‘Shit show’: KCI concessions contract approved, heads to council after dramatic meeting
Two Kansas City Council members left a dramatic committee meeting on Wednesday as members sparred verbally over the controversial airport concessions contract.
Council members Teresa Loar, waving to the people packed in the chambers as she exited, and Katheryn Shields left the meeting, fed up with what they felt was a lack of transparency and time given to fully review airport bids.
Councilman Kevin O’Neill, 1st District at-large, called the meeting a “shit show.”
While the theatrics slowed down the the committee meeting, it still approved the proposed airport concessions contract, sending it to the full council for approval next week.
BEHIND THE STORY
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Kansas City is currently weighing bids for a lucrative contract to run food, beverage and retail at the city’s new $1.5 billion airport terminal. A private city selection committee chose Canada’s Vantage Airport Group from five groups that submitted bids. If it wins, the company would oversee all concessionaire business at the airport for at least the next 15 years. But the city’s secretive selection process has come under scrutiny as members of the public and the council received limited information about the bids.
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After the City Council selects a company, the winner will likely begin work soon inside the terminal to have construction completed by the March 2023 opening date of Kansas City International Airport’s new single terminal.
The concessions bid is one of the largest opportunities available to private companies at Kansas City International Airport, the city’s largest ever infrastructure project.
Earlier this month, city officials identified Vantage Airport Group of Vancouver as the winning bidder for the lucrative deal to run concessions at the city’s new $1.5 billion terminal.
The contract process was scrutinized for transparency issues as a selection committee, made up of city staff, District 2 Councilman Dan Fowler and a Southwest Airlines representative, weighed the bids in private. City officials said that protected the integrity of the process.
But the secrecy allowed jockeying among council members, communication from prospective bidders and lobbying from a key labor union to occur outside of public view.
The Transportation, Infrastructure and Operations Committee lost quorum once Loar, District 2 at-large, and Shields, District 4 at-large, left. Mayor Quinton Lucas, absent from the meeting earlier, joined virtually to vote.
‘There’s winners and there’s losers’
The committee debated going into closed session to discuss the bids. However, all five proposers waived their proprietary information, allowing for information that had previously been kept private — the estimated annual gross sales, for example — to become public.
A few of the proposers waived that information before Wednesday’s meeting. When the others were asked if they would be willing to do the same, they all agreed.
Under a proposed agreement with the firm, Vantage would pay the city a minimum of $1.75 for every passenger who boards a flight at the airport. With 2019 passenger traffic patterns, that would have assured the airport more than $10 million.
Loar, committee vice chair, called the contract “the most untransparent and the most secretive and the most corrupt,” comparing it to the vote to reallocate part of the Kansas City Police Department Budget. “This just continues to get worse and worse and worse on this council ... we need to do our job.”
She then brought up concerns of OHM Concession Group, the principal food and beverage company included in the proposal, and how it has fared in the past — OHM was recently pushed out of the much smaller Greenville-Spartanburg Airport in South Carolina.
Minutes from airport commission meetings show OHM owed the airport for unfinished construction, past due fees and lost revenues. But those documents say the company did not have the cash to satisfy existing and future obligations.
The OHM CEO called it a “mutual part of ways with the airport.”
As committee vice chair Councilman Eric Bunch, who chaired the committee Wednesday, said he would call for a vote, Loar said that if the city would execute a contract with the group that they need to know what’s happening.
“I will be leaving the room,” Loar said. “I will not be involved in this.”
Shields followed a few minutes later after asking a few questions, leaving the committee short of quorum and briefly in limbo.
“I appreciate what we’re trying to do but this is not something that ought to be rushed and I think we should have an opportunity to have all of the questions answered,” Shields said. “There isn’t time today to do that so like my colleague Councilwoman Loar, I will be removing myself from this meeting.”
Both Shields and Loar later attended their other committees, Shields for the Finance, Governance and Public Safety Committee and Loar for the Neighborhood Planning and Development Committee.
Shortly after, Lucas joined the committee virtually. He was out of town participating in the Harvard Bloomberg City Leaders Initiative, said chief of staff Morgan Said.
“I do not like defeating a quorum as a way to try to avoid our responsibility to vote yes or no so that’s why I will be voting today,” Lucas said.
“It was a breach in what I consider decorum and the attacks are vicious,” Councilman O’Neill told The Star. “The idea that there was no transparency is crap. ... I’m just disturbed that our processes can be so challenged without any real reason. This is a ‘I want this guy and not that person so I want the process changed,’ and I just think that’s crap.”
He said he’s good with transparency, but he thought it was a poor process to make the other bids public.
“There’s winners and there’s losers in every RFP process,” O’Neill said. “So I guess I’m just confused as to how you challenge the process in the middle of an RFP.”
Five groups bid for the contract:
Delaware North Companies, Inc.
Greater Kansas City Restaurant & Retail Group, LLC
MERA KC
PLTR-SSP @ KCI, LLC
Vantage Airport Group US, ltd
Public testimony
Several business owners included in Vantage’s proposal spoke in favor of the bid.
Tyler Enders, co-owner of Made in KC, said they negotiated with four of the proposers and were included on three bids. He called it a profitable, representative and equitable proposal.
“Vantage has operated with the utmost integrity and transparency throughout this process, it is clear they understand how we do business in Kansas City, how we nurture and build relationships,” Enders said.
Roxsen Koch, with the Polsinelli law firm representing PLTR-SSP, criticized the RFP process.
“This needs to be an open and transparent process,” Koch said. “This has not been that.”
Kim Randolph, CEO and president of the Heartland Black Chamber of Commerce, said that as a business owner, she understands the risks involved.
“We want to make sure we support and train our small businesses to be successful,” Randolph said, to applause from the crowd.
There was a stack of several additional people with out of town addresses who signed up to speak, Bunch, District 4, said, but he prioritized Kansas City residents for time’s sake. He said there were slightly more in support of the contract.
The ordinance will be heard in the full city council session at 3 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 7.
This story was originally published September 29, 2021 at 4:16 PM.
