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Kansas City is still getting the shaft.
It’s a beef that’s been around for decades and never resolved. The Missouri side of the Kansas City metro pays for most — not all — of the region’s jewels, such as the Truman Sports Complex, the museums or that gem-still-in-the-rough, the new downtown entertainment district.
Meanwhile, Johnson County skates by, free and easy, not a worry in the world.
Kansas City Mayor Mark Funkhouser broached the topic the other day on KCUR-FM. With budget shortfalls pressing down on him with the force of a Shaquille O’Neal bear hug, who can blame him?
“If we want this metro area to thrive, we need to share resources a lot more than we do,” he said.
There. He said it. Now the idea is officially on the table again. And that’s exactly where it should be, even though the latest example of bistate cooperation faltered in 2004 and even though those Kansans who work in Kansas City pay the 1 percent earnings tax. That simply doesn’t go far enough. (Full disclosure here: Yes, I pay the tax.)
A new school of thought that is out there suggests that metro areas rise and fall together as a unit, as one big family — not as individual parts.
It’s a philosophy espoused by a smart guy at the Federal Reserve Bank named Jordan Rappaport. Funkhouser says he’s been reading and thinking about Rappaport’s paper, “The Shared Fortunes of Cities and Suburbs.” (You can find it easily online.)
Rappaport says this: “While it may make sense for cities and their suburbs to compete along some dimensions, there are also strong incentives for the two to cooperate to make their metro areas attractive and productive places to live and work.”
One area where cooperation helps is in the financing of the ongoing operations of shared amenities like zoos, museums, performing arts centers and stadiums that benefit residents throughout the area.
If the costs aren’t shared, Rappaport says, “individual municipalities that try to fund such public goods on their own will probably do so at less-than-optimal levels.”
In case you haven’t noticed, this city is full of venues that are operating at less-than-optimal levels. That has led to frustration, especially on the Missouri side.
“We are bearing an unusually large portion of the burden, and I think it’s unfair to the Missouri residents,” Jackson County Legislator Henry Rizzo said.
But then you run into people like Ed Eilert, a Johnson County commissioner and former Overland Park mayor who admits he can’t be “warm and touchy-feely” on the issue.
That’s another way of saying, “Here comes the cold water.”
Issue one, Eilert said: Will Kansas have sufficient say over how bistate money is spent? That’s been an issue in the past, particularly with the stadiums in 2004.
A second issue, he says, is Union Station. Its remodeling was a huge success. The operating leg of the project has been a bust. That has left a bad taste.
“There’s a continuing issue with people being able to produce what was promised in the manner in which it was portrayed,” Eilert said.
In other words, trust is lacking. Eilert also points out with some justification that the sales tax is tapped out as a future funding source, and each of the area’s counties has too many concerns at home to worry about needs elsewhere.
So if the goal is real bistate cooperation, talk is just talk. We have a very long way to go.
Next time Kansas and Missouri leaders come together, stick this one on the agenda.
• • •
How difficult is it for a party to win the White House three elections in a row?
Pretty.
Analyst Charlie Cook just pointed out that in four of the five most recent elections in which one party had held the White House for two consecutive terms, that party has failed to win a third one.
Also, Cook noted, Democrats these days enjoy a whopping 14-point edge in party identification.
Bottom line: The GOP is in a “deep hole,” Cook said.
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