"I was doing commercial real estate downtown," says Sean O'Byrne with- out apology, "and I didn't have the luxury of having blinders on."

At the time O'Byrne was working for Colliers Turley Martin Tucker, a commercial real estate services company. In 1994, he chose to be Colliers' point man Downtown, a move his colleagues thought a bit daft.

"They said you couldn't make any money Downtown," said O'Byrne. A small town Missourian, with a CMSU degree,

O'Byrne nevertheless adapted quickly to the downtown environment. Brash and self-assured, he negotiated its streets as if he were born there and did much better for his company than anyone had a right to expect. O'Byrne, however, did not do as well as he might have. Downtown had problems. As O'Byrne relates, he would navigate his would-be clients through the shoals of broken curbs and hanging wires in a sea of litter, and they, all too often, would opt for another port of call. Companies were looking for a clean and safe environment for their employees, and Downtown simply did not offer it.

Not at all reluctant to speak his mind, O'Byrne decided to take on the powers that be. "Nobody was bitching about it," says O'Byrne. A large part of the problem was that there was not exactly any one person to bitch to.

O'Byrne was running smack into the problem that the city planners had warned of some 25 years prior. And now power in the city was, if anything even more fragmented than it had ever been before. He was not alone, however, in sensing the problem. John Laney, Chairman of the Downtown Council, and Bill Dietrich, the Downtown Council's President, were quietly working to solve it.

Dreaming

In 1969, the same year as Woodstock, the Moon Walk and O'Byrne's seventh birthday party in Chilicothe, Missouri, Kansas City's Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority launched what would prove to be a serious 15-month study of Downtown.

The study--with the admirably humble title, "Kansas City, Missouri Downtown Plan"--was completed in January 1971, an odd bit of timing for so sobering a report.

Kansas City, you see, was rather full of itself at the moment. The Kansas City Chiefs had recently won the Super Bowl and within just a year or two the city would open KCI, Crown Center, Kemper Arena, Bartle Hall, the Truman Sports Complex, and the River Quay. By 1974, the city would have franchises in all four major league sports and would grace the cover of many a major periodical.

As the report writers foresaw, however, these developments portended gloom for Downtown. "The [Central Business District] is a weak metropolitan core," noted the writers with surpris-ing candor, "because special activities have located elsewhere."

Like all such reports before or since, this one projected the future Downtown as an "attractive, efficient, dynamic business and residential center." How could it do otherwise? But for the first time in the city's history, a serious study confronted the fact that the contemporary Downtown was none of the above. Few, however, were in a mood to listen.

They should have. Thirty years later, "none of the above" describes all but a western slice of the Central Business District. A 2003 working draft of the Kansas City Downtown Plan and Implementation Strategy, unsparingly cited the "issues"--no one has "problems" anymore--that have kept the area within the loop from becom-ing attractive and dynamic.

These include a lack of usable green space, a high number of vacant parcels, a "perceived" lack of parking, high vacancy rates, a lack of viable retail, a lack of consistent "streeetscape," restricted access, and an environment that is something other than pedestrian friendly.

The current plan, like many others before it, makes many specific physical recommendations as to how things ought to be different. Among its bolder aspirations is a "key new linear civic space" that would link the Convention Center complex to "the proposed Arena/Anchor site."

In a similar vein, an ambitious 1983 plan called "Downtown 2000" projected a striking, new "Galleria," a 230,000 square foot shopping center linking Macy's and Jones's that "could bring the excitement of contemporary retail malls to the core of the downtown business district." As the reader recalls, the new millennium came and went not only without a Galleria but also without a Jones or a Macy's. The "linear civic space" of the 2003 plan may ease into a comparable oblivion.

For all its artless humility, its lack of photos or color illustrations, its unpretentious title, 1971's "Kansas City, Missouri Downtown Plan" hinted at problems that other, glossier plans avoided. And no problem has been more persistent or more neglected over the years than organization.

"The operational aspects of downtown ‘administration' will be fragment-ed among a large number of existing political and private management vehicles," noted the 1971 report. In an era that was already celebrating "public-private partnerships," the writers had to be a wee bit careful, but their use of the word "fragmented"--where "shared" might have sufficed--clearly signals their intent.

The report writers pressed on, however timidly "There would be virtue," they wrote, "in centralizing certain specific downtown functions in a management district." "Virtue," yes. That's exactly the word.

Too Many Cooks

One is hard pressed to find a city plan anywhere that delineates the "who" half as carefully as it delineates the "what" of a city's future. It is one thing to conceive of, say, a downtown arena. It is another thing altogether to designate that person or persons who will bring it to life.

In Kansas City, this problem has been historically aggravated by a "weak mayor" form of governor. Stung by the Mayor Pendergast experience, reformers in the city reconceived the mayor's role rather as the Chairman of a-- usually fractious--board of governors. The mayor's power to get things done came largely through persuasion.

The person charged with operations, the city's COO, was the city manager. Reporting to the mayor and the council for direction, he had little authority to set priorities and no natural constituency to assure that the priorities he was given were met.

As to long range planning, the city, of course, had its own planning and codes directors, as well as the Economic Development Corporation, which it funded. But for the real power to transform Downtown, one always has had to look beyond City Hall. Those with a stake in Downtown planning and development today are many.

