Worried about KCI project’s inclusion of minorities and women, KC Council demands info
At the urging of some who said they have received numerous complaints from constituents and construction firms, City Council members have decided unanimously to demand information on the role women and minorities are playing at Kansas City International Airport.
Crews have been working on the new $1.5 billion single terminal at KCI for more than a year. When the city sought voter approval for the project in 2017, officials promised the monstrous project would be a boon to the local construction industry. The terminal’s developer, Edgemoor Infrastructure & Real Estate, pledged that a combined 35% of the construction work would go to subcontractors owned by minorities and women.
Edgemoor has assured council members that’s happening, but some elected officials have questioned their reports. A city presentation seen by some City Council members offers conflicting information. The council voted Thursday in favor of a resolution to require the city manager to hand over information on every bid that construction firms have submitted for the project.
Councilwoman Teresa Loar, 2nd District at-large, who chairs the council’s Transportation, Infrastructure & Operations Committee and introduced the resolution, said that the project needed more oversight and that local businesses would “desperately need this work.”
“They’re already struggling,” Loar said. “We’ve got $1.5 billion to spend at that airport, and it should be shared with the citizens of this city.”
Loar said she feared getting to the end of the project and finding that only a sliver of the work had gone to firms owned by minorities and women.
“And whose fault is that? That would be this council,” Loar said, “not the owner’s rep, not the aviation department and not Edgemoor. That fault lies on us because we have been elected and we are paid by the taxpayers of this city to do our job and that’s to oversee these projects.”
Geoff Stricker, managing director of Edgemoor, said the company was happy to share the information with council members, which he estimated would take about a week. He said Edgemoor remained “steadfast” in ensuring firms owned by minorities and women work on the project.
“We’ve made a commitment to Kansas City from the time we were selected through today through when we complete this project and beyond to have a transformational impact on the community and the project and build the workforce of the future,” Stricker said.
In a presentation to the City Council last month, Edgemoor said minority-owned firms made up approximately 16.4% of the construction work already paid for, and women-owned firms represented 12.9%. A report provided by the city’s Human Relations Department, which tracks progress on such goals, says roughly the same.
But Edgemoor and city figures vary vastly on the number of contracts for upcoming work that have been awarded to those firms. Edgemoor said last month that 21.9% of the work it has contracted has gone to minority business enterprises, or MBEs. And the company said WBEs had received 12.1% of the work.
But Human Relations Director Phillip Yelder told The Star on Friday his department’s figures show MBEs have received just 5.5% of the work — 3.3% for WBEs.
“We based our numbers on contracts executed — I don’t know where they got those percentages from,” Yelder said.
Yelder said he had made Edgemoor and the city’s Aviation Department aware of his figures, but that not all council members had seen them. Edgemoor stood by its numbers.
Stricker said there is a 60-90 day lag between when it awards contracts to the lead construction company on a given portion of the work and when subcontracting firms receive “letters of intent” and report their inclusion on the project.
For example, he said, J.E. Dunn’s participation in construction of the garage is already being reported to the city, but its construction subcontractors, including those owned by minorities and women, haven’t yet been entered into the system.
“We’ve sat down and walked through this with (Yelder) and his staff, and he understands and recognizes the timing difference, so I come back to — I’m confident in the numbers that we reported back in April,” Stricker said.
Councilman Lee Barnes, 5th District at-large, referenced Yelder’s more dire numbers on the City Council floor Thursday and apparently caught some members by surprise.
“Like so many projects in the past, we get to the end of the game, and then we say, ‘Oops, we didn’t have the capacity to reach the number of MBEs,’” Barnes said. “I don’t want to play this game today.”
Councilwoman Katheryn Shields, 4th District at-large, had voted against Loar’s resolution in committee on Wednesday, saying she was not sure it was necessary. But the numbers Barnes presented, she said, were in “direct contradiction to the reports that we have been receiving.” She voted for the resolution at Thursday’s full council meeting.
Loar’s resolution came after she emailed Aviation Director Pat Klein last week seeking to have her committee review each bid on the project.
He replied that such a request would take considerable time and resources and “would easily risk breaking our budget and scheduled opening.” At Wednesday’s committee meeting, Loar called that the “most absurd thing” she had ever heard.
The resolution then cleared committee 3-2 with Shields and Councilman Kevin O’Neill voting against it. But both voted in favor of the proposal on Thursday.
