On a Rail

Comedian Chris Rock has a very funny routine called "Upside Your Head." In it the "perp" takes a number of people hostage in an office, creating panic as to who will get hit upside the head. The essence of the joke is that sometimes a person gets so frustrated with others' idiocy that he loses all control and goes on a rampage, smacking people in the hopes of knocking some sense into them.

After last Tuesday's election, a lot of people may want to capture Clay Chastain and deliver him an "upside your head." Only the squeaky journalist voice in my head keeps me from being one of the many with that compulsion. Yet that same voice compels me to talk with Chastain whenever he begins a quest to knock city officials upside their heads with another initiative petition -- and to revisit him when that effort misses its mark.

I support light rail. I find it irrational not to. Only the most narcissistic culture would ignore its responsibility to the future, giving no thought to the prodigal consumption of limited land and oil resources for what amounts to instant gratification. Maybe it takes a Chastain to remind us of that, and we know it. How else can you explain his success in getting enough signatures to place a string of initiatives on the ballot three years in a row?

But if some people have recognized his vision, many haven't accepted his leadership. Chastain can't get that fact through his head. That's why he keeps coming back. And ironically, because there is no other light-rail leader with the same level of commitment, Chastain has a reason to keep coming back. "No one will challenge the establishment after me," Chastain told me a few days after his November 7 initiative lost with less than 40 percent of the vote.

But what Chastain seems unable to understand -- maybe without something upside his head -- is that a lot of people don't care about challenging the establishment. They just want light rail built.

The argument that the establishment doesn't want light rail evaporated when The Kansas City Starendorsed Chastain's 1999 sales tax proposal (it included money for capital improvements). The newspaper took a chance, perhaps miscalculating the extent of public support by basing its editorial decision partly on the fact that Chastain's 1998 proposal had earned 45 percent of the vote. More likely, however, was that the newspaper wanted to keep the light-rail process going despite Chastain's follies. The newspaper's endorsement spurred civic leaders to begin thinking about putting something on the table.

Also, in a way, the endorsement attempted to undo the damage done in 1997, when then-mayor Emanuel Cleaver condemned the Area Transportation Authority's midtown light-rail plan as "touristy frou-frou" and called the ATA Board "pitiful." Doing the bidding of Broadway/Westport property owners and echoing the protests of businessmen James Nutter and R. Crosby Kemper, Cleaver shifted the light-rail issue to the Chamber of Commerce. From there it became more of a business deliberation than a public transportation consideration. The ATA never stepped back into a leadership position on light rail. Into that vacuum stepped Chastain.

Chastain knew what he was doing. And though he tried hard to fill a leadership role -- making a second run for mayor in 1998 and floating three light-rail petitions (1998, 1999, and 2000) -- he couldn't pull it off. His personality -- his ego -- kept re-creating that vacuum. It prevented him from accepting any role other than one he could keep all to himself. When Warren Erdman and other members of the Central Business Corridor (CBC) made overtures to Chastain earlier this year, asking him to join forces to formulate a light-rail plan, Chastain refused. The CBC wanted Chastain to give up the petition effort -- the one thing of power he had.

"I never got a phone call from anybody," Chastain says. "When we started the petition effort, that's when I got the phone call. The catch was that we would have to cancel the petition drive. When I said no, they never called again."

Chastain says he wanted his initiative on the presidential-election ballot. He was convinced the large turnout could guarantee a victory. Short of that Chastain couldn't compromise, couldn't separate himself from the light-rail issue, and couldn't bring himself to trust anyone beyond a small circle of people who had the same deficiency they accused city leaders of having: the tendency to put selfish concerns ahead of good public policy.

Chastain can't see that. He declined Erdman's gesture because, he says, he didn't want a "business veto" of his plan, he didn't want to give up a vote during a major election, and he couldn't bring himself to "cut a deal."

"We had a fundamental difference in philosophy," says Chastain. "The city (might) have put on a competing ballot measure. We didn't want to get stuck with another bad plan. We wanted to put this major issue (before the public) without city officials who don't know what they're doing. I argued against it; I know what the city does. They never approached me until the petition was in place."