Runaway Train

Clay Chastain thinks we mock him.

If only it were that simple. Ten years ago, while Union Station rotted and the "civic leaders" trying to save the landmark looked lame-ass at best, Chastain seemed like a hero. Relentlessly driving his petitions, he stood outside grocery stores and forced everyday people to care about the city's gigantic monument to failure. Unable to ignore an increasingly aroused rabble, the city's politicians, businessmen, philanthropists and busybodies -- an amorphous collective Chastain referred to as the establishment -- eventually figured out how to return the building to glory. But these rocket scientists flunked when they installed the laughable Science City as an alleged tourist attraction. Chastain, who's always thought the train station ought to be a train station, remains right about one thing: "There's nobody in there. It has no soul. It has no pulse. It has no life. It has no people."

If Clay'd had his way, JoCo commuters might pour into the station every hour. Gondolas might float to the Liberty Memorial, too. His proposals have always been wacky, but you have to give the guy credit for thinking big. And for having convinced -- or harangued -- a few thousand Sunfresh shoppers that his ideas were at least worth considering on election day.

Confirming his self-proclaimed status as an agitator who posed a serious threat, "the establishment" repeatedly fought Chastain's efforts in court. Over the years, though, Chastain's transit initiatives have created his own legacy of failure. Voters have always rejected his ideas, reducing him to fodder for Lee Judge's lazy cartoons and Hearne Christopher Jr.'s vacuous columns in The Kansas City Star. Moreover, it's bizarre (and insulting) when a guy who left town for Tennessee keeps visiting just long enough to put questions on Kansas City ballots. It's not that Chastain has bad ideas -- hell, we'd like to see street cars running from 75th Street to the River Market, an east-west light-rail line going out to the stadiums, and sexy, electric-hybrid Bus Rapid Transit cars zooming south from the Northland.

The problem is that he's lost touch with reality. Here's just one piece of evidence: If voters approve his proposal on November 4, Chastain says it would be up to the Area Transportation Authority to carry out the order -- and to truly understand how jacked-up the ATA is, just read Casey Logan's story ("Busted!") on page 15.

The truth is, you can't sit on the other side of Chastain's monotone barking, can't weather the glare from his furious eyeballs for long, before you start to feel very sad about what's become of him. It's tortured him into madness, this Kansas City transit problem.

Ask Chastain why he keeps putting proposals on ballots even though he promised he'd stop, and you get a sense of his existential delusions. "The establishment here was not solving this problem," he fumes. "If they had solved the problem, Clay Chastain would not be here. I would not exist. I only exist because the establishment hasn't solved this transit dilemma."

Additionally, he exhibits symptoms of paranoia. "I like to see beauty in design -- and when I don't see it, it upsets me. When I know we could do better. Incompetence upsets me. I'm an idealist. That's how I design. That's why I don't let anybody influence my designs -- because they'd be contaminated if I did."

He's become increasingly hostile: "I can't stand the ruling class that runs this town. I can't stand them, and it's mutual."

Yet he's unable to understand why the business community won't work with him: "I don't know why. Why don't you ask them? Why don't you ask them why they couldn't support this? Why they couldn't compromise and put some rail in the ATA plan like I asked them to do. [He's speaking loudly now.] Just put a rail line in, and we can compromise....These same good ol' boys that I've been fighting for the last decade don't want rail in this town. You go ask them why they don't want a hub at Union Station. Is it because they don't want the poor people mixing down there in that lily-white Science City exhibit?"

Chastain on the fact that he sounds paranoid and delusional: "I am somewhat. Who wouldn't be? Do you think I'm a robot? Do you think I don't feel? Do you think I'm some sort of superhuman who can just slough all this stuff off and walk around with a phony attitude like, CEOh, it doesn't bother me at all'? But if I could ever get one of those guys behind the scenes, I'd stick my knife in his back.... I come into town to be respectful of people, and I get treated disrespectfully, and I get mocked. When I come to town, I call people, I set up appointments, I drive all the way out here, I try to be a fair-minded, respectful person just presenting an idea, and I get treated like this. People wonder why sometimes I don't come off very engaging and warm and I'm hostile and I'm too intense. It's true, but you'd be, too, if you'd been treated like I have for ten years."