Funk chooses fight over flight
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"Now I realize that if you are in a war, you have to fight back," Funkhouser said. "The attacks -- the attempts by your opponents to define you and your positions -- must be challenged. If you don't challenge the attacks, you let someone else define you. I will not let that happen anymore.
"Reconciling the need to be honorable, ethical, honest and straight with the need to fight back has been hard. But I have to fight. And I will. But I will fight fair."
Funkhouser admitted that he has "gotten off to a slow start" but denies that he is "a lovesick puppy."
"I am damn near 60 years old," Funkhouser said. "I have traveled the world and built an international reputation as a performance auditor. And all without my wife. You might have heard -- she doesn't fly."
Uh, congrats?
Read Funk's full speech after the jump.
The State of the City
All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church Forum
January 25, 2009
Introduction
It is good to be back at All Souls.
When I took this podium last January I didn't understand the significance of this event.
And maybe it was fortunate that I didn't realize it because I felt free to be myself and to speak frankly about the State of our City. I looked at the speech not as an opportunity to make headlines or reposition myself politically. I took it as an assignment to deliver an accurate and insightful assessment of the condition of our city government.
Embracing the task, I described a city, my city, as going in the fundamentally wrong direction. I pointed out the budget imbalance and the misdirected priorities and the unfair burden being borne by Kansas City proper in supporting the entire metropolitan area.
I don't remember hearing gasps from those of you who were assembled here. I remember seeing heads nod.
I don't remember hissing and booing. I remember applause.
I remember one gentleman standing up and saying "Mr. Mayor you have scored a triumph here today!"
But outside these walls, the speech was summarized negatively. "Mayor trashes his own city." And I was branded as the worst cheerleader of all time. Cheerleader. It is an odd role to require of elected officials.
I'm pretty sure cheerleading wasn't what people had in mind when they voted for me. I'm a public finance expert - a policy analyst.
I campaigned on fixing problems; the metal plates, the budget, the TIF process. I pledged to be smarter with taxpayer's money. I promised to be the mayor who would make our city a city that works for regular folks.
Because I campaigned on the premise that the city wasn't working, how surprising could it have been that, upon election, I didn't hoist the pom poms and lead the crowd in a rousing victory chant?
But there it is.
And I've been taking criticism ever since. I am often condemned for not putting the public's perception of ME, MY own personal public image, high enough on my priority list. But that's not my job. My job is to do what I think will make our city a better place for you and your family to live.
The job is difficult. Much more difficult than I realized. It has taken a toll on me. And it has taken a toll on my family. Had I known then what I know now - the sacrifices my loved ones have had to make - I would have thought twice about taking on the challenge.
But I did take it on.
And I have promises to keep.
I'm not the first mayor of Kansas City to be sideswiped by the reality of what it means to be Mayor of this diverse, sprawling and cantankerous city.
Slow starts are something of a tradition.
Kay Barnes won in a landslide and had a mandate; but in her first few years, she was engulfed in a controversy about an alleged secret plan to sell the Water Department. Critics charged her with forming task forces but accomplishing little of substance. She was attacked by business leaders for proposing a strong mayor form of government. And some City Council members complained that "communication broke down" between the Mayor and councilmembers in Barnes' first term.
Emanuel Cleaver is one of the most ethical men I know, but his early months were dogged by minor scandals. In his first two years in office, the city lost four tax elections.
Being in a position as auditor to observe both mayors, I guess I should have learned more from their experiences.
But - just like Mayor Barnes and Mayor Cleaver - I've gotten off to a slow start.
But I'm a quick study. I've learned a lot in my first 20 months in office, particularly about politics.
I thought I already knew quite a bit about politics, because for nearly 30 years I worked directly for elected officials and for nearly 20 years I taught graduate courses in public administration at Park University, KU and UMKC.
I had reason to believe I had all the political skills I needed for this job.
Without political skills, I could have never survived 18 years as auditor, serving under six different City Councils who could have fired me at any time. But I held my job even as I pushed scathing reports about the failings of the government they were responsible for running. That took political skill.
It took political skill to get the street lighting system upgraded.
It took political skill to change the national auditing standards.
It took political skill to get the authority to audit the police. Our police department is under state control. No one thought the City Auditor would ever get the authority to audit the police. But I got the state law changed - and eventually the routine audits of the police have become an accepted fact - by both the police and the community. When I retired as Auditor the police gave me their highest awards - the Chiefs medallion and the ceremonial baton.
I have achieved a lot through politics.
What I didn't know is that there are two very different types of politics.
The first type of politics can be described as the art of persuading people to do what they don't want to do. This is the one I knew about.
The second type of politics can be described as the "process by which we kick, bite, scratch, punch, gouge and claw at each other."
This is the type that I didn't know about, but which I have come to learn first hand.
