Tax Increment Financing

What The Mayor Thinks:

When I ran in 2007, Tax Increment Financing was a big problem. An economic development tool that was designed to remove blight and encourage development was being abused by greedy developers at the expense of our schools, libraries, neighborhoods and basic city services. I said I would rein it in, and we did.

What The Mayor Has Done:

I appointed a new TIF Commission, and I have pushed for a greater voice for representation from our schools, libraries and other jurisdictions on that commission.
Together, we closed the first TIF plan to return funds to the jurisdictions, a major success. We turned the tide on unneeded and out-of-control economic incentives. But I didn’t stop there. I recently called for, and the TIF Commission agreed to, an audit of all TIF-related accounts.
During my administration, we’ve ended the era of willy-nilly incentives and brought responsibility to a system that had been abused far too often.

What The Mayor Plans to Do:

Never say never.
TIF has been abused in the past, but it remains a viable tool under the right circumstances. I will continue to personally study each TIF proposal to see if it does what it’s supposed to do: create urban development where there is urban blight.
But that’s not all.
I will continue to make sure your tax dollars are being properly spent, and that the city doesn’t fall back into the trap of developers who would use this sometimes vital tool for projects where it clearly was needed more for their own financial gain, than to bring critical improvements to a blighted section of the city.

Kansas City Chamber

What The Mayor Thinks:

While cities are made up of neighborhoods and the residents who live there, every city also needs a strong business community to provide jobs for those residents, pay taxes and power the local economy.
In general, a city’s business community is mirrored in the local Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber provides leadership for the business community, offers advice and service to businesses considering that city as a place to locate, and offers networking and education for existing business owners and entrepreneurs.
By its nature, the Chamber is one of a city’s strongest advocates.
In the Kansas City area, a regional Chamber represents the interests of the entire metropolitan area. Smaller chambers of commerce in each of the other local cities in the Metro advocate directly for the business community in those cities.
Raytown has a Chamber, as does Kansas City, Ks. Gladstone and Parkville each have their own chambers, as does Platte City, the Northland, Shawnee, Independence, south Kansas City, Northeast Kansas City, Gardner, Spring Hill, Lenexa, Overland Park, Olathe, Leawood, northeast Johnson County…it’s a long list that goes on, but you get the drift.
Kansas City, traditionally, has been represented by the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce. That relationship worked for years – years when Kansas City’s suburban city neighbors were small, sleepy burgs that weren’t vying for major business developments against their larger neighbor.
Like Kansas City, each of those cities is a member of the regional chamber of commerce. That Chamber now must represent all of those cities more or less equally, which places this group in what can best be described as a perpetual conflict of interest.
Unlike Kansas City, virtually all the other cities in the Metro also have their own chambers of commerce to drive their local business community, and to sell potential new businesses on their cities.
Clearly, the regional Chamber is no longer enough for Kansas City.

What The Mayor Has Done:

I have proposed the formation of a true Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, a business advocacy group made up of Kansas City business leaders – not a regional group with business executives from dozens of suburban cities.
Kansas City needs a group of business leaders whose sole concern is the growth and retention of businesses and jobs within the Kansas City city limits. As Mayor, I need business leaders who understand the conditions in their city’s neighborhoods.
The vast majority of the board members of the current Chamber – the Greater Kansas City Area Chamber of Commerce – live outside Kansas City. They can’t, and don’t care to, understand my central concern: my residents and the neighborhoods they live in.

What The Mayor Plans to Do:

I’m not done.
I continue to speak with Kansas City business owners about the need for a local Chamber of Commerce. They support my efforts. I plan to continue to push for the formation of such a group. But I’ve got to tell you, this will not happen without a fight. Where money is concerned, change never comes easily.
With our own Chamber – the “Kansas City Chamber of Commerce” – we will retain our regional approach, but add a needed focus for, as well as on, our own city.

