On second thought, PJ Guastello is not running for mayor of Kansas City | Hudnall
In retrospect, P.J. Guastello told me this week, he maybe should have waited a little longer before filing the paperwork to run for mayor of Kansas City.
The Northland businessman could have spent the summer working behind the scenes — commissioning polls, meeting with donors and community leaders, and quietly testing whether there was an appetite for his candidacy.
“I was a little bit ignorant to the process,” Guastello said. “I didn’t need to file in order to put out a poll seeing if people liked me. I could have just written a check to Axiom and decided from there.”
Instead, he filed “PJ Guastello for Mayor” in April with the Missouri Ethics Commission, which put him on the radar of people like me. Then he hired the Republican consulting firm Axiom Strategies to poll likely voters to assess his level of support and which potential lines of attack against him might resonate.
How much would Kansas City voters care that Guastello had donated to the U.S. Senate campaign of Eric Greitens — long after Greitens resigned as Missouri governor amid scandal? How much would they care that Guastello had also given money to Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear in Kentucky (where one of Guastello’s companies does business)?
And what about the ex-cons Guastello runs around with, like Eddie Musallet, with whom he’s partnering to open a new Northland grocery store?
Guastello said the poll results were not the reason he decided last week not to move forward with his campaign for mayor.
“I really do think I could have won,” he said. “Money wouldn’t have been an issue. If I couldn’t raise enough, I could have self-funded the campaign. But ultimately, I just don’t think I’m the right guy for this right now. I have more to learn.”
Business-friendly candidate
I caught up with Guastello at Monday’s afternoon Royals game, a 15-1 victory against the Phillies.
He’s a big fan. In a season full of boring games and bloodbaths, Guastello estimated he’s attended somewhere around 25 games so far. He’s held Crown section season tickets for the past six years, a suite before that. After the game, in the hallway outside the Crown section, Bobby Witt Jr. gave Guastello a wave and they stopped to chat for a few moments.
“A lot of the players live up north kinda by me,” Guastello said, by way of explanation. He lives in Staley Farms.
The available evidence indeed suggests that Guastello could have financed his own run.
Guastello, who is 46, is one of the majority owners of Elevate Cannabis, which has 15 licenses in Missouri, five in Illinois and a few more in Arizona. He also told me that he owns a trucking company and a third-party logistics company in Nashville. But most of his focus these days is on commercial real estate development. He’s behind projects including Oak Ridge, the family social club up near Stroud’s, and more recently the former Sears building on Front Street.
The poll Axiom sent out described Guastello as being “responsible for the livelihoods of 1,500 employees across private companies grossing over $400 million annually.”
A registered Republican, Guastello saw a lane for himself as a commonsense, business-oriented mayoral candidate — a bit of a contrast to the current field, which is made up of three City Council members (Wes Rogers, Crispin Rea and Ryana Parks-Shaw) and a long-shot lawyer (Kenda Tomes McClain).
Guastello (he is the cousin of George Guastello, who runs Union Station) believed a charismatic, growth-oriented campaign from a successful guy could have resonated. He would bring a developer’s perspective to City Hall and present an argument that the city could spur growth by cutting bureaucratic delays, leveraging the Land Bank to build more affordable housing and using AI not to cut jobs but grow the city faster.
But the more he talked to the consultants, the less enamored he became of the process.
“I was going to have to say things I didn’t mean,” Guastello said. “I was going to have to say I was against the downtown (Royals) stadium. I wasn’t supposed to talk about the need for more affordable housing.”
That was Axiom’s advice?
“I don’t want to say anything bad about Axiom — I think they do a great job, and it works really well for certain candidates,” Guastello said. “They are very purposeful. They have a program that works. They mapped out my whole campaign for me and told me how I could win. I just didn’t think I could do it.”
‘The Greitens thing’
What else did Guastello learn during his short time as a potential candidate for mayor of Kansas City?
“One thing that surprised me about the Greitens thing was that Democrats were 11% more likely to vote for me because I gave money to Breshears. But they were 93% less likely to give me money because I gave money to Eric. I thought that was interesting.”
“Both those guys are my friends,” Guastello said with a shrug. “I stick up for my friends. Maybe I’m loyal to a fault sometimes.”
He was struck by the anger many residents have toward local government, “even when they don’t really even know what they’re mad about.”
“People are very quick to judge their leaders based on not very much information. They’re upset about the schools and taking it out on city leaders — well, city leaders don’t have anything to do with the schools. I really think voters should give politicians a little more grace.”
Guastello also received an education in the realities of political fundraising: running for office means assembling a network of supporters, donors and allies — and each comes with their own priorities for what they want from City Hall.
“Everybody has an agenda,” he said. “It was always about how me being mayor could benefit them, not how me being mayor could help the city. I was having trouble navigating the interest groups, the labor groups, all of it. I started to feel like I was going to be fighting people I wanted to help. And for what? So I can be mayor?”
He said the plan is to offer his services to whoever the next mayor is. He’d love to serve on a board. “I’ve run big businesses. I understand development. I can tell you where you’re getting a good deal from a developer or a bad one. So I hope I’m allowed to help.”
He’s supporting Wes Rogers for mayor.
“Crispin and Ryana tend to vote in a similar way,” Guastello said. “Wes is a little more independent, from what I’ve seen. Plus, I’ve known him and his dad for a long time. He’s from up north too.”
He’s surprised other candidates haven’t thrown their hat into the race.
“You’d think there’d be 12 people running by now,” Guastello said. “But at the end of the day, I don’t think anyone’s coming in last minute. Maybe one that I can think of.”
Who? I had a guess. But Guastello had already said plenty. We agreed to keep that part of the conversation off the record.
