Do They Court Us Because We Look Good or Because We Are Just Plain Gullible?Or Both?

Kansas City had a lot to offer, like a 100 acre tract right next to the airport that sits next to an open 800-acre tract that would leave plenty of space to attract aviation-related suppliers for what promised to be a $375 million assembly plant.

In addition to space, we offered them the farm—quite literally—plus what is probably the most generous incentive package that the state of Missouri ever put together. The House and Senate served up a $240 million tax credit, which at one point in the legislative process had ballooned, in dialogue anyway, to $880 million. From the looks of the deal, you would have thought that Bombar-dier was a sports franchise or something of that significance.

But lets be honest, didn’t we all have the suspicion from the very beginning that we were being used? Early on Bombardier had let it be known that the Canadian site in suburban Montreal, Mirabel to be precise, the home of the Montréal-Mirabel International Airport, was its preferred location.

And lo and behold, when Mirabel evaluated the hand Kansas City was playing, it saw our bid and raised it. On July 8, Mirabel announced a new collective agreement by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers to grant Bombardier the appropriate concessions if the company made its decision before July 15. Can you imagine us giving Bombardier a deadline? I wonder if someone showed Mirabel Kansas City’s cards.

On the plus side,I suppose, even if no one in Platte County got beyond high school French, we looked good enough to make the folks at Mirabel think that Bombardier might just up and leave them.

Speaking of sports franchises, does the phrase “Pittsburgh Penguins” ring a bell. In January 2007, The Penguins’ owners let it be known that they were unhappy with the 45-year-old Mellon Arena and were going to scout around for a new home.

Seeming just a wee bit desperate, we told them they could play rent-free in the new Sprint Center, be equal managing partners in it, and have Kansas City renamed “Penguinville” if they abandoned the grey skies of Pittsburgh for the sunny ones of Kansas City.

I exaggerate only about Penguinville. The other two conditions just seem made up.

Now anyone who had halfway followed hockey knew that the Penguins had recently signed the wunderkind Sidney Crosby. We were no more likely to have pulled the Crosby-led Penguins out of Pittsburgh than we were the Manning-led Colts out of Indianapolis or the French-speaking Bombardier execs out of Montreal. But we tried.

And sure enough, in March 2007, the muckety-mucks of Pennsylvania got together and decided that, yes, time was exactly right for a brand new state-of-the-art, multi-purpose arena for the Penguins to playin.

And there are others. I recall that the Nashville Predators and the Seattle (aka Oklahoma City) Supersonics played KC’s fiddle a bit as well.

Maybe it’s me, but it seems KC may have earned the title of Leverage City.

Now maybe if we could just persuade the Bank of England to leave London!

Joe Sweeney

Editor-In-Chief & Publisher

Sweeney@IngramsOnLine.com