Nace Baiting

When Mary Kelly burst into tears on a Saturday morning late last June, she unwittingly set the stage for another venomous election season in Kansas City.

With Election Day nine months away, Kelly didn't care who would be running for City Council. The only things on her mind that morning were a string of broken promises and a dirty creek that had flooded her neighbors' yards and houses for decades.

Kelly was livid before she arrived at the Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center for the town hall meeting hosted by her council representatives, Becky Nace and Terry Riley. "I was really going to go and say some hard things," she says. "But I didn't think that would be right for God. If somebody is being a fool because they're angry, then other people feed into it, and that can cause a problem."

It would have been easy to whip up the crowd. The two dozen people who were there shared Kelly's frustration. For years, city officials had promised them a host of neighborhood-improvement projects -- level sidewalks, unclogged storm drains, smooth-flowing creek beds. Bureaucrats at City Hall had even sent some of the residents notices assuring them that the projects would be funded. A few folks had held on to those letters for more than twenty years -- long after they'd given up hope of city workers ever showing up to do the jobs.

Kelly stepped to the microphone. She had barely begun telling the story of Town Fork Creek, an eroding tributary of the Blue River that meanders through the hills of southeast Kansas City, before she broke down.

"My father told us not to cry about things," she tells the Pitch. "But after he died, I learned that you have to release whatever is in you. To me, tears is a way of release and cleansing."

Her father had also preached against whining for handouts. Born in Meridian, Mississippi, during the Jim Crow years, Tom Bell had been an up-by-his-bootstraps entrepreneur. With nothing more than a wheelbarrow and a strong back, he had bartered for food, clothing, shelter and whatever else his family needed. In time, he moved up to a horse-drawn cart, then a truck. "My father was a legend," Kelly says. "He was the first black business owner in the area."

Kelly followed her dad's example. From her small, segregated schoolhouse near the Alabama border, she went on to earn a graduate degree in nursing. She finished her 35-year career at Kansas City's VA Hospital as a top supervisor. Now she's a 77-year-old exercise instructor. "I'm a senior citizen," she says. "But I don't think like one. I don't act like one. And I don't look like one."

Although he might not have approved of his daughter's sobbing, Tom Bell would wholeheartedly have supported her having stood up and spoken out. "My father believed his word was his bond, and he expected that from others," she says. "I take it serious when the city doesn't follow through on promises."

After Kelly and several of her neighbors spoke, Councilwoman Nace addressed the crowd. She explained that when she'd assumed office in 1999, she had discovered a huge backlog of unfinished neighborhood projects. In many cases, the projects had been funded for their design phases and then abandoned. In other cases, Nace said, her predecessors had secretly shifted the money to more politically salable projects, such as the brass stars adorning a "Walk of Jazz Legends" sidewalk near Bartle Hall.

Then Nace gave them more bad news. She and Riley had agreed that no new projects would be approved until the backlog was eliminated, except to fix problems that posed public hazards. That meant no new sidewalks. Or gutters. Or park equipment.

No one was happy to hear this, but everyone understood and respected the decision. Kelly walked away satisfied that at least she'd been heard.

Kelly wasn't thinking about the ballot box on that sunny weekend. But other, more powerful people were. The next day, former Mayor Emanuel Cleaver struck the first blow in a campaign to replace Nace as Kelly's representative.

In a brief Kansas City Star story, Cleaver vowed to fight against Nace's re-election in March. "I have never worked to have anyone defeated, but I will make an exception to that rule in this case," he told the paper.

Kelly doesn't subscribe to the Star, so she missed the story that jolted political junkies with an early buzz. But she heard Cleaver repeat his war cry a couple of weeks later from the pulpit of his church, St. James United Methodist, in a sermon that was broadcast on KMJK 107.3. Bemused, Kelly listened as Cleaver told his flock that Nace had committed a political sin by denying "repeated requests" for new sidewalks around his recently expanded church, which sits in Nace's 5th District.

Kelly thought back to the meeting at which she'd wept before a crowd of angry citizens. Cleaver hadn't been there. He hadn't heard Nace explain that the backlog of unfinished work had pushed new sidewalks far down the list of priorities. Unlike Kelly and her neighbors, Cleaver's church had never applied for neighborhood-improvement funds.