Mayor's 'School's First' Program Greeted By Silence In Committee

Kansas City, Mo. – The first phase of Kansas City Mayor Mark Funkhouser's "Schools First" program was sidelined in a council committee meeting yesterday. A number of citizens testified for the infrastructure improvement plan, and the mayor put in his pitch, including that the only expense next year would be $2 million in debt service.

"When you're spending $3 to $5 million a year and need to be spending many multiples of that, when you have a $1.6 billion backlog, which is what they tell us we have in sidewalks, you have to start somewhere," says Funkhouser.

But the committee wasn't willing to start by putting $100 million in infrastructure bonds on the ballot. Nobody moved to vote on the ordinance, meaning it doesn't go to the full council and is very unlikely to make the August ballot.