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Mar
28
Orange Revolution
March 28, 2007 | 26 Comments
Funkhouser: 50.6%
Brooks: 49.4%
Mayor Barnes’ Depends: Soiled
Categories: City Council, KC Mayor, Politics
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I wish I could watch her hand over the office keys to Mark . . .
I wish there had been a ‘mayor cam’ on her when Mark was announced as the winner.
thank god he’s not proclaiming a “mandate”. it was a narrow margin, and funk needs to prove his downtown detractors wrong within the first 100 days.
let’s not gloat too much on kay. she has a lot on her 5-page single-spaced resume and will probably be representing us in congress before the decade is out.
I agree. While not perfect (who is?) I feel she has done a lot for this city.
The look on her face as the results were announced had to be priceless.
And DaveKCMO, I wouldn’t count out Sam Graves yet. I suspect Barnes’ performance over the last month, which doesn’t reflect well on her, will be a campaign issue.
She did overreact, but I still think a lot of people here are way too down on her. Yes, the TIF thing got carried away, but at least downtown isn’t a scary place that looks like a war zone.
Yes, it’s very fashionable to bash Kay Barnes these days on the Internets. People quickly forget all the good things she accomplished during her tenure.
Perhaps it’s easy to bash Kay because she wanted to turn any discussion about economic incentives into “You’re either with us or against us.” Okay then, so I’m against her, if that’s the way she wants to play. Or because she ignored a lot of the city. Or…
She should somehow figure out how to earn a living by going into hysterics at press conferences and inadvertently helping the very groups she’s railing against. Who cared about skate parks in KC before she railed against the skate punks in Barney Allis? (Ok, so no one cares now… but my point is that she ended up bringing more attention to the issue by her tantrum than she probably planned.)
Amen, Dr. Noisewater. The Kay bashing and downtown bashing in this campaign got way out of hand. And she will make a very good candidate for the House against Graves. It’ll be funny to watch as blogs like this one suddenly jump on her bandwagon once that race begins.
The 6th district has fielded lame Democratic candidates my whole life so far. Barnes is just the latest.
Maybe y’all should refresh people’s memories about what Kay did specifically outside downtown since that seems to be what she trumpets as well.
Do you think that after Brooks not winning the election, the rolling roof not passing, and bi-state failing, that maybe Kay Barnes will think twice about running against Sam Graves?
A revolution? Hardly.
I am supporting Funkhouser & the whole council because some really great people got elected yesterday & hopefully we can make Kansas City great & attractive for potential residents.
And agreed with the Kay bashing – nobody was dogging on her while she made downtown Kansas City viable again. The five KC political bloggers may be down on Kay but she polls over 50% & that is amazing for an incumbent.
Cheers.
I’ll have to second skate punks for kay! here. Beyond the downtown “revival,” it’s hard to name a significant achievment she can claim in her eight years as mayor.
The jury is even still out on her downtown achievements. The Sprint Center won’t open until this fall and lacks a major tenant. The P&L district doesn’t open until later this year, is heavily subsidized by the city, and will be on financially shaky ground the moment it opens.
I’ve always thought she was a mediocre mayor at best. Perhaps others can point to the shining moments of Barnes’tenure.
311 is a HUGE achievement. contacting the city with a problem before was a huge headache. still a ways to go, but nevertheless better than when she arrived. isn’t that all we can ask for?
on the flip side, every single candidate runs on neighborhoods. it’s almost a cliche. what kay is most guilty of is not providing a clear explanation of how her other accomplishments will *indirectly* benefit neighborhoods. it’s about communication!
The shining moment IS downtown! People act like turning downtown around was inevitable, but–guess what–it didn’t happen until Barnes arrived with her “River-Crown-Plaza” vision. While other cities revitalized their downtowns in the 1990’s (Denver, Minneapolis, Charlotte, etc.) we had to wait until Barnes came in and helped jumpstart things. For those saying “what else has she done besides downtown,” perhaps you should take a moment and ask, if she had concentrated on other things, whether downtown would be where it is today? Remember, just two years ago the whole south loop was filled with parking lots.
