There’s big money to be made at KCI Airport. City leaders, show the public your cards
In February, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas attended the Super Bowl. For part of that game, he shared a suite with Mike Ketchmark, who has raised and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for political candidates and committees from both parties over many years.
One of those candidates was Quinton Lucas. In the weeks before the mayoral election, Ketchmark gave $100,000 in cash and in-kind services to Taxpayers Unlimited, the political arm of the firefighters union. In that same period, Taxpayers Unlimited spent $200,000 supporting Lucas.
Another person in the suite with Lucas and Ketchmark that Super Bowl Sunday was Ketchmark’s close friend Steve Tilley. Tilley, once Missouri’s House Speaker, is now a well-connected lobbyist.
OHM Concessions, the food and beverage subcontractor to Vantage Airport Group, is one of Tilley’s clients.
We asked Lucas if he and his financial supporter Ketchmark’s friend Tilley ever discussed the Vantage deal he would soon vote to approve. “I’ve not seen Steve Tilley throughout the pendency of this process,” Lucas said Thursday. “I have not spoken to him at all.”
On the other side of the fight over airport concessions, KCUR revealed on Thursday that City Councilwoman Teresa Loar had called City Manager Brian Platt in August, asking about and disparaging the Vantage deal. Platt thought the call was “inappropriate” and “disturbing.”
Loar has worked to scuttle the Vantage deal for weeks, and voted against it on Thursday.
For weeks, those for and against the Vantage deal have accused one another of influence-peddling and lying. Some council members had more colorful terms for the process.
It’s not just ‘politics.’ It’s steering public dollars
And this wasn’t a departure from the norm, either. In fact, this is the third time in three years that an airport contract has been so bitterly contested.
There was a similar fight over the original development contract for the new terminal when Edgemoor was picked in 2018. In 2020, the city rejected a $75 million paving contract awarded to a Colorado firm, in order to hand it to a favored bidder from St. Joseph. That time, the jilted bidder asked the feds to investigate.
In each case, City Council members intervened publicly and aggressively on behalf of bidders, including those who had lost. Those complaining now about “politics” at the airport were up to their elbows in contract-steering just a few months ago.
We’ve suggested an independent airport authority might alleviate these problems. No one seems interested in that. Too much money is on the table.
Politicians, and some in the public, have expressed surprise and dismay that people involved in the bids, and journalists, too, have tried to make sense of this behavior, and have spelled out the relationships between bidders and decision-makers. The complaints include claims that 1) this kind of stuff is routine, and 2) no one cares about the airport.
The second claim is false: Clean, transparent government is everyone’s business, though you are welcome to look away if you choose.
The first is more complicated. Kansas City is a big small town. When millions are on the table, the fighting is fierce. That everyone knows everyone makes public scrutiny and transparency and vigilance more essential, rather than less.
The idea that the City Council should simply accept a staff recommendation without serious review — a position taken by more than one council member in this latest dispute — is mistaken. If no one is allowed to question a staff decision, why elect a City Council at all?
Councilman Dan Fowler complained mightily about our questions and coverage, and about an Ethics Commission finding about the appearance of a conflict of interest in his vote. In the end, he abstained from the final decision, which was the right thing to do.
Should Kansas Citians have ignored his possible conflict? If so, why have an Ethics Commission? Because everyone knows Dan is a good guy? No one is unassailable; as soon as we assume otherwise, we should prepare to be assailed.
In fact, without visibility, corruption is inevitable. Kansas Citians were entitled to as much information as possible before this decision was made.
We never supported or opposed any bidder in this process, and won’t do so now. Vantage must deliver. We’ll know if it succeeded around the time of the 2023 Super Bowl.