I have always believed that politics is a sacred process. We are a self-governing people and it is through the political process that we accomplish self-government. It is how we create a government "of the people, by the people, for the people."
I told my students, "Politics is the process by which we contend with each other to determine which of our values we will make real."
We give lip service to many ideals but politics is how we decide which ideals we will devote resources and money to, and actually make happen.
"The process by which we will contend which each other." In retrospect the word sounds so sterile.
Contend doesn't begin to capture the essence of what happens in the second type of politics.
The second type of politics manifests itself as intense scrutiny and unfailingly negative spin on the most insignificant of decisions. A constant backroom barrage of criticism and sniping that threatens to overwhelm any healthy conversation before it has even begun.
It includes an amazing focus on how an idea is presented and very little fair consideration of what the idea actually is.
You would never believe how much conversation is generated by a simple invitation to a press conference or meeting. There are an infinite number of ways to mess that up. Who was invited first? How were they invited? How much later were the press alerted?
None of those details are important to you. They make absolutely no difference in how you feel about Kansas City as a place to live or raise your children. These details don't pave your streets or clear your snow or pick up your recyclables. These details don't fix your schools, revitalize your neighborhoods or lower crime rates. These details accomplish nothing in the grand scheme of running a city that works.
When I entered big-time politics, I expected vigorous arguments about policy.
I was confident I would succeed as mayor because I know a great deal about the workings of the city government, its financial condition, and the makeup of our city residents.
But knowledge of the facts and logical thinking aren't valued in the second type of politics - the kicking, and biting and gouging kind. In that type of politics, what people argue about are personal issues and trivia.
That caught me by surprise and kind of knocked me off my feet for a while. I was ready to contend - I wasn't prepared to fight.
My initial response to the attacks was that they weren't fair. They weren't seemly. And they needed to stop. And I thought that if they didn't stop, and if I just kept on doing my work, the attacks would be dismissed as petty and silly. And in that light, they would prove ineffective.
I was wrong. The attacks have been successful in defining me and what I am all about.
When I read about myself in the newspaper I often do not recognize the man they are describing. Often their version of me - and of Gloria - has no connection at all to who we really are.
The attacks have caused some of my past supporters to withdraw their support. I still shake my head in disbelief at the endless political cartoons and one-liner jokes illustrating the belief that I'm so attached to my wife that I can't leave home without her. I'm not a lovesick puppy. I am damn near 60 years old. I have traveled the world and built an international reputation as a performance auditor. And all without my wife. You might have heard - she doesn't fly.
I didn't try to protect myself. I didn't fight back in the same spirit that I was being attacked. I thought fighting back was negative and unethical. I thought fighting back would distract me from the issues, the REAL issues that needed my attention and my energy.
But I get it now. Now I realize that if you are in a war, you have to fight back. The attacks - the attempts by your opponents to define you and your positions - must be challenged. If you don't challenge the attacks, you let someone else define you. I will not let that happen anymore.
Reconciling the need to be honorable, ethical, honest and straight with the need to fight back has been hard. But I have to fight. And I will. But I will fight fair.
I've learned that the reason to fight is not just to protect myself and my family.
If politics is the process by which we contend with each other to see which of our values we make real, and if I do not fight - and win - then the values that I want to advance will not be achieved.
I ran for office to advance a certain agenda and to achieve certain objectives. If I do not learn to fight effectively, my family and I will have made enormous sacrifices for naught. And a historic opportunity to turn our city around will have been lost.
For me, fighting effectively means staying alive, staying in office, and continuing to advance my agenda for our city. And it means bringing the citizens of Kansas City and their elected leadership together in a renewed spirit of conviction and commitment to a common purpose.
There is much reason for hope. And despite all the negative press about my relationship with the city council, the fact is the council and I have voted together on every single policy issue. And thus - together - this council and I have scored accomplishments that will serve our city well in the coming years.
Working together, the council and I have fundamentally changed the conversation about how our city guides development. In passing a much-needed policy on the use of tax incentives, we stopped the indiscriminant handouts to developers.
And I can count at least a dozen other accomplishments:
• Secured voter approval of renewal of the capital improvements sales tax
• Strengthened regulation of billboards in the city
• Strengthened regulation of payday loan companies
• Got most of the metal plates off the streets
• Adopted a strong, fiscally responsible budget
• Reinvigorated the Mayor's Night Hoops program
• Launched the Mayor's Night Kicks program
• Continued the revitalization of downtown
• Secured voter approval of renewal of the bus tax
• Established the Metropolitan Mayors' Caucus
• Filed with the EPA a state of the art combined sewers overflow control plan
• Successfully launched the New Tools Initiative
These accomplishments absolutely align with the agenda I crafted for my campaign and have remained focused on ever since...
Be smarter with the money; so that citizen satisfaction improves; so that people return to the urban core of the city. It was a vision I had as early as 1989.
