Kansas City Area Development Council seeks a new leader

After 25 years as the Kansas City area’s chief marketing cheerleader, Bob Marcusse will pass the bullhorn to someone else.

The Kansas City Area Development Council said Marcusse will retire as its president and CEO. He is 66 years old and will be 67 by the official Jan. 31 retirement date.

Marcusse said he expects to serve in a consulting capacity for a few months after his retirement but then plans to concentrate on his bucket list, which he only partly joked was topped by cleaning out his basement.

The organization, which is focused on attracting new businesses to the 18-county, two-state region, said it expects to announce his successor by mid-November. A national search already is underway.

Board chairman John Murphy, a lawyer at Shook, Hardy & Bacon, praised Marcusse’s tenure, during which time the council has gained national industry honors as a regional economic development organization. The agency takes partial credit for attracting more than 40,000 jobs to the area, representing nearly $5 billion in capital investments.

Initiatives such as the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute, the KC Animal Health Corridor, KC SmartPort, KCnext, TeamKC and KC Rising are part of Marcusse’s legacy, the organization said.

Asked what he considered his career highlights, Marcusse said he was very proud of developing “an incredibly gifted team” at the council. Mostly though, he preferred to dwell on a rise of optimism in the Kansas City area, justified by the fact that “we have a dramatically better product now compared to 1991.”

He said the region today is “much more appealing to businesses and individuals as a place where they want to live and work.” He said even the occasional “border wars,” when businesses jump the state line in pursuit of better economic development deals, have failed to cloud his belief that the area works collectively to represent itself to clients around the country.

This story was originally published October 29, 2015 at 4:07 AM.