There is the Downtown Council, the Chamber of Commerce, the Civic Council, the Kansas City Area Develop-ment Council, the Mid-America, Regional Council, Jackson County's eco-nomic development dept., and that's just for starters.

The state, the county, and the federal government all also have significant Downtown properties and thus a significant stake. So do the public corporations like the Port Authority, the Housing Authority of KC and the Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority.

Hoping to involve the state of Missouri even more, Kansas City Mayor Kay Barnes established still another council, the Greater Downtown Development Authority (GDDA) in December 2001. The State obliged by passing the Missouri Downtown Economic Stimulus Act, more causally known as Modesa. As it works, Modesa enables authorizing boards in Missouri cities to offer new state tax breaks. These tax breaks would help finance construction of a given project's public infrastructure.

Barnes appointed a major league line up to the GDDA. One problem. The Modesa legislation as passed requires authority members to disclose property holdings Downtown. More problematic still, it prohibits them from voting on financing requests that affect their interests or from buying property, at least for a year, in areas proposed for assistance. And so the Greater Downtown Development Authority had to bench its heavy hitters and was forced to create still another entity to fulfill Modesa's statutory requirements.

Walking the Streets

For Sean O'Byrne, economic development begins at the street level. As he sees it, a clean and safe environment provides "a bed for development." Without it, all the boards and all the grants and all the tax breaks are not much help.

Like the anonymous report writers of 1971, O'Byrne grasped the virtue of centralization. So too did Bill Dietrich, and John Laney. They and other activists on the Downtown Council knew that the one way to fight fragmentation was to create what's called a "Community Improvement District," inevitably shortened to the unsexy CID, pro- nounced C-I-D. "We had spent too much time planning," says John Laney, whose day job is Hall Family Foundation Vice-President, "We had to figure out how to get it done."

What this CID had to do was to make sense of the sometimes contested, sometimes neglected, and always incoherent management of the Central Business District. This was a task on the order of transforming Cold War Berlin into Prairie Village.

As a first hurdle, the Downtown Council had to persuade at least half of the downtown property owners of the wisdom of creating still another taxing district and still another "assessment," a.k.a. "tax." The assessment would be based on the value of one's property and was to be collected by the county.

This wasn't easy. And for good reason. Jonathan Kemper, the CEO of the Commerce Bank's Kansas City region, makes a widely shared observation, "There's a rich history of the city not living up to its obligation." The Downtown Council had a lot of convincing to do and a lot of signatures to collect. Kemper credits Dietrich's leadership with turning the tide.

Having gotten the property owners' approval, the Downtown Council people had to jump through any number of bureaucratic hoops, state and city, but they persisted and succeeded. For better or worse, they will have to repeat the process six years out.

As its first task, the Downtown CID, a.k.a. DCID, planned a 40-person security and maintenance force to make Downtown clean and safe, two things that it has not historically been. The Council needed a director to pull this off. After passing on 116 candidates and in despair of ever finding one, the Downtown Council looked to O'Byrne,

With a "passion" for Downtown, and a fear of hiring the wrong person, O'Byrne accepted the charge. For starters, he and his staff hired the new safety and maintenance "ambassadors" and made them just that. Clad in their distinctive black and gold uniforms, the ambassadors swarm Downtown like bumblebees and spread the honey.

Although the jobs do not pay a whole lot, they come with full benefits. More importantly, O'Byrne has gotten his ambas-sadors to share his passion. "It has worked out very well," says Kemper. "Sean is a big part."

"I think you all did a fantastic job by hiring friendly people to monitor the activity in [Oppenstein Brothers] Park," reads a typical letter O'Byrne has received. "That extra touch is priceless."

"Awesome job," says another letter writer. "Great improvement," says another. "A breath of fresh air." "The improvement is tremendous." "What a great program." "What a huge difference." "Spic and span." "How great downtown is looking." "You must have gone through an extensive screening process to hire people who are consistently upbeat, friendly, and personal."

As O'Byrne gladly acknowledges, he caught one great stroke of luck just as the DCID was kicking off. Kansas City hired a new city manager, Wayne Cauthen. "Right now," says O'Byrne, "the stars are lined up."

Cauthen, by all accounts, has refused to accept the amiable status quo that he inherited. When O'Byrne first approached him with "just me, my problems, and my three ring binder," Cauthen understood what was at stake. He formed an action-oriented accountability committee that includes the heads of all relevant departments. The committee meets once a month and addresses each problem that O'Byrne has unflinchingly documented.

At one early accountability committee meeting, a department head started laughing when he saw an O'Byrne photo of a city sewer so clogged that grass was growing out of it.

"Do you think that's funny?" said Cauthen. If it once were funny, it no longer was.

"You can't hold a city together with duct tape," says O'Byrne, and he means it literally. When he started duct tape and baling wire and metal plates and posted bills and graffiti covered Downtown. No more. His ambassadors have taken to the streets each morning with a genuine sense of mission and transformed downtown.

The best service that the Downtown Council and its spawn, the DCID, are performing may very well be a theoretical one. Although the Downtown Council has no illusions about the extent of the DCID's power, it has hit upon a prototype that works.

One can only imagine Downtown's potential if a person like O'Byrne had the ability to plan as well as manage, to end the fragmentation and dispel the need for the dozens of boards that clog planning with progress, to serve finally not so much Director of DCID but as Czar of Downtown, There is a "virtue" in that indeed.