Mayor Funkhouser, You MUST do your Duty

Mark, when you started out on this effort, you knew this time was going to come. You knew that the forces that have controlled the city to their own advantage were going to attempt to seize control of the Mayor's office. The time has come - not a time of your choosing, not the issue of your choosing, not even the opponents of your choosing. But you knew that it would come about like this - fighting an awkward fight on a tilted battlefield.

You must fight.

The City Council has quite literally sought to dictate who may speak to the mayor, and under what terms. The ordinance they passed has specifically included giving advice as a forbidden activity. They did so even though it had been pointed out to them that forbidding unapproved contact with government officials is not only undemocratic, but unconstitutional.

Sadly, the City Council seems to think this was simply about your wife. Indeed, they sought to hide that fact when they started on the twisted, secretive journey to passage of this ordinance. They claimed to be imposing a volunteer ordinance that applied to all volunteers, but were forced to strip away provisions that applied to the Parks Department, then to other departments, and finally passed an ordinance that was, as you wisely pointed out all along, drafted to apply only to your wife. It was sad to see how they stabbed Beth Gottstein in the back, leaving her hanging out to dry when she made the unfortunately false claim that the city council would not be so small as to draft an ordinance aimed at your wife. Even as she uttered her hopeful words, her fellow 4th District Councilperson was in a backroom boiling the ordinance down to its poisonous essence. They are ruthless, even to each other.

But, even though the ordinance was aimed at your wife, it was never about her. With all due respect for Kansas City's first lady, she was merely a cruelly chosen target for serious people with a deeper agenda. Gloria is a tool they are using to cause you pain, but, if it weren't her, it would be something else entirely. This is about power. This is about who controls the Mayor's office. More centrally, this is about money.

Dirt and concrete - not bare feet and most definitely not words between former friends - are the reasons the council has acted as it has. As you knew when you started this whole effort, Mark, there are people who make money, huge money, staggering money, based upon the decisions of the Mayor's office. For decades, those people have controlled the Mayor's office. Mayors Cleaver and Barnes, in particular, saw that things went smoother when they made sure the very powerful were kept happy. And smooth sailing for the powerful meant smooth sailing for the politicians who kept them happy. To be fair, they accomplished much that was good while they were appeasing the powerful. They were talented politicians.

Dirt and concrete - real estate holdings and construction dollars - are very, very serious matters, as you well know. Those persons who control the valuable real estate (and their lawyer hired hands and other servants of power) in our city expect to see money spent on them, and taxes abated for them. Where many of us view political involvement as a civic interest or even a hobby, these people are in it for the deadly serious money. If they dream up a new project that enhances their holdings, the Mayor is supposed to be enthusiastically behind it, even if it means taking tax dollars away from our schools, and resources away from our poorer citizens on the East side, the West side, and the Northeast. Those cops patrolling the Cordish properties are not patrolling the areas that are seeing drive-by shootings and drug dealing. Why? Because the high dollar dirt and concrete are focused on Return on Investment, not returning hope to the urban core.

The citizens of Kansas City have very few opportunities to sit at the tables of power. In fact, they have none. Nobody is going to genuinely seek citizen input on whether we should gold plate the doorknobs on the latest Cordish fantasy. Nobody expects the public to have a voice when the powers that built the fantastically expensive convention center now say it is incomplete without a fantastically expensive hotel to go with it. Nobody was supposed to discuss development tools for the East side, or pledge to pursue TIF projects that benefit the areas that are genuinely blighted.

You are that nobody, Mark, and you have the chattering and monied classes in an uproar. So those people have manufactured an issue to knock you down a notch. They want to reach into your office, indeed, into your very marriage, and tell you how and when and where your wife can give you advice. The city council is willing to do that because, in the eyes of the real estate developers and the insiders, family values evaporate in the face of real estate values.

You are at a crossroads, Mark. You can allow the city council to wildly overstep its boundaries as set forth in the Charter and attempt to tell the Mayor how to do his job. You can ignore the unconstitutionality of their sloppy, treasonous little ordinance. You can go along and get along. You can act as though this ordinance is just a little bump in the road for your relationship with the council. You can even use this as a fresh starting point, and begin a rebuilding process to become the ribbon-cutting, cheer-leading, credit-claiming Mayor that this city chose to eschew when it voted Orange. In short, you can join in the reindeer games with the council and be one of them, all to your personal benefit. If you do that, you may retire after 8 years with a solid gold watch and a send-off party sponsored by the bluest of Kansas City's blue bloods.

But I don't think you can do that. Certainly not if you are the man I hope you are.

As I said above, this is most definitely not about cross words between former friends. This is not about one of hundreds of lawsuits pending with the city. It's not about Gloria, or volunteers.

It is about power. The powers that be want to control the power that wants to be. They have convinced members of the City Council to pass an unconstitutional power grab, and even gotten them to lie about their motivation along the way. The fact that many of the majority are fundamentally good people who are acting in this manner shows just how deeply the control of dirt and concrete runs in this town.

I leave it to you and your legal team to figure out exactly how to challenge the ordinance. But I call on you, as my Mayor, as my representative at the tables of power in this city, to stand up and carry on the fight. I can't be certain whether you will win, though I firmly believe that our judicial system stands as our most steady bulwark against the corrosive effects of money, power and influence.

The powers that be, acting through their influence on a too-easily-swayed council, want to dictate who may speak to the Mayor, when, and where. It is, of course, an outrage, and it was accomplished in a back room while committee members shamelessly ignored the public speaking against it.

If you fight and win, you will have struck a serious blow in favor of Democracy.

If you fight and lose, you will have provided an example of integrity that may inspire others to continue to fight.

If you do not fight, you will gain the peace and quiet and respite of the morally dead.