Mayor Q predicts 2024: Police, KCI, Royals stadium and Kelce: ‘I like resolving drama’ | Opinion

Maybe good news is not news at all; readers always say they want more of it, but because we can measure such things now, we can say with certainty that they don’t.

Still, that doesn’t mean Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas is wrong to point to some of the positives of 2023, like that every city employee got a pay raise and that the Kansas City Fire Department just welcomed its largest and most diverse class of new recruits. “On the basics,” like resurfacing roads, Lucas said in an end-of-the-year interview, “we’ve performed.”

In our deadliest year yet, public safety is still our No. 1 challenge, along with the related issues of local control of and community confidence in the KCPD. But the state-appointed board of police commissioners is working less politically together for the common good now, the mayor says, in a way that at least makes progress more possible. And why is that?

Because, Lucas says, we’re further removed all the time from the post-George Floyd “politics of 2020.” We’re further away from “a time that sucked,” and from the tendency to “play the politics of the Trump era.” That is, to see everything as “are you with us or against us” in a way that was always “preposterous, since I don’t know a single Kansas Citian who doesn’t want fewer homicides. I’m glad we’re moving away from the somewhat trite debates you might still hear on talk radio” but that do nothing to actually help anyone. We hope that’s right.

Part of the mayor’s job, as Lucas sees it, is trying to make sure that we don’t keep having the same conversations year after year, for instance on whether and where to build a new Royals stadium: “I like resolving drama.”

Some of the mayor’s predictions for 2024 are not exactly bold, but we do hope they are self-fulfilling: KCI will get more international flights next year, he says, as promised, and both the Chiefs and the Royals, he’s sure, will announce that they’re staying in Kansas City.

The Kansas City Current will continue to show what funding women’s sports teams can mean for a local economy. And a decade from now, as Lucas has said many times, the Royals will be playing ball in a new stadium in downtown Kansas City.

Mayor Q is not taking much of a chance, either, in predicting that particularly during an election year, millions will be spent and made stoking divisions, sometimes via such “inane and bonkers” commentary as Jason Whitlock’s trenchant recent thoughts on restrooms at KCI, “about which he knows nothing.”

But some of what Lucas sees ahead is notable for its honesty: He does not, alas, see Josh Hawley at high risk of losing his U.S. Senate seat, and says the Missouri gubernatorial race is “more interesting” on the Republican side, where Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe is running as the pro-business candidate and Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft as the “John Ashcroft’s son” candidate, a lane he definitely owns.

“I won’t go on a long tirade about how he sees his job more as harassing librarians than making sure people can vote,” Lucas says. Don’t stop on our account.

But the bottom line, as the mayor says, is that voters will have to settle this question: “Do we want to be a spectacle” or get stuff done? “Will people go for the circus, or for actual common sense?” We don’t pretend to know the answer.

In the upcoming Iowa caucuses, Lucas thinks, we’ll see that the circus still has its allure. But when it comes down to choosing between the concrete accomplishments of Joe Biden — in steadying the economy and restoring our alliances and pushing through a historic investment in infrastructure — and the entertainments, such as they are, of Donald Trump, “I don’t think Trump is reinstalled,” Lucas says. “I believe enough in the American people” to think they’ll reject the circus. Let’s hope his optimism is justified.

As for what the future holds for Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift, Lucas says, “I believe Travis will still be here next year.” And OK, he hopes that Swift will be, too.

Though the mayor and the musician haven’t met, they have been in the same space a couple of times: “I try not to fanboy,” he says, but naturally sees her as “an absolute delight and a positive for our region.” In fact, anyone who doesn’t see this “globally relevant woman who likes to hang out in Kansas City” in that light, he says, “needs to get a life.”

Some things really are beyond politics, including, paradoxically, the woman responsible for registering so many new voters that it might make a crucial difference next November. And that, along with some vestigial belief that our better angels will prevail, gives us hope for 2024, too.

This story was originally published December 28, 2023 at 5:06 AM.