The hits, the misses and the swagger: summing up the Sly James era in Kansas City
Stroll through downtown or the Crossroads Arts District, and you’d be hard pressed not to notice the footprints of Mayor Sly James that will remain long after his second term ends this week.
James — whose record includes a $325 million convention hotel and downtown streetcar along with a $1.5 billion single terminal at Kansas City International Airport in the Northland — leaves office after eight years of prolific investment in Kansas City.
But James, who will be succeeded on Thursday by Councilman Quinton Lucas, doesn’t claim the massive projects among his greatest accomplishments. Asked about those, he spoke instead of his work in an area where the law allows Kansas City mayors little more than a bully pulpit: education. Schools are controlled by the 15 districts that lie partially or fully within city limits.
James nevertheless launched an ambitious and successful effort to get more Kansas City kids reading. He also worked with Major League Baseball to build an indoor softball and baseball facility for kids in the urban core. Those, he said were his biggest wins.
“If we don’t have any other obligation as adults, we have the obligation to take care of the people we bring into the world and to make sure that they have the tools at their disposal that are going to prepare them to deal with an increasingly challenging world,” James said during an interview in his City Hall office earlier this month.
Some admirers agree that those intense efforts are at the heart of his legacy. That word that draws a sour response from the ex-Marine MP and trial attorney, although he has just published a book — “A Passion for Purpose” — highlighting his accomplishments and personal history.
“I really don’t give a shit. You don’t do this for legacy. You do it because it needs to be done, and you do it because you want to do it,” he said.
The brick-and-mortar and the push for children’s literacy will stand long after James leaves office. Almost as important, his contemporaries said, was the sense of possibility, even swagger, he brought to the city. He fought hard for his agenda, at times frustrating City Council members who felt he took a “my way or the highway” approach to governing.
“It occurs to me that the history books will say his legacy was the streetcar and the airport, but his contemporaries will know that he brought Kansas City back from life support,” said outgoing Councilwoman Jolie Justus, 4th District, whose unsuccessful mayoral candidacy James endorsed.
When James took office he inherited a city that his political adviser, Mark Nevins, said seemed a little bit lost. The financial crisis, the Great Recession and the turbulent four-year tenure of Mayor Mark Funkhouser had all combined to set city government adrift.
Nevins said James was successful in “giving Kansas City its groove back.”
“I think Mayor James restored a sense of urgency, a sense of pride and a sense of direction,” Nevins said, “and we would see it regularly when we would do polls for ballot measures that frequently the thing that was most compelling to people was this sense of momentum.”
Big Hits, a Couple of Big Misses
To James and his chief of staff, Joni Wickham, improving children’s literacy through Turn the Page KC, which James founded shortly after taking office in 2011, was among the administration’s greatest accomplishments.
The group reported in 2017 that 3rd grade reading proficiency had reached 54 percent across the city. In 2011, it was just 33 percent. Despite the success, James said the effort is “far, far from complete.”
But for the mayor and his principal aide, evidence that they made a difference in such a crucial area of children’s lives tops their list of victories.
“Our kids’ education impacts so many things like crime, like poverty, like institutionalized racism, and if we are able to get them off to a good start early then it has positive and compounding ramifications down the road,” Wickham said.
Turn the Page KC showed progress in its first few years, but when the state changed the reading test between 2017 and 2018, scores statewide dropped. Students in the program didn’t necessarily lose ground, but the new test makes scores difficult to compare to previous results.
James’ focus on the city’s kids meant it stung when voters in April resoundingly defeated his proposed 3/8-cent sales tax to expand pre-K for four-year-olds across Kansas City.
He rolled it out last summer, hoping to place the question on the November 2018 ballot. But he agreed to hold off until April to continue negotiations with the school superintendents, who weren’t in support. The two sides never came together.
School leaders took issue with the use of new taxpayer dollars for pre-K programs at private and parochial schools, while James’ campaign argued they constituted a substantial portion of early childhood education providers. School officials also objected to the regressive nature of a sales tax and potential loss of control over their programs.
James saw the plan as more than school reform. Early childhood education is the ultimate anti-poverty program, he argued, wielding a body of research showing that children who come to kindergarten ready to learn are more likely to be successful adults who stay out of the criminal justice system.
“You can’t change poverty and criminality by simply arresting people and giving them food stamps,” James said. “You change it by making sure that they don’t have to wind up in poverty and criminality in the first place by giving them the tools to avoid it, and we don’t seem to have that capacity.”
James and Nevins said they probably should have kept pre-K on the November 2018 ballot instead of attempting to reach agreement with the superintendents.
“So that was a strategic mistake...to give into that pressure,” James said. “And the other thing is that I assumed that the issue of taking care of the kids would be superior to the issue of (superintendents) guarding turfs and protecting budgets. It was not.”
He added that while there were things that could have been done differently, he wouldn’t “let other people off the hook.”
“His heart was in the right place,” said Kansas City Public Schools Superintendent Mark Bedell. “The issue was the mechanism toward getting it done.”
After the pre-K vote, Bedell said the district was interested in a property tax levy to expand pre-K. Previous attempts have not been successful.
James’ other defeat at the ballot box was an expansion of streetcar service along Independence Avenue to Benton Boulevard and Linwood Boulevard to Prospect Avenue. It also would have extended the existing north-south route from Union Station to the University of Missouri-Kansas City, a project the city is still pursuing.
