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The 2024 version of Kansas City emerged from half a century of highs and lows in the corporate world. Ingram’s has been part of the trip the whole way in this, our 50th year, with a mission grounded in meaning. Unlike other media consumed by the conflict du jour or he said/she said approaches to “balanced” coverage, our commitment has always been to identify issues of great, lasting import to business executives.
We don’t cover banking for bankers; they already know what transpires in their sector. Same for the health-care community, construction and development, higher education and workforce training: The inside-baseball moves inside each of those sectors are of little relevance to those outside of them.
Instead, our goal has been to approach developments across that spectrum of commerce from the perspective of the small-business owners or corporate executives who want to know how changes in those disciplines will affect their enterprises.
To commemorate this magazine’s 50th year of that commitment, excerpts from selected stories over our history have been assembled for your perusal. We’ll start with the welcoming letter from the founding publisher, Ludwell G. Gaines, whose vision started it all—first under the flag Outlook, later rebranded as Corporate Report, and in its present iteration since 1988, Ingram’s.
So enjoy this nostalgic journey, but know this: While we celebrate with this issue, we do so knowing that the mission isn’t changing. We’re here to promote a Greater Kansas City that is always striving to be just that: Greater. We can’t wait to see what the next half-century brings.
1975
Charter Issue
The Publisher’s Letter
I believe that Kansas City is entering an exciting and promising new era, an era of planned growth and a new dynamic spirit. OUTLOOK is a new publication intended to report on, and to be a forum for, the Kansas City economic community. I believe that our approach to business journalism has never been more relevant and in demand than right now. I believe that OUTLOOK will be an essential, authoritative, timely and positive source of information about the economic thrust and focus of Kansas City. I also believe that it is important for OUTLOOK to take an active role in Kansas City’s growth. We will distribute nationally copies of each issue to key executives of expanding firms to present the full range of activities and developments in Kansas City finance, investment, agribusiness, real estate, commerce and industry.
In summary, OUTLOOK will cast a clear eye on the complex business world and take a firmly positive stance in the economic community. We anticipate an ever-growing community support for this publication, and encourage our readers to send us their comments.
— Ludwell G. Gaines, Outlook Publisher
1976
December 1975 / January 1976
CarpetBankers
How did Kansas City become one of the most competitive banking markets in America? What draws more banks from outside the market—national, regional or state—to this cauldron of competition? The reasons are many, but history provides a clue. From that inaugural edition:
“Missouri law has always prohibited branch banking and the state’s voters resoundingly defeated a 1958 referendum on branching. The Federal Banking Act of 1956 prohibited companies from expanding across state lines and empowered the Federal Reserve to approve holding-company acquisitions of bank stock and holding-company mergers. In 1968, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a consent decree against Mercantile Bank Corporation, which then controlled 18.5 percent of all deposits in Greater St. Louis, ordering Mercantile to divest and sell its Security Bank stock and not acquire any other banks in St. Louis city or county until 1973. Thus, the stage was set for seeking growth paths across county lines.”
February
A New Spirit in Kansas City in ’76
“America’s bicentennial year is also a pivotal year for Kansas City. Designated a Bicentennial City, Kansas City took as its theme “Heritage.” Part of that heritage is the fact that Kansas City developed in what a century before had been called “The Great American Desert.” It is now the most dynamic city in what can be called “The Great American Breadbasket.” The spirit that transformed the desert gave rise to America being called The Land of Opportunity. That spirit, revitalized in Kansas City, is what makes Kansas City the hub of opportunity for the future.”
1977
August / September
Too Many Strings Attached—Federal Dollars and Local Government
“Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die,” someone once said. This could have been referring to the mixed emotions local officials harbor on the subject of federal aid and the inevitable control it brings. Federal aid to state and local governments, including cities, counties, school districts, and numerous special governmental jurisdictions, began just after the Korean War and took the form of special categorical grants for singular purposes. From its meager beginning, federal aid to state and local governments has become so dependent upon federal funds for the provision of basic governmental services that to discontinue federal financial assistance would be catastrophic. It would mean a complete reshaping of governmental programs which affect every aspect of the lives of American people.”
1978
December / January
Agribusiness Big in KC
If anyone needs reminding about the importance of agribusiness to the metropolitan Kansas City economy, a look at a new Midwest Research Institute study puts things in perspective. The study shows that sales and receipts from agribusiness and agricultural production in metropolitan Kansas City (Johnson and Wyandotte counties in Kansas and Jackson, Clay, Platte, Cass and Ray counties in Missouri) totaled more than $5.6 billion in 1976. This amount is equal to two-thirds of the total sales and receipts derived from all manufacturing activity within the metropolitan area. In addition, $700 million was loaned to farmers and agribusiness from the city’s financial institutions, $323 million in farmland was sold by Kansas City real estate firms, and, in 1977, approximately $26 million will be spent in the city by people attending agribusiness conventions.
