Busted

Last July, Mark Huffer stood in the basement of the Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church on Linwood Boulevard and tried to convince the large congregation of angry bus riders looking back at him that he felt their pain.

They weren't buying it.

Huffer, director of the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority, was there to announce what most people in the audience already knew: Without an increase in the sales tax that fuels local transit, Kansas City's crappy bus system would get downright shitty. For one thing, no more service on Saturday nights. For another, no service at all on Sundays. The attendees, crammed inside an urban church, most of them dependent on the bus, several of them blind, didn't like the sound of that.

But they also didn't like the idea of more taxes, and Huffer's weak sales pitch for the tax increase (Huffer may be the least passionate speaker in local government) seemed to inspire only more contempt from his audience. If voters approved the tax, he said, the ATA "would be in position to make some modest improvements."

Two months later, Huffer offered the same flaccid appeal to a panel of downtown impresarios for whom buses are primarily exhaust-blasting traffic obstacles. Leading the discussion was Tom McDonnell, chairman of the Greater Downtown Development Association and CEO of DST Systems, downtown's biggest single developer. When Huffer finished his spiel, McDonnell reacted with skepticism. Eventually, the GDDA chose to endorse the proposal, but only after the downtown landlords asked why they should pay more for a transit system that had such a miserable record to show for past expenditures.

Huffer might have responded to that question with contempt.

At a time when the ATA faces a crippling budget crisis, documents show that millions of dollars intended for public transportation have instead been siphoned off for a wasteful welfare program for rich developers. Money earmarked for people of modest means who rely on bus service for their livelihoods instead is being sucked away for the benefit of a wealthy club of business insiders and, records show, squandered through neglect and lack of oversight. With only days left until the election, there's been no public discussion of how cash incentives for the rich have helped decimate the ATA's budget surplus and put the bus service on life support.

And regardless of what voters decide on November 4, they're powerless to stop it.

On November 4, Kansas City voters will decide whether to approve a five-year, three-eighths-cent sales-tax increase that would pump an additional $22 million annually into the ATA. A no vote on Question 1, the bus service says, will mean layoffs, mass service cuts and, no doubt, an outbreak of broken hips as a result of all the little old ladies walking to church come busless Sundays.

A yes vote means more people get to keep their jobs and maybe not so much hip breaking. But besides that, the ATA promises "new" routes that aren't so new and "improvements" along routes that currently suck. Ask the bus service to expound on those ideas, and the ever-enthusiastic ATA leadership shrugs and points you to their Web site. Pathetic? Embarrassing? Depressing? Yes, yes and yes. But remember: hips.

Predictably, the tax proposal has been met with widespread criticism of the ATA. Observers both rich and poor wonder why Huffer and company didn't foresee the financial doomsday coming and plan accordingly. The ATA's defense is part history lesson, part mercy plea.

Quickly, the history: In 1965, the state legislatures of Missouri and Kansas created the ATA as a means of buying out private transit companies and establishing a single transportation agency to serve the entire metro area (Cass, Clay, Jackson and Platte counties in Missouri; Johnson, Leavenworth and Wyandotte counties in Kansas). When it came time to fund the ATA, however, neither state gave it the authority to collect taxes from all those areas. Consequently, for more than three decades, local funding for the ATA has come entirely from a half-cent sales tax collected only in Kansas City, Missouri. In other words, buy a Buick in Olathe, and you pay nothing toward public transit. Buy burnt ends in midtown, and you do.

Naturally, as the economy blows, so blows the ATA. And in recent years, both have blown pretty hard. Seven years ago, the ATA had $16 million in reserves. Today, nothing. Less than nothing, really, because the ATA predicts a $12 million shortfall in 2004 alone.

Which brings us back to service cuts and fragile bones and worrisome drops in church attendance. To offset its budget woes and prevent such calamities, the ATA presents the sales tax du jour. Proponents promise that when the five-year tax expires, Kansas City will be on the brink of having a truly regional transit system: buses that run on time, buses that take you where you want to go, and buses that bring you back to where you started -- a seemingly simple concept, yet one elusive to the city's leadership.

But that rosy future prediction doesn't change the hard-sell approach to the ATA's current tax proposal, which is essentially the same as one The National Lampoon made when it ran its famous cover headline "If You Don't Buy This Magazine, We'll Kill This Dog." Vote no, we're told, and thousands of Kansas Citians who rely on bus service will suffer greatly. And according to Citizens for Public Transit, there will be a ripple effect far beyond the relatively small number of people who ride the bus. Those folks, denied mobility, may lose jobs, causing business to suffer and the local economy to fail; and pretty soon you'll see animals walking in pairs toward a big boat.