Back then, as a new Kansas Citian, reviewing the first of many submitted budgets I would examine on behalf of the city council, I wrote:
"The City's needs are virtually limitless, but its resources are not. Choices have to be made with regard to which needs will be addressed through programs funded by City government and which will not. However, we as a community, have been avoiding making the choices required."
In some respects we continued to avoid overt choices over the next twenty years. But we did choose. We chose to indiscriminately offer Tax Increment Financing deals as our principal method of economic development rather than doing the hard work of community building and workforce development. We chose to focus much of our capital improvement effort on sports venues and toys for the rich rather than basic infrastructure and maintenance. And we chose to focus on downtown development at the expense of neighborhoods.
In doing so, we have exacerbated the fundamental problem for Kansas City - People are moving away.
We spent great energy and money and resources on amenities that made us LOOK successful. We wanted to LOOK major league. And we've done a pretty good job of that. Kansas City remains the home of most of the regional amenities; the zoo, the Chiefs, the Royals, the Nelson, the Kemper, Liberty Memorial and Union Station.
In keeping the amenities, Kansas City has remained a nice place to visit.
But for too many Kansas City is no longer a nice place to live. And they tell us that loudly and clearly. The numbers can't be denied. Since 1968, we have lost at least 100,000 people south of the river. Think about that. We've lost Joplin and Jefferson City combined.
But the metropolitan area has grown. Folks aren't moving far, just far enough. And they take their tax dollars and property values with them.
This is something I realized and reported on in that same 1989 report.
In that report, I wrote;
"Discouraging population loss should be a cornerstone of the city's economic development strategy....The City should add to its economic development activities a clear focus on attracting and retaining residents as well as businesses and industries. ...
In 2000, my auditor's office commissioned the first citizen satisfaction survey.
I thought we needed a way to find out what our citizens wanted from their city government and to get their opinion of how good a job we were doing in order to keep them wanting to live here.
For the last eight years, the Mayor and City Council and City Manger have received a report card on the job they are doing.
This past year has been a hard one for me for a lot of reasons. There have been disappointing days and trying council meetings and gut wrenching newspaper columns.
I can take it. I am a tough man. As a young man growing up in the scrub hills of West Virginia I had plenty of fights. My own father broke my nose at least twice.
But even in a year as bad as I've had, my biggest disappointment was when I saw this year's citizen satisfaction scores.
Those numbers. The ones that had been so important to me as auditor. The numbers that I campaigned on. The numbers I knew we had to improve if we had any chance of seeing our city truly succeed.
Those numbers were worse than the year before. And they are not acceptable to me, to us, to you. Our city can do better. Our citizens deserve better. And beginning today, I pledge to renew my campaign promise;
A City That Works.
This new program, A City That Works, is a renewed effort to focus our city government on results that matter to Kansas Citians.
The program has five elements:
1. Focus on a few performance measures
I'm going to meet weekly with the City Manager, a committee chair and city staff and focus each week on one specific measure. We'll work with the staff to consider the issues they face in managing the particular service being measured and what steps can be taken to improve citizen satisfaction. By shining a spotlight on a particular function we can find ways to improve the results. With the rotating schedule, each measure will be subject to public scrutiny every six weeks.
2. Targeted funding
Through the weekly meetings focused on specific measures we will identify areas where relatively small amounts of additional funding seem likely to produce large improvements in service delivery and citizen satisfaction. And we will look for ways throughout the fiscal year to free up resources to make those funding increases.
3. Quarterly reporting of survey results
The citizen satisfaction surveys have been done once a year since their inception. That is not often enough to make them a viable part of our civic dialogue. With more frequent feedback we can make sure that the steps we are taking are working.
4. The New Tools Initiative
The New Tools Initiative is a citizen-driven, bottoms up process aimed at developing an economic development plan for the distressed areas of the city. These areas have some of the lowest citizen satisfaction ratings and improving conditions will increase citizen satisfaction.
5. Enhanced community engagement
Kansas City faces a huge financial crisis. The shortfall in the coming budget is $90 million and it grows to $400 to $500 million in five years. We need to make massive structural changes in the way the city funds and delivers services. The only way those decisions will get made is if the people who bear the consequences of the decisions are the ones making them. But in Kansas City, satisfaction with public involvement in decision-making is only 20 percent. That figure is lower than for any other city in our metropolitan area. The level of satisfaction with city communication is worse for Kansas City than the average for our metropolitan area and worse than most big cities.
We need citizens to be informed, engaged and confident in the decisions made by their government. To get that done I'm going to work with my council colleagues and city staff on creating the following positions; New Tools Community Organizers, a Citywide Volunteer Coordinator, an Ombudsman and a Director of Community Engagement.
• New Tools Community Organizers. The city is taking the unprecedented step of hiring four full-time community organizers to engage the community in the development of an economic development plan for distressed areas.