Once again, amen, Dr. Noisewater. Virtually every big city in the country has faced the same two dominant issues over the past 20+ years: deteriorating/decaying urban cores and failing public schools. Barnes got KC a long way toward solving one of them. The other has been largely out of her hands and in the hands of a pretty inept bunch of people.
The criticism — even in Funk’s own TIF audit — has been sorely overstated. TIF hasn’t been the overwhelming boon it was billed to be, but to call it a failure is to miss the larger picture. TIF could be done better, but it’s been anything but the outright failure some of you constantly suggest.
As much as some of you want to bash downtown, there are a lot of people living there now who weren’t there a few years ago, establishing a residential and commercial foothold in an area that was the very definition of urban blight. You can nitpick around the edges all you want, but you’re lying to yourself and everyone else if you dispute the real progress we’ve seen.
I see. I’m glad that Kay Barnes is to thank for the downtown revival, while myself and all the “little people” who moved there and opened businesses there because we always wanted to had nothing to do with it.
I just can’t believe how poorly the Brooks campaign was run – probably the worst run major political campaign I’ve ever seen. It wouldn’t have taken much to crush the Funk, regardless of all this “revolution” talk. KC is in better shape now than it’s been in 30 years.
Revitalizing downtown was and is important. And yes, Kay does deserve credit for it. Good for people who are opening businesses there, but the businesses would have a much harder go of it if downtown was still the scary, ugly, abandoned place it was just a few years ago. And yes, the Brooks campaign was an astonishingly lame one. I assume they didn’t try very hard because they thought they would win anyway. I can’t think of another explanation. The main reason I voted for Funkhouser is because I feel that Brooks is too old.
Agreed, Ryan. One long-standing Downtown attraction is the Crossroads district. That was started by artists and grew organically from there. Kay Barnes had nothing to do with that. A lot of credit is due to “urban pioneer” artists, small businesses and residents for at least demonstrating downtown could be a viable area.
The “River-Crown-Plaza” was not the tipping point for downtown redevelopment. The revitalization of the River Market area happened under Emmanuel Cleaver. Barnes is a couple years late in coming to the downtown redevelopment table.
Besides, “River-Crown-Plaza” or “String of Pearls” plan never did pan out. There has admittedly been a ton of development downtown. But Crown Center has been left to it’s own devices, and Barnes has thrown TIF money at the one of the city’s ritzy shopping districts. She completely ignored the Midtown area, from roughly 29th Street to 39th, completely. Broadway, Main and the surrounding neighborhoods haven’t thrived under her neglect.
Any “progress” made has yet to live up to it’s potential because so much of it remains half built and empty. For the new development has been completed, no one has even tried to quantify the benefits in terms of the number of jobs or additional tax revenue.
Downtown may be better than it was, but it’s far from a shining beacon guiding people in from afar. It’s a fairly clean ghost town. I feel less comfortable walking downtown with so few people than I do walking in Westport with all its assorted problems.
Downtown is not yet a “shining beacon” after dark because the projects are not finished. When Sprint Center opens and basically replaces Kemper, there will be a lot of foot traffic at night. There will be events there on a regular basis, major tenant or not.
and we’ll still be paying for Kemper
Unless the area gets some local flavor and not just more of the same old national chains that you can find anywhere, I don’t see it ever becoming vibrant and interesting. Kemper doesn’t get that much trafic at night unless there is an event, so the Sprint Center replacing it will not really boost traffic. The area around the center has to be interesting, and it’s not.
It won’t have to be all that unique or interesting, it’ll be bars and restaurants conveniently there when the arena has events. Plus, it’ll be very attractive when courting conventions. We have lost countless conventions because they are normally held downtown and downtown had nothing to offer in terms of entertainment after dark. Every out-of-town tax dollar means that we residents are one dollar closer to paying it off with someone else’s money. Plus more convention money means more, better jobs. It’s an investment in our city’s future. Why are there so many huffalumps with no sense of vision or possibility?
The city’s biggest tourist draw, the Country Club Plaza, is also almost entirely national chains. Yet it is enormously popular, and at any given time about 70% of the patrons are from out of town. It’s far away from the convention center, and there is certainly no arena to further help it along.