The Proposed Downtown Hotel

What The Mayor Thinks:

When I heard that my colleagues on the City Council were moving forward on a proposal to spend 100’s of millions of tax dollars on a Downtown convention hotel, I thought, “You have got to be kidding me.” Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to have another amenity Downtown. I’d also love to have a brand new Cadillac in my garage. Buying groceries to feed my family and making my mortgage payment have to come first at home. Likewise, adequately funding police and rebuilding our city’s neglected infrastructure have to come first over another glitzy project shadowed in red ink.
While hotel boosters keep insisting that it might be possible to fund a new hotel without raising taxes or drawing on the city’s general fund, I know better. These projects sound wonderful, and they are billed as job-generating economic engines – right up until they get sold for pennies on the dollar like the one in St. Louis, or start drawing from the city budget, like the one in Overland Park.

What The Mayor Has Done:

While I was skeptical about the need for a convention hotel and extremely skeptical that any proposal would be presented that didn’t require tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies, I let a City Council-created task force explore the idea. But when you give an inch…The council advanced and passed in one day $500,000 in city money for a consultant to support that task force last year when I was out of town, attending the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
The task force met. They discussed. They toured downtown on foot with media in tow. And they learned that the city would need to find nearly $300 million in taxpayer-supported incentives to convince a hotel operator to make a go of a convention hotel downtown.
The City Council’s answer was a vote to add another dose of taxpayer money, this time $250,000 to secure development rights to a proposed site for a year.
I could no longer let the farce continue. Against a flood of support from downtown boosters, I spoke out against what is so clearly a dumb, and expensive, idea. I was overruled by the Council. Again, where money is concerned, change doesn’t come easy. But that doesn’t mean you give in, or worse, give up. Any change worth doing, takes time.

What The Mayor Plans to Do:

I will continue to point out to my colleagues on the City Council and the business community the probable financial disaster that would follow the construction of a new publicly financed hotel Downtown. The hotel may well not even improve our ability to attract conventions.
We expanded Bartle Hall, built the Grand Ballroom, built Power & Light and the Sprint Center – each of was billed as the magic bullet that would supplement our ability to attract conventions. Despite all of those Downtown improvements, however, we have steadily lost conventions.
If the city has $300 million to spend, I want to use it to rebuild our crumbling neighborhoods and put people to work building sidewalks and repairing streets. I will continue to fight until I get this done.

Economic Development

What The Mayor Thinks:

For too long, the approach to economic development in Kansas City has been narrowly focused on offering enormous tax breaks and incentives to large corporations and out-of-town developers. The city has subsidized – to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in forgone tax revenue – bars, restaurants, hotels and retail establishments, often taking on substantial debt to do so.
This type of government meddling in the market has not worked. Kansas City has 50,000 fewer jobs because it has not kept pace with the national average in job growth since 1995.
Government investments should be in neighborhoods, infrastructure, education and in supporting local small businesses – the businesses that become the Hallmarks of the future.

What The Mayor Has Done:

During my administration, we have stopped the out-of-control use of tax incentives to draw businesses that stay for short periods of time, or for speculative projects built on the promises of well-paid consultants. We don’t need more avoidable failures costing Kansas City taxpayers millions. Especially when those millions take away money that can be used for basic city services like snow removal and more police on the street.
Through initiatives like Schools First, New Tools and similar strategies, we are beginning to move city government toward investments in neighborhoods that will bring real job growth.

What The Mayor Plans to Do:

I’m not done.
I want City Hall to be the place an entrepreneur or business owner feels he or she can come to for support, to get questions answered, for information.
In my next term, I will push Kansas City to capitalize on its many economic strengths. By leveraging our central location, and by taking advantage of the river, rail lines, and highways that converge in the Heart of America, Kansas City can become a global center for the exchanging of goods and services. This is a visionary idea, but it’s the wave of the future.
And by doing so, we will generate jobs and make this a city that truly works for regular folks.