Fishy Smells at Kansas City Library

A great deal of hype on the front pages of the Kansas City Star boosted the plans to move the central library collection into "Jonathan's building" - the old First National bank building a few feet from Jonathan Kemper's Commerce Bank. The Kemper family controls the $14,000,000,000 bank as well as the $9,000,000,000 UMB bank nearby, Jonathan Kemper is Commerce Bank's presiding officer. The renovation will cost an estimated $50,200,000, $25,000,000 of which philanthropists - including institutions dominated by Jonathan Kemper - put up. It is difficult to ascertain from the sloppy reporting of the Star the exact nature of these "donations", or, for that matter, the structure of the deal as a whole. In any case, an association of real estate owners headquartered in the Commerce Bank Building and dominated by Jonathan Kemper put together a limited liability corporation to buy and renovate the property, secure tax credits, make a deal to lease the library to the city, eventually sell the library building to the public library entity. The library presently gets most of its funding from property taxes. An attempt will be made to pass along all costs to taxpayers. Jonathan Kemper is supervising the public's interest as trustee for the Kansas City Public Library system.

The Kansas City Star ran several front-page features boosting the new library, and ignored numerous complaints from me that the editors and reporters were ignoring significant facts and were misleading the public by blurring the distinction between news and advertising. They and the City Manager, the Mayor and other civic leaders ignored my numerous complaints as well as the supporting facts which I had dug up on my own. The official policy of civic leaders seems to be the one recommended to them by former Denver Mayor Webb: "ignore naysayers." However that may be, time and time again I urged the reporters to do what every investigator worth his salt does as a matter of habit: "Follow the money."

It appeared to me that the Kansas City Star, in regards to the library and other, much larger downtown projects involving tax credits of nearly $500,000,000, was prostituting itself to political leaders who were in league with certain vested interests whose "civic-mindedness" was not as benevolent as they would have taxpayers assume from the "news." I suspected that the Star had a tax-incentive incentive, in the form of its new $200,000,000 printing plant, not to throw stones from that enormous glass building, although it has not hesitated to cast aspersions at Missouri legislators who took away the tax exemption for print materials, a specific act which the editor says portends general doom for private industry everywhere in the state.

In any event, I had never read another paper so obsessed with boosting, in the name of downtown revitalization, the projects of a small power elite who will reap considerable benefits in the name of "civic-mindedness." The extent of the distribution of crumbs is questionable but not reported on in detail, and the trickle-down effect of the projects boosted is dubious given past history - "There ain't nothin' in it for us," is the constant chorus heard among Jackson County's large population of working poor and unemployed people. As for history, the Star's boosterism brought to mind the words of the patriarch of the Kemper family dynasty when he ran as a Populist-minded Democrat for mayor in 1904:

"The Star as a political factor in our city is death to whomsoever it smiles upon because of the fact that the taxpayers and people of our city have found through its record in the past years it has not been their friend, but has ever fought the cause of taxpayers in the city in behalf of invidious interests."

 "(The old library building) is too small for its collection."

I have a written statement from the library's spokesperson stating that the bookshelves in the old stacks were not full. Another library staff member informed me that the collection of books had actually been downsized by several thousand books to fit the new library - a very large space is devoted to "show business" - and that the collection had been "dumbed down" to suit the actual mentality of Kansas Citians. The spokesperson denied both assertions, but she was unable to disprove them because, or so she claimed, the staff was unable to account for the library's most important public property, the collection itself, because of inadequate information systems.

She admitted that the collection had not been properly maintained for thirty years. She could not or would not provide a list of books purged over the last year; statements of quantities of books in the collection prior to the current period; actual floor space available for shelving books at the old location including basement stacks, as compared to space planned for shelving at the new location; and so on.

When a thirty-minute cursory examination of the database uncovered several discrepancies of the kind that would shed light on the number of books removed from the stacks during the last purge if only the database were queried, she would not provide the list requested and immediately removed or had removed the records brought to her attention. She, as well as a "marketing" spokesperson, continually prevaricated as to the quantity of books, stating that more books would be available to the public than before. Well, yes, more books would be immediately be available for browsing, simply because the public was not allowed onto two floors of the old building; however, books were retrieved from shelves in the "stacks" in a few minutes on request.

The rhetoric had its intended effect; for instance, KCTV announced that "twice as many books were available" at the new library, misleading the public to believe that the collection of books itself has been doubled. After receiving dozens of complaints from me to the effect that the Star was ignoring the most important property, the libros (books), while boosting the physique of the $50,200,000 renovated building and praising Jonathan Kemper, the Star almost cleared up the misunderstanding about collection size in yet another front-page article, dated April 11, 2004, entitled 'Shhh! Libraries leading downtown revitalization.'

"And it's not as if the library is ignoring books, deputy director Dorothy Elliot said. 'We still have many, many books.... Look at the square footage.... '

The new Central Library has 190,000 square feet, versus 142, 000 square feet in its former home.

At the old building, a large part of the the collection was stored in the basement because there was not enough shelf space. In the new location, almost all the books will be on display."

I repeatedly asked several reporters and editors to "follow the money" and examine what appeared to be "exorbitant costs" in respect to the boosted project. The April 11 report finally admitted that the new, larger structure would need more funds for maintenance and utilities than the old place. More significantly, the lease payments for the new facility are $850,000 per month as opposed to $142,000 for the old space.

