Quinton Lucas is everywhere. Is KC’s new mayor trying to do too much, too soon?
The holidays are coming at just the right time for Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas.
In his first months, the mayor has pursued a schedule that might break a lesser politician. See him this week, riding with city crews plowing snow-covered streets. He’s at a Chiefs game. Crashing a port authority meeting. Signing a tenants’ bill of rights. Holding a town hall.
He’s on radio and TV. Touring a factory. Arguing with Gov. Laura Kelly.
Throw in the Martin Luther King Jr. street-naming flap, fare-free buses, battles over business incentives, local police control, city lobbying contracts, a resigning city manager — well, the mayor has been pretty stretched. He could use a break.
Especially since a few worrisome cracks are starting to show.
It’s far from a crisis, but some City Council members are grumbling. Decisions made on the 29th floor of City Hall, like the consensus choice for interim city manager, are mysteriously unmade, they say. The last person to talk with Lucas often prevails.
Key staff positions were left unfilled for weeks. Paperwork related to resignations at a key agency was inadvertently locked in a computer, making it unavailable.
Mayors are rarely in the minority on important votes. Yet Lucas was on the losing end when the fate of the controversial Strata office project was decided. He then declined to veto the deal, confusing almost everyone. He lost the public vote on renaming The Paseo for King, another dent in the armor.
Kansas City’s murder rate remains stubbornly high and a daily challenge. Events can overcome even the most prepared politician, as the mayor now knows all too well.
Lucas broadly concedes some of this. He assigns some early miscues to the normal arc of any new mayor, which is fair. All mayors want to fix everything in the first six months on the job. Lucas is no exception.
A sometimes cantankerous group of council members — particularly, some of the veterans — are also a factor.
Left unchecked, though, early stumbles can turn into four-year freefalls. And the mayor’s lengthy, varied agenda keeps getting in the way: The tenants’ bill of rights might have been a big victory, but it was quickly overshadowed by the fighting over the Waddell & Reed tower downtown.
In fact, the first five months of Lucas’ term have largely been defined by council warfare over business welfare. Voters last summer saw Lucas as an opponent of handouts and incentives, yet projects continue to move forward, and several more are in the pipeline.
The mayor insists he’s appointing people to boards and commissions who will slow the incentive parade next year. He wants credit for capping incentives as a councilman.
OK. At some point, though, the mayor and council will have to say no to something, insist developers build east of Troost, or concede it’s business as usual at City Hall. Right now, option three seems the most likely.
For now, Lucas remains hard at work, trying to cut a deal with Kansas City Public Schools to make the Waddell & Reed proposal easier to swallow, or shrinking the Port Authority’s authority, or trying to smooth our relations with Kansas Gov. Kelly. The only way is forward.
When you try to do everything, though, nothing gets done, only more often.
Let’s hope the mayor uses his well-deserved break to rest up, and reconsider his all-of-the-above agenda. In 2020, he needs to focus on the people and the problems — crime, housing, the poor — that put him in office.