Cleaver worries discord over KCATA leader could hurt chances of getting federal money
Robbie Makinen was told he would be forced out of his job at the end of June as president and CEO of the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority.
But one week after the closed-door meeting at which his fate was to be decided, he still hasn’t received official word on his status from his bosses on the KCATA board of commissioners.
“An announcement is forthcoming,” commissioner Michael Shaw said Thursday afternoon. “Exactly when, I don’t know.”
As Makinen frets about his future, U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver worries about the impact the controversy surrounding Makinen’s employment status may have on federal funding requests that potentially could be worth tens of millions of dollars or more to local public transit projects.
“My only comment to people who have called me about this is ‘this is bad timing,’” he said, “and bad timing creates a holy mess.”
As the Kansas City congressman assures the federal bureaucrats who make funding decisions that local government officials are one big happy family, Mayor Quinton Lucas and others at city hall have been publicly dissing the KCATA for poor bus service in recent months. More recently they have also complained that the transportation authority’s real estate development activity detracts from its main mission.
Then last week, The Star broke the news that city officials have been working behind the scenes for months to oust Makinen from his job after he balked when city officials said they wanted all of the KCATA’s pandemic relief money. Makinen tried without success to block them from taking some of those transit dollars from the KCATA to pay for a $23 million streetlighting project.
His efforts included a call to federal transit officials, who then called Lucas to ask what was going on in Kansas City. Lucas then let Makinen know he was not pleased to get that phone call. City Manager Brian Platt later told two commissioners that either Makinen had to go or Kansas City would find someone other than the KCATA to provide bus service within the city limits.
All that friction, Cleaver said in a telephone interview this week, could hurt the region’s chances of getting a federal planning grant for what he calls the Bi-State Sustainable Reinvestment Corridor.
That’s a brand name for an all-out effort to maximize the amount of money the region will get for projects from the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that President Joe Biden signed into law late last year.
In deciding where to spend those dollars, federal officials tend to favor regional projects that benefit multiple communities, such as Cleaver’s idea of funding public projects along a transportation corridor stretching from Independence to western Kansas City, Kansas.
Cleaver said he’s been talking up the idea to former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who is senior adviser and infrastructure coordinator for the Biden administration.
“Relationships across two states, two counties, four cities — in Washington that’s the kind of thing that sells,” Cleaver said.
But from his decades in government, as a congressman and before that as a city councilman and Kansas City’s first Black mayor, Cleaver also knows what dampens the enthusiasm of D.C. decision makers.
“The federal government leans towards stability,” Cleaver said. “There’s always going to be some hesitation when there’s a tumult in a community that’s asking for millions and millions of dollars. So I have shared that with people who’ve called me that I don’t want to blow this opportunity.”
Cleaver not consulted
Lucas is not among the people who’ve sought his counsel. Cleaver said he wishes that city officials pushing for Makinen’s ouster would have given him a call before stirring controversy at the very time federal officials are considering two funding requests worth $10 million initially and tens of millions more into the future.
“Nobody has talked to me, not that they had to,” Cleaver said. “But if I were them I would like to talk to the Democratic member of Congress who has been critically important in getting money in.”
Asked to comment on Cleaver’s concerns, Lucas issued the following written statement:
“I agree with the Congressman’s view on the importance of stability at KCATA, particularly as it relates to ensuring timely and reliable service delivery, paying drivers and employees a fair wage, and serving Kansas Citians in all neighborhoods. Over the past several decades, first as mayor and now as a senior Statesman, Congressman Cleaver has built a positive relationship between federal administrators and Kansas City leaders, and I look forward to continuing to work with him to secure funding opportunities for our community.”
Cleaver did not volunteer comments on Makinen’s job performance during the interview, but he noted that the Kansas City bus agency boss has a fan in U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.
“The last time I had a meeting with Buttigieg, he opened the meeting by saying ‘boy, that Robbie is doing something great with those zero fares,’” Cleaver said.
Makinen has long supported eliminating bus fares as a way to boost mass transit use and eliminate the hassle of managing a fare system that provided only a small portion of the authority’s budget. Kansas City, the largest of the four local governments that contract with the KCATA for bus service, adopted a zero fare policy in 2020.
One of the funding requests that Cleaver said is now “percolating in the system” is a $4 million grant for new buses. The other is an application from the Mid America Regional Council that would pay for 80 percent of the $7 million estimated cost to plan for “reinvestment and mobility services” along State and Independence avenues, from Village West in Kansas City, Kansas, to Truman Square in Independence.
“We’re hoping for success,” said Ron Achelpohl, MARC’s director of transportation and environment.
Planning grant recipients will be announced in August, he said.
Cleaver is hopeful the planning grant will lead to the kind of success that saw Kansas City awarded more than $50 million in mass transit grants during the Great Recession. He only hopes the current discord won’t jinx it.
“Bad timing, it could mess us up,” he said.
This story was originally published July 7, 2022 at 3:50 PM.