The east-west extension, James said, would have brought more resources to the predominantly black East Side.
“If you go east-west, you’re going to get a different (demographic) slice, and you get into the minority communities, and you spread the development opportunities and the transportation opportunities that way,” James said.
Though the turn east was thwarted, at least for the time being, Congressman and former Mayor Emanuel Cleaver II, called the streetcar’s impact on downtown a 100 percent positive.
“It will look infinitely better if in the years to come if it can be connected to something,” Cleaver said. “If it’s just a tourist deal it’s going to wear thin on the taxpayers. I run into people all of the time who say, ‘Well, I’ve never been on it.’ … That notwithstanding, it was a great, I think, move and he will be regarded as a good mayor for Kansas City.”
Despite the streetcar loss, James said he believes the East Side is better off than it was when he came into office in 2011, citing infrastructure and housing improvements, Turn the Page KC and efforts to eliminate food deserts.
“When I got into office, the 39th Street Aldi was still in limbo,” James said. “We called people into the office, sat them down, argued with them for a while, butted their heads together and said, ‘Get it done,’ and it got done. We had to purchase the Linwood Shopping Center to get a supermarket over there. It got done.”
Sustaining Sun Fresh, the Linwood supermarket, has taken additional investment from the city. Earlier this month, the City Council had to appropriate an extra $375,000 to support the store.
Pushing for progress
James’ biggest legislative victories were, at times, hard fought. The City Council’s Airport Committee, led by Justus, moved in fits and starts toward an agreement with KCI developer, Edgemoor Infrastructure and Real Estate.
In the end, the proposal passed the council 11-1, but not without raucous debates and frustration. Some council members were frustrated by the initial proposal, supported by James, that the city award the job to Burns & McDonnell without a competitive bidding process.
Lucas said while he respected James and the mayor’s office, the two didn’t always see eye to eye and James, at times, took a “my way or the highway” approach to leadership.
“Sometimes you need to just say this is what we’re doing and we’re going to get it done,” Lucas said, “but I also think that it makes it a heck of a lot easier if you’re actually collaborating with the people who will be voting with you and saying, ‘Hey, let’s bring you on board from the start.’
Nevins said James doesn’t “suffer politics well.”
“If people were standing in the way of progress in his view for reasons that were not based in substance but rather in politics, he just had no patience for that, and to the extent that his second-term council was more political than his first-term council, I think that was something that was frustrating to him,” Nevins said.
James’ first mayor pro tem, Cindy Circo, said she told him it was obvious when he was happy or annoyed with someone, but she didn’t believe him to be a steamroller. She said if a council person was going to argue with him, however, they had better be prepared.
“If you think he’s a bully, then you should not be in politics,” she said.
Still on the to-do list
James leaves Lucas with a list of emerging and longstanding issues.
Residents have called for fewer downtown development incentives, economic growth on the East Side and more affordable housing. The city’s homicide rate remains among the nation’s highest, though James noted progress in bringing rates of other crimes down.
But he said “the fact that we still have a legislature that doesn’t do a damn thing to help us keep guns off the street has not helped us in one single solitary bit.”
“Gun violence is up,” James said, “and it’s going to continue to go up, and it’s going to continue to go up because more and more people who should not have guns get guns because there is no way to stop them from having guns.”
James said curbing violence, an exceedingly complex issue, will remain a struggle unless the state or federal government does more to restrict access to guns.
While the homicide rate remained a problem during James’ eight years, it wasn’t for his lack of trying, said former Councilman Alvin Brooks, who founded the Ad Hoc Group Against Crime in the 1970s and served with James on the The Board of Police Commissioners, which oversees the police department.
Brooks said James did “as much as he could” to be effective on reducing violence, but noted he could do little more than talk when it came to the proliferation of guns.
“I think Sly will leave a legacy as one of Kansas City’s great mayors,” Brooks said.
Ad Hoc’s current president, Damon Daniel, said James didn’t turn a blind eye to crime, but he didn’t feel there had been enough progress east of Troost on issues of economic development and livability.
“None of those things have changed,” Daniel said.
Lucas, who will have to take on crime when he assumes the office next week said it was among the issues where James’ administration fell short. He said repeatedly during the campaign that cities like Baltimore and St. Louis have significant downtown infrastructure projects and “cool stuff,” but still deal with violence.
“I am of the thought that we can only be a great city if we actually address that issue long term,” Lucas said.
Beyond the mayor’s office
When James leaves office, he and Wickham are expected to go into business together.
Just what the nature of their venture will be, they’re not ready to announce. Wickham notes they still have a few days left of work in City Hall.
Whatever the two’s venture, James can continue to invoke a favorite Marine Corps motto he brought to his work at City Hall: “improvise, adapt and overcome.”
Though the job appeared to wear on him toward the end — he publicly counted down his remaining days in office — he said it was the “professional honor of (his) life.”
As for what he’ll remember, he said there’s too many moments to name from meeting former President Barack Obama and visiting the White House to meeting mayors from London.
“God knows, don’t ever go drinking with British people,” James said. They’ll “drink you under the table in a heartbeat and then laugh at you.”
He added his time in office had been a “long assembly line of good stuff.”
“I can’t pick out one thing and say that it was better than the other,” James said. “They were better in the moment, and I prefer to look at it like that as opposed to isolating one, I like to look at the whole. The whole has been pretty damn good.”
This story was originally published July 29, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
