The Untouchables
There’s no way to know, as this edition goes to press, whether Jackson County Executive Mike Sanders will have made good on his threat to sue the City of Kansas City, Missouri, over composition of the commission that makes TIF decisions. But honestly, folks, we shouldn’t be in this fix in the first place.
Kansas City’s use of TIF money—tax revenues collected from new projects that pay for the public infrastructure that made those developments possible—is a good idea in concept. In practice? It’s been well-documented that the program hasn’t held developers to account when projecting how successful a project will be and has, in effect, used taxpayer money to help pad the profit margins on many of those projects. Over-use of the incentives has contributed to the annual gaping budget deficits that must be addressed at City Hall.
This is all bad enough, but remember: It ain’t happening in a vacuum. Kansas City and, yes, the state of Missouri, too, have failed to produce a cohesive development policy that a) helps the region’s core compete to attract and retain businesses relative to others on that side of the state line, and b) keeps it on at least a minimally-tilted playing field with the kinds of incentive packages being offered such as Star bonds in Kansas.
That was never more clear than over the past couple of months, when a long-planned $1 billion project to bring new life into the dilapidated Bannister Mall area migrated across the line to the Village West retail development in western Wyandotte County.
I’ll be frank with you: Ingram’s had neither a stake in the outcome of that decision, nor a preference as to where that project sets down with an 18,500-seat stadium for the Wizards and offices for as many as 4,500 employees of the expanding Cerner Corp. The soccer team and the medical software giant are both strong assets to the region. But there’s something wrong with a process that essentially pits one part of the metropolitan community against another in a zero-sum game like that.
No matter what emerges at the former Bannister Mall site, it’s going to be a real challenge to live up to the expectations that had been set for south Kansas City’s economic revival with the soccer complex there, and we simply find it distasteful and ultimately unproductive when policy makers are choosing economic winners and losers.
Even before we could attempt to address that bi-state imbalance, though, we need to get all parties involved on board with the way TIF decisions are made. Missouri law that provides for an 11-member TIF commission, including representation from Jackson County and other entities, had never been codified by the City Council.
That’s essentially what Mike Sanders’ legal threat was all about: Allowing the decision-making to involve more than the six TIF members designated by the City of Kansas City, Missouri. And it’s a simple matter of fairness. The city shouldn’t be making one-sided decisions that affect the tax bases of other jurisdictions without giving those parties an opportunity to weigh in with voting rights--particularly if it’s law.
In that respect, Sanders was spot-on when he slammed the current process by noting, “even my kindergartner can understand it: Six does not equal 11.”
Why is any of this more than just inside baseball for policy wonks? Because Kansas City, for all it’s done to remake its Downtown into a metro-wide attraction, still faces serious challenges with its image as a place to do business.
Complex issues involving the quality of public schools in the city, the city’s earnings tax, failing infrastructure, delivery of basic services and public safety are knotty enough. But you’d be amazed how much easier any one of those could be to address if the center of the region were a truly thriving business community, providing jobs and generating tax revenues.
Here’s a suggestion for one small step toward any larger goal: Let’s embrace fairness as an operating principle, and resolve the TIF membership flap to everyone’s satisfaction. We can eat the rest of the elephant later. 
Joe Sweeney
Editor-In-Chief & Publisher
Sweeney@IngramsOnLine.com