St. Louis dysfunctional? Kansas City: Hold our (better-tasting) beer

Last year was pretty rugged for our friends in St. Louis. It started with a botched attempt to force the city and county to merge, and ended with the collapse of plans to privatize its airport.

The county executive went to prison. Controversy surrounded the prosecutor. Eleven kids under age 17 were murdered.

All of this, and more, led the editorial board of the Post-Dispatch to call 2019 the Year of Dysfunction. A few days later, the great columnist Bill McClellan weighed in.

Dysfunction “makes us interesting,” McClellan wrote. “We don’t have mountains. We don’t have beaches. Without dysfunction, we’d be Kansas City.”

The first reaction seems obvious: Sure, and without the Chiefs, we’d be St. Louis. But that would be a cheap shot. Sort of.

On the other hand, when it comes to dysfunction, Kansas City cannot yield the ground.

In 2019, we had a long argument over naming a street for Martin Luther King Jr. We still don’t have an answer. He died in 1968.

Illegal dumping and uncollected trash are plagues. Last year, potholes ravaged some city streets. Poor snow removal was a consistent complaint.

We elected a new mayor, and the city manager quit — then lined up a job with Jackson County, which has retired the dysfunction trophy. Have you heard about our, er, problems with property tax appraisals? The decrepit county jail?

Did you know our former county executive is in a halfway house? That the Royals lost 103 games?

It’s true Kansas City has so far mostly avoided the clumsy interference of goofball Rex Sinquefield. But Sinquefield was a key voice in the notorious Kansas tax cut experiment, which turned the entire state into a dysfunctional quagmire. So there’s that.

I think Bill McClellan understands all this, actually. “I don’t think we are much worse than anybody else,” he wrote. That seems true.

Because here’s the thing: The issue not government dysfunction, which is largely unavoidable. Democracy is messy.

The question is how a community responds to it. Is there truly an effort to build a “more perfect” community, or not? Progress, or retreat?

Our national government has abandoned any serious effort to build a better future, which is why we’re all so disgusted with it. Local governments, on the other hand, are doing better.

In Kansas City, bus service will soon be fare-free. Voters have agreed to spend on streets and sidewalks, and to send cash to challenged neighborhoods. The schools struggle, but appear stable. Tenants have new protections.

Mayor Quinton Lucas has committed to lowering crime. Kansas Citians will hold him to that promise.

The city still hands out too many checks to rich developers and companies, of course, because some bad habits die hard. Maybe that will change in 2020.

But momentum here — and, my guess is, in St. Louis — is still forward. Learn from 2019’s mistakes, and try to do better.

That’s been the Kansas City Chiefs’ approach too, by the way. To all our St. Louis buddies: Playoff tickets may still be available.

This story was originally published January 5, 2020 at 5:00 AM.