighborhood Alliance program that we’ve had, and really making it more robust. We’ve got this great program called Community Engagement University, and I love the idea of, after folks graduate from Community Engagement University, making them ambassadors from their portion of the city and not having their graduation be the last meeting, and pull folks together twice a year or four times a year, to talk about the issues that they’re facing in their own community. Because I found that when you bring people from different communities together, they’re going to find they have more similarities than they do things that divide them.”

PHIL GLYNN 

[Glynn gave his answer through an example of work he has done with his family business, Travois.] “How [Travois] ties back to being a candidate for mayor is this: One of the projects we did was with the Navajo Nation. They had a couple of very small towns that did not have reliable electricity service. We were called in to put together financing to extend the infrastructure to these communities, so that for public safety and economic development, there could be reliable electricity … Travois’ job was to go out and find financing from a private source to fill that gap. So when you think about all of the people who had to come together to make that deal happen — and it happened, it was successful, it is up and running today — we had to get elected officials, and utility company officials from the Navajo Nation, and get them on the same page as our banker, which is based in St. Louis, and the bank’s lawyer, which was in Chicago, and all of this had to be approved by a federal official in D.C. And here we are sitting in Kansas City orchestrating the whole thing, making it happen. The skills I have had to hone over my career is getting people who come from very different backgrounds to work together. So when I think about how different some of the people involved in that project were, and then I think about how we talk about Kansas City, we talk about east and west of Troost, and north and south of the river being so different, we are not that different. Other than being a business owner and knowing how to manage those resources, I think the life experience that I have that will help me really be successful as mayor is the experience of getting people who think of themselves as different, or who are told that they are so different, that they have nothing in common — and helping them identify that in some ways that is really not true. That people have a lot more in common than we sometimes want to admit, and that even people who come from very different backgrounds basically want the same things.” 

STEVE MILLER

“The basis of my campaign is connecting all four corners of our city. And this is not something that is foreign to me because leadership in MoDOT — just like in a city — we had a constrained budget, lots of needs, and we had all different parts of the state competing for those resources. We brought in a process of discipline and public discussion, planning, and investment of our transportation resources. Something that was transparent, that gave people an opportunity that identified needs and figured out how to allocate those resources. So that’s certainly something I’m ready to be very concerned about doing, is working with all of the city council members. You have two city council members that represent each of our six districts — those individuals live in and advocate for those districts. The mayor is the one that has to bring everybody together and get them on the same page. I had to do that when I was leading the Missouri Highway Transportation Commission, and that means developing good, working relationships with every member of the council, encouraging them to identify those items that are the highest priority for those city districts, and working together to make certain we accommodate those as best we can. That means having a really close, working relationship with the city manager to work to figure out how that all fits together … We have these divisions in our city, whether it’s the geographical one — the Missouri River — half of our landmass is north of the river, with different perspectives. You have to figure out how to bring those together. And east and west of Troost, although the legal barriers have been broken down, we still have cultural and business barriers to this day that make it if not a segregated city, then certainly a separated city. The mayor has got to learn how to connect across those.”