Smiley Face, Sad Face

Councilmen Chuck Eddy and John Fairfield, mayoral candidates who sit on the committee, preferred to focus on the positive. Fairfield wanted Cornwell's report to detail all the private money that Kansas City had been able to leverage with TIF. When Cornwell showed a slide that described incentives as "investments," Eddy chortled with delight. "This may be the truest statement page you've had," he said.

I do give Eddy credit for acknowledging, as he did during the Cornwell presentation, that TIF didn't reach enough depressed sections of the city. That point was made oh-so-evident in a recent study by University of Missouri-Kansas City economist Michael Kelsay, who found that the city's most poverty-stricken areas got the least amount of TIF. The 3rd and 5th districts, where minorities outnumber whites, account for just 12.1 percent of the city's TIF plans, according to Kelsay's research. Former city auditor Mark Funkhouser, who is also running for mayor — and whose audits provided the basis for much of Kelsay's work — called that discrepancy "obscene" at a candidate forum last month.

The day after Eddy made his comment about TIF, I drove to the Bannister area to see what the city's "investments" had left behind. I met a woman at the bus stop near the recently deceased Wal-Mart. She said she had worked as a cashier there. She was waiting for a lift to the new store on U.S. 40.

The woman, who did not give her name, said her hours had been cut with the move to the new store. Once full time, she was on this week's schedule just two days. A lot of the Bannister Mall Wal-Mart veterans, she said, are upset that they now must fight with new hires for shifts. "They really dogged us."

A moment later, her bus arrived. In the city's cold calculus, she was technically one of 1,535 new workers. The pissed-off look on her face told another story.