Power & Flight

Dicking Around in WyCo

The Kansas City, Kansas, Board of Public Utilities wants its own briefing on Chief Administrative Officer Marc Conklin, who has been indicted on charges of stealing $400,000. After a grand jury investigation led Wyandotte County District Attorney Jerome Gorman to file the charges last month, BPU General Manager Don Gray said the board had hired an outside firm to sniff out the details of Conklin’s alleged malfeasance and discover whether any other surprises lurked.

Last month, Pitch staff writer Justin Kendall reported on the loose loot and ledger mayhem at the BPU (“Monopoly Boys,” October 16). Last week, he learned that Lenexa investigative outfit Clarence M. Kelley & Associates Inc. would handle the legwork for the BPU’s internal investigation. A firm named for a onetime FBI director and Kansas City, Missouri, police chief probably means business. And Joey Greco from Cheaters was busy.

BPU independent counsel Carl Gallagher hired Clarence M. Kelley & Associates on October 9, six days after Gorman unsealed the indictments against Conklin and Rodney Turner (a Wyandotte County lawyer who provided legal services for the utility). The private dicks are charging the power company — and, thus, the WyCo ratepayers who have no choice but to buy their electricity from the BPU — $85 an hour to shadow an effort already well under way in Wyandotte County’s District Attorney’s Office.

Kendall questions the independence of Clarence Kelley’s internal snooping. A former BPU manager tells The Pitch that Conklin, the alleged thief, oversaw the BPU’s human resources department, which was in charge of the Kelley contracts until Conklin’s promotion to chief administrative officer earlier this year. Gallagher didn’t know about the utility’s previous business relationship with Kelley & Associates.

The BPU’s relationship with Clarence Kelley goes back at least a decade. According to a payment history acquired by The Pitch, the utility company has made 35 payments to Kelley & Associates since 1998, totaling $96,603. Over the summer, the BPU cut Kelley two checks — $4,875 on June 25 and $6,353 on August 29 — for services unrelated to the indictments.

Clarence M. Kelley & Associates has limited its shamus bit for the BPU mainly to investigating workers’ compensation fraud, though the firm also followed up after bullets were fired at the home of former BPU General Manager Leon Daggett‘s home. No charges were filed in that case. Maybe the firm works better when criminal charges are already pending.

Airsickness

Air traffic controllers told Pitch reporter Nadia Pflaum last year about poor working conditions in the tower at Kansas City International Airport and at the Kansas City Air Route Traffic Control Center in Olathe (“Fear of Flying,” October 18, 2007). Pflaum reported last week that the FAA still hasn’t hired enough new trainees to replace retiring Reagan-era hires, leaving controllers overworked, towers understaffed and the union unhappy.

Kevin Peterson, the head representative for KCI in the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, works a six-day week. So do all of his fellow controllers. When he took a break to meet with Pflaum for a follow-up to her 2007 story, he had worked 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. and was due back in the tower at 10:30 p.m. for another eight hours.

Seven years ago, 42 fully certified controllers were available to work at KCI. Last October, that number was down to 25. Today, that number remains at 25. Meanwhile, the number of controllers at the Kansas City Center in Olathe has dropped from 291 in 2006 to 246 today. The NATCA representative at the Kansas City Center, Scott Hanley, says trainees routinely wash out, and vets continue to retire.

Peterson says deviations — what your average white-knuckle air traveler might call an air-traffic-control mistake — are on the rise. “We had six operational deviations in October,” Peterson says. “That’s more than we normally have in a year.”

In a deviation, a plane enters improper airspace but does not come closer than three miles to another plane. The FAA contends that the nationwide increase in deviations is the result of new hires receiving on-the-job training. Nine new controllers are now in training at KCI, working toward full certification. But Peterson says new eyes aren’t the only problem. Seasoned controllers face burnout after long hours, scarce breaks and six-day workweeks. And trainee guidelines are lower than they were two decades ago. An entrance exam score of 70 percent is good enough to get an aspiring controller into the nonstop party.

Maybe the prohibitive cost of air travel these days is a good thing after all.

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