The son of Jackson County Executive Frank White Jr. started work this week in a new management position at the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority that was never advertised to possible outside applicants.
ATA president and CEO Robbie Makinen on Friday discounted any suggestion of favoritism in the hire, saying Frank White III was the best fit for the $80,000-a-year job as senior manager of marketing.
“I think he’s actually perfect for the job,” Makinen said, citing the younger White’s more than two decades of work in a variety of marketing and sales positions, most recently as an independent insurance broker.
The ATA is not a county agency, but the county executive appoints one member of the 10-person ATA board of commissioners, to whom Makinen reports. Until recently, Makinen was the county’s director of governmental relations for then county executive Mike Sanders, whom Frank White Jr. replaced in January.
The younger White, 46, said he did not seek the ATA job.
“When Robbie first offered it to me, I declined because I didn’t want the hassle,” he said, citing a lifetime of having people assume he was receiving special treatment because his father was a member of the Kansas City Royals team that won the 1985 World Series.
But he said Makinen convinced him that he would be a good fit. White, who said he is in the process of shutting down his Lee’s Summit insurance brokerage, the Mitchell Graves Group, now looks forward to the challenge of overseeing a four-person staff charged with increasing ridership on an increasingly unified public transit system, as well as promoting the ATA’s role in economic development.
“If it all works well,” White said, “we’ll change the perception of public transportation.”
Makinen said it is not unusual for the ATA to add new management-level employees without advertising the positions.
“From what I’ve been told, I have the right to hire people who need to be in certain spots, and so that’s what I did,” Makinen said.
Mike Hendricks: 816-234-4738, @kcmikehendricks
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