Big-Time Grey Area
by Jack Cashill
“The Star is always looking for another opportunity to bring a black man down.” This is a delicious answer if for no other reason than that The Star can sniff out “racism” in its political enemies more creatively than a French pig can sniff out truffles.
“What fresh hell is this?”
Upon picking up The Kansas City Star each morning and reading it, one can forgive Ken Bacchus for evoking Dorothy Parker’s classic response to the day’s news.
Bacchus is the “embattled”—and rarely is a cliché more appropriate—head of the entirely unmusical HEDFC or, for short, the Housing & Economic Development Finance Corporation.
What has grabbed the media’s attention is that the HEDFC has rehabbed two homes, one a rather tiny bungalow, for a total ranging somewhere between $437,000 and $1.1 million, depending on which day one reads the newspaper and on who is preparing the invoices. Worse, the houses are located on Tracy Avenue in a Beacon Hill neighborhood light years away from gentrification. When sold, the houses will not return their investment—even if measured against the lowest end of that scale.
As much as I like a good scandal, however, this one may not be it. A quintessential “nice guy,” Bacchus has been married to the same lovely woman for thirty years and has raised two upstanding kids, including a son who went to grade school with my daughter and is now a Marine in pilot training at Pensacola. All of this, of course, proves nothing, but it suggests a lot.
That the media have turned him into “a Dwayne Crompton,” the famously overpaid Head Start honcho whose salary and perks became something of a national scandal, pains Bacchus, and it should. “I don’t believe he took a dime,” says one source close to the investigation, and the various audits seem to confirm this.
Nor did Bacchus go looking for the job. A little more than two years ago, the late, legendary businessman Herman Johnson and current congressman Emanuel Cleaver, among others, persuaded Bacchus to take over an agency whose mission was much purer than its history.
When Bacchus took the job, the city’s director of housing had already approved the Tracy Avenue project. The mayor and the City Council had signed off on it. Bacchus inherited what was essentially a done deal. “We should have managed the contractor better,” admits Bacchus. “I made a bad assumption that things were going well.” They obviously were not.
What helped push the everyday boondoggle of “public-private partnership” into the scandal sphere was the insistence by the subcontractor on the job that it had been underpaid to the eye-popping tune of some $480,000, which more than doubled the base, “not to exceed” contracted price of $419,000. With some justification, the sub claims to have received verbal orders from Bacchus to make added refinements.
Bacchus has a different take. “Unless bills are certified with appropriate change orders,” he protests. “They are not bills.” He argues that HEDFC contracted with CA Design, not with the subcontractor, and CA Design has not presented a bill for this additional work. Either the subcontractor is not owed the money, Bacchus claims, or he did not know how to protect himself.
The latter is possible. The only entity I found on Google with the sub’s name is a ski resort in South Dakota. This guy did not seem to exist before the scandal at hand. His company has no obvious presence either on the Web or in the Yellow Pages. Bacchus assures me that he is a real person and even does good work, but that this specter of a company managed to land a public contract of this magnitude speaks to the ambiguities of life on the cusp between public and private, what Bacchus calls a “big time gray area.”
From its conception, HEDFC has operated in this gray area, an area largely sheltered from the demands of profit and loss and often free of any real oversight, especially since the money being spent flowed from Washington.
To justify its expenditures, the agency has had to find a logic other than profit. On the Tracy project Bacchus sees the two show houses as loss leaders that will help redefine the neighborhood. He cites several new homes that have been built or refurbished nearby because of this project. As a model for this kind of investment, Bacchus looks to Quality Hills, Union Hill and the Downtown loft developments, all of which were seeded with public investment. Truth be told, this argument works much better at $437,000 than $1.1 million.
Whether or not Beacon Hill takes off as Quality Hill did, Bacchus makes a valid point: the gray area in which HEDFC dwells, once limited to those neighborhoods that could not attract private investment, has grown dramatically to include just about all of metro Kansas City. There are few, if any, major developments anywhere in the area that are not the result of a public-private partnership and a dwindling number of minor ones.
This raises the question of why the media have come down so hard on Bacchus and HEDFC. When I asked Bacchus, he replied defensively, “The Star is always looking for another opportunity to bring a black man down.” This is a delicious answer if for no other reason than that The Star can sniff out “racism” in its political enemies more creatively than a French pig can sniff out truffles. The editors deserve Bacchus’s rebuke.
As Bacchus knows, however, the answer is both simpler and more complex. For one thing, the city has a new, no-nonsense city manager on the job who, though black himself, is famously intolerant of public waste, black or white. As one insider commented, “No one anticipated Wayne Cauthen.” Cauthen is now moving program income decisions to City Hall to tighten controls as his predecessors should have done years ago.
If there is racism involved in this case, it is what George Bush might call the quiet bigotry of lowered expectations.
For years now, generations even, the city has been throwing random scraps of public funding to the minority community and averting its gaze while hungry contractors scramble for the crumbs.
As the gray area has expanded, however, so has the scrambling. In a pitch perfect parody of Casablanca’s Captain Renault, Mayor Kay Barnes professed to be “shocked” at the excesses of the Tracy project. This would play better, however, had local leaders not championed their own fair share of public-private grab bags of equally dubious value. Oz, anyone? Light rail?
More spectacularly still, if my memory serves me, it was only I and a few other cranks who protested the price tag on the new federal courthouse Downtown. When built, it cost as much as sixteen state-of-the-art 600-pupil public schools, about three of which were sacrificed just to build the judges their own separate entrance and elevator. Oh, that’s right, I forgot. It was all “federal” money just passing through.
Meanwhile, The Star editors lament in the Bacchus case that the “biggest scandal is not what’s illegal, but what’s permitted.” The editors are likely right. What they overlook, however, is that in their fevered embrace of government give-aways, minority set-asides, and public-private cluster backscratches, they have help create a climate that nurtures waste, legal or otherwise.
Bacchus may not be blameless in this affair, but one thing I don’t blame him for is canceling his subscription to The Star.
Jack Cashill is Ingram’s Executive Editor and has affiliated with the magazine for 26 years. He can be reached at jackcashill@yahoo.com. The views expressed in this column are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram’s Magazine.