As for the total cost to bring the new structure on line, that would be, as stated, $50,200,000, or $264 per square foot of library space - including attached amenities such as the garage. A much larger, brand new facility could have been had for that amount. To find the cost per square foot to add the additional square footage, we deduct 142,000 from 190,000, which leaves 48,000 square feet added, at a cost of $1,046 per square foot of added space.

We can compare the Kansas City numbers to the figures given in the same article for the new Denver library, which was expanded from 130,000 square feet to 540,000 square feet, we come up with $139 per square foot for the whole renovated facility, and $183 per square foot for the 410,000 square feet added.

Something smells fishy in downtown Kansas City! The senior architect for HTNB - the architectural firm favored for numerous large projects downtown - apparently feels everything smells fine: he admits that it may be better to tear down and build anew, and attributes the huge difference to the need to reinforce the floors of the old bank building in order to support the books.

"(The old library building ) is too threadbare."

Again, a better library could have been built anew, or the old one could have been renovated, and for much less money up front and over time. The benefactors could have made certain that the central library remained where it has always been, in the beautiful historic Kansas City Civic Center.

But the association of real estate owners wanted it near the historic Kemper dynasty's campus, smack dab in the middle of the latest commercial revitalization of the campus, now called the "Library District."

Notwithstanding the pretexts previously given by the Star, when boosting the move, that is why it is where it is; and now that the dust has settled, the Star, finally. touts it for the real reason of its being, in the context of course of dozens of cities who are likewise using public libraries as private commercial real estate development tools. Again, the downtown real estate owners plan to sell the new library building to the city - the public would also foot costs going forward.

The librarians were ecstatic to get a new building, how could they refuse such an offer for a grand, "free" building? Enter Jennifer Wilding with her special study written for Kansas City Consensus, a policy group, showing that library funding is presently at risk as usual, therefore there should be a tax increase, and people outside of the library district should also be made to pay for the new library. ('Library funding at risk, study finds', Star, 4/20). Something smells fishy in downtown Kansas City!

"(The old library building) is too fetid and full of vagrants."

If I were to write a novel - I began my study of the Kemper family and the Star with that in mind - I would say that the old library was deliberately allowed to go to seed so that the need to relocate to the new location would become more and more pressing as time progressed. I am afraid that my own report of the pathetic conditions at the old library might have added to the impetus. Libraries all over have been "taken over by the homeless" over the last few years, but there was no excuse for conditions at the downtown Kansas City Library.

Fact: The house rules under the pertinent library board code were not being enforced at the old library. Fact: the same rules are being enforced at the new location. In fact, library supervision was not only negligent but was in the most serious violation of the code - not enforcing it. According to my sources, staff members on the floor were actually reprimanded for intervening in "security issues."

The attempt to blame the lack of discipline on all sorts of poor people under the rubric of "the homeless" and "vagrants," identifying them with petty criminals, creating an uproar and widespread hard feelings in the community, was a crying shame, a travesty of justice, a disservice to the community, and more. The supervision and the top administration were the culprits: supervision should have been disciplined; the director should resign or be terminated.

Something smells fishy in downtown Kansas City!

In sum: False pretexts for relocating the library were given by the power elite's propaganda organ, the Kansas City Star. The Star dedicated several front-page "news" articles to advertise the move and the new building, emphasizing at all times the Show Business aspects of the renovated structure, and failed to present a cogent and full statement of the structure of the deal among the particular parties involved together with a concise but complete statement of the sources and allocation of the $50,200,000 funding. Jonathan Kemper, who made "Jonathan's building" happen, and who appears by virtue of his various dominant positions to have conflicts of interest which blur the distinction between public and private interests, ultimately justified the move with the typical self-righteous statement of civic leaders who want something for nothing: "It is the right thing to do." For whom? Land-bankers, or landlords who collude with tax-incentive bestowing political leaders in legal and sometimes illegal graft, assembling and holding property for large-scale developments; big architectural firms and construction companies; big real estate developers and their bankers; the upper-middle class and elite who can afford to buy or rent high-value lofts, condominiums and the like; - all of which tends to broaden the gap between the rich and the poor as the rich shift more of the tax burden to the poor in the form of consumption taxes, fees and the like. Besides the prestige purchased by the elite who have their names and firms advertised, the new library as a business venture would be sheer folly without the expectation of profits and related appreciation of land values and leaseholds from the surrounding commercial real estate development in the Library District and the immediate vicinity. It appears that the prime movers of the new library project expect to recover around $25,000,000 from profits and related rise in values; the building itself will apparently be sold to the public library entity, but due to inadequate reporting by the Star, the general public has no way of knowing the structure of that intended transaction, or whether the "donations" from "philanthropists" are or are not recoverable; apparently the balance of the $50,200,000 does not come from "philanthropists" but ultimately from the taxpayer. That is to say that the public library is being used as a tool for private profit, and the plan is to unload it on the unwitting public once those gains are assured.

"Books are not the library's most important property anymore. Besides books, there's magazines, videos, online databases, internet access, software, meeting places, etc. The library is much more than just books." David King, Kansas City Public Library, April 30, 2004