• Citywide Volunteer Coordinator. Many cities have a staff person whose job it is to recruit, train and manage citizen volunteers. For example, Olathe, Kansas, perennially the city with one of the highest overall citizen satisfaction ratings in the metropolitan area, has an extensive volunteer program overseen by a highly trained professional volunteer coordinator.
• Ombudsman. More and more progressive cities are adding an ombudsman office to their organization. The ombudsman allows dispute resolution between the city and individual citizens who believe they've been treated unfairly. The ombudsman function differs from the 311 service provided by the city because it allows a more in depth investigation and possible mediation of the individual citizen's complaint.
• Director of Community Engagement. The city needs a full-time staff function reporting to the City Manager whose responsibility is to look citywide for ways to improve citizen engagement with city government. The creation of this position would probably reduce costs overall as individual departments hire public relations firms and take other steps to try to educate, inform, and engage citizens.
In addition, we'll create
• "A City That Works" Website. The report prepared by the PFM financial consultants says that "The city should focus department efforts on determining the handful of key performance indicators by department and track and inform citizens of results in these areas. Other widely publicized government results websites have had a positive impact on citizen satisfaction with government." We will implement this recommendation and launch a website that tracks the city's efforts to improve citizen satisfaction and the results of those efforts.
It's budget season. We are in the middle of a huge local, national, international, and global economic crisis. This is the biggest economic crisis in generations. And I've seen in coming for years. In preparation for this budget season, I revisited all of my past budget reviews
In 1999 the projected deficit was $48 million - I thought that was an enormous sum. Now, just ten years later, the consequence of our ignoring the structural imbalance is that the deficit is ten times larger - between $460 and $540 million. That we can't ignore. Nipping and tucking and dodging and ducking isn't going to get it done.
So how can you improve citizen satisfaction with city services in the teeth of a huge financial crisis? Obviously, just throwing money at it isn't an answer.
We have, right now, today, an historic opportunity to begin making structural changes in our government. We need a city government in which decisions and services are focused on the people who actually live in Kansas City.
We can take a page from Olathe. I've visited Olathe city hall. On their walls, they don't have pretty pictures of regional amenities. On their walls they have charts and graphs. Charts and graphs that track the expectations of its residents and how their city services live up to those expectations. The citizen satisfaction results guide their budget process.
Kansas City residents earn less than 20 percent of the total income in the metropolitan area. Nevertheless, as many of my audit reports pointed out over the years and as the PFM report highlights, the residents of Kansas City pay a disproportionate share of the cost of regional amenities. How did this happen? As the financial center of gravity of the metropolitan region shifted to the suburbs, especially to Johnson County, Kansas, the power and influence of Kansas Citians over their own government has declined as well. There is no other way to explain the decisions that have been made. The city government has repeatedly funded services in ways at odds with the expressed desires of its residents
It is not an accident that the largest city in the metropolitan area is also virtually the only city without its own Chamber of Commerce.
Alexander Graham Bell once said, "When one door closes another door opens but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us."
The present economic crisis may have closed one door. But here's the door that's open; we have an opportunity to engage and inform our citizens in ways that will refocus our government on the things that matter to the people who call Kansas City home. We have an opportunity for a rebirth of the Kansas City Spirit
Make no mistake. This is not a rejection of regionalism. Much of what we need to do to succeed depends upon regional cooperation. It is in the interest of every citizen in the metropolitan area to see Kansas City, Missouri thrive.
With your help, I intend to see that it does.
You have a Mayor who, whatever his other strengths and weaknesses might be, has trained his whole life to work with you to meet this challenge. I grew up working class - I have enormous respect for the wisdom of regular folks. I'm tough, determined, and I spent my professional career developing expertise in public financial management. It turns out this was the perfect time for Kansas Citians to take the odd step of electing a professional auditor as their Mayor. They elected, YOU elected, an auditor. Not a cheerleader.
I am asking you to join me today in a renewed commitment to a city that works. Citizenship is more than voting, it is a shared responsibility. Go to our website or contact my office to apply for appointment to a board or commission. Join in the work of the New Tools initiative. Volunteer to work with the city.
It is difficult to change the culture of government, especially one that has been going in the wrong direction for decades.
"There appears to be a tenuous line of communication between the governors of our society and the governed. This situation does not square with the concepts of democracy we have been taught to revere. The line of communication between the leaders and the people needs to be broadened and strengthened - and by more than a series of public-relations and publicity campaigns - else our concept of democracy is in danger of losing vitality in dealing with the problems that affect all in common."
Floyd Hunter, Community Power Structures, 1953
The purpose of the "City that Works" program is to connect you to your government so that together we deal "with the problems that affect all in common."
These are challenging times but we have much to be hopeful about. I pledge to you today a renewed commitment to a city that works. For you and for me, but most importantly, for our children.
Thank you.
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