By Barb Shelly, Kansas City Star editorial page columnist
The latest brouhaha to sweep through Kansas City's government buildings is the police department's reluctance to get on board with the regional jail project involving City Hall and Jackson County.
This thing is a thicket; you can be knee-deep in the details and not be sure exactly what's going on.
But at one level the controversy looks like a clash of cultures.
The Police Department is a ponderous, chain-of-command, dot-every-I-and-cross-every-T bureaucracy. Chief Jim Corwin wants a detailed plan to take to the police board. He wants contracts and assurances and every detail worked out.
Jackson County Executive Mike Sanders is an impatient, results-oriented manager. He sees a regional jail, managed by the county, as an accomplishment for his administration. His style is to get the thing moving and work out the details along the way.
To get the City Council's cooperation in the project, the county agreed to turn the renovation of a new downtown jail over to City Hall's Capital Improvements Management Office (CIMO).
That was a mistake, in my opinion. Jackson County is functioning better than City Hall right now, and should have taken over the project. The Police Department has had multiple problems with CIMO and its work on the Police Academy and other law enforcement construction projects. You really can't blame the police brass for being cautious about linking arms with the city and CIMO on a rushed project.
Corwin says he wants to close down the Police Department's detention unit. And it still seems like he could make the regional jail work for the police by sitting down for a nuts-and-bolts meeting with Sanders and City Manager Wayne Cauthen. But the rush to get the new jail up and running by Aug. 1 for city budgetary purposes definitely suits Sanders' style more than Corwin's.
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No surprise here, another Cauthen blooper
Who is responsible for CIMO? None other than our unqualified City Manager, Wayne Cauthen. It baffles me, Barb, that you and others at the Star have not called for his immediate termination. All of you know that he is an unqualified disaster in his lack of qualifications (both education and experience), finance lack of knowledge, and poor (let's say pathetic) administration. Do you guys at the Star want to keep things the way they are so that Captain Wrong-Way Peachfuzz and his crew will provide you with more copy? I suspect this sure beats the heck out of local investigative reporting.