Wages and salaries of more than 94,000 employees supported by agribusiness activities amount to more than $869 million annually. This is equivalent to 85 percent of the total employment in all manufacturing industries in the metropolitan area. It’s 17 percent of total metro employment. MRI figures that, conservatively speaking, one out of every six people in the Kansas City workforce is directly or indirectly supported by agribusiness.
December / January
Farmland: The Giant Grows Even Bigger
This year, Kansas City-based Farmland Industries Inc. jumped from 123rd to 67th on the Fortune 500 list of the largest U.S. industrial corporations. The big jump occurred last May 2, when Farmland’s merger with Far-Mar-Co. Inc., the nation’s largest grain marketing cooperative, was consummated.
1979
April / May
The Big IF in KC’s Trading Pit
Louis Rukeyser of Wall Street Week calls the proposed new futures contract based on the Dow Jones 30 industrial stocks average index “An ingenious new concept that could make Kansas City one of the legitimate financial nerve centers of the nation.” The contract, commonly referred to as the “industrial future” and carrying the ticker tape signal “IF,” is awaiting approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. It could be traded on the Kansas City Board of Trade as early as April or May of this year. Approval of the contract by the CFTC promises to revolutionize traditional investment theories long-practiced by American stockholders, large and small.
May
Grand-Theft Computer
The executive who says “It can’t happen to us” is a prime target for a crime by computer. This is a scare story. Its intention is to get top management off its collective seat and into the EDP area, figuratively and literally.
If a computer center is a part of your operation but you don’t concern yourself with that area or its security (“It’s someone else’s job”), skip this article and save yourself the few minutes it will take to read it. But in a fraction of that time, your company could be ripped off by a light-fingered computer embezzler to the tune of $430,000.
What’s more, this crime may never be detected, but even if it is, and the perpetrator is caught, the odds are strong that he or she will never spend a day in jail. Strong statistical evidence exists for each of the seemingly outlandish statements you’ve just read.
Why a figure like $430,000? According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, that’s the average take per heist in electronic breaking and entering via computer. A lowly bank robber, by comparison, nets a paltry $10,000 for his efforts. No wonder FBI Director William Webster said his agency is giving high priority to white-collar crime, a variety of wrongdoing that used to be referred to as the crime of the future.
June / July
Raising The Minimum Wage
The rhetoric still rages and the debates continue. The minimum wage bill (which took effect Jan. 1, 1978, raising the minimum wage to $2.30/hour) does raise some very difficult questions. However, because of reporting methods, it is too early to determine what the effects of the new minimum-wage bill will be on the nation, and more particularly on the Greater Kansas City trade areas. The Kansas City Chamber of Commerce has taken no stand on it to date. The national chamber is doing a survey on it, but only with the passage of more time will the real impact be felt.
July
Pershing Square—Marching Down Main
The new, big-boy development in town, Pershing Square, is due to start pushing its weight around in about a year. And from the reputation of its developer, it should be a handsome complement to that other big boy in the neighborhood, Crown Center—the defending champion of Downtown Kansas City face-saving.
Ground-breaking ceremonies for the first phase of the $500 million Pershing Square development were held in May just east of grand old Union Station, and construction was scheduled to begin in mid-June. Pershing, the largest proposed development in the history of Kansas City—expected to surpass even Crown Center in money spent—is only a block north on Main Street from Crown Center.
The first Pershing building, due to open in August 1980, is a 160,000 square feet, eight-story office structure, with the redoubtable title of One Pershing Square.
August / September
Ewing Kauffman and His Royals—The Business of Baseball
“I don’t like to be a loser,” said Ewing Kauffman, owner of the Kansas City Royals, in 1970. “Give us (Royals) six years and we’ll deliver the fans of Kansas City a pennant.” True to his promise, in 1976 and 1977, Mr. K (as he’s affectionately referred to by his friends and colleagues) brought successive American League Western Division Championship flags to the Harry S. Truman Sports Complex.
“We’ve lost $11.2 million in a little more than seven years,” said Mike Herman, Kauffman’s financial adviser. Mr. K said, “It’s not an investment. We have $21 million in (the franchise), and the return is 2 percent after taxes. That’s no return and that’s only been in the last two years. Before, it was a loss.”
When asked how a rational businessman like himself gets involved in a losing proposition like that, Kauffman replied: “Stupidity.”
October
Condominiums Come of Age in Kansas City
What’s up to date in Kansas City? Condominiums. (If you can spell it right off, you can afford one.) And who’s got the biggest condo project in the city? Crown Center. (Natch.) But there have been some rumors underground that the Downtown developer’s giant condo, south of Crown Center Redevelopment Corp. (whose parent is Hallmark Cards), is foundering. The structure was up there all right—all 30 stories of it—but few were living there. There was the talk that Hallmark may have sent its very best once again, but that Kansas City—foolishly—didn’t care enough to buy.
Not so, oh cynics and would-be trust busters. Crown Center indeed suffered two very lean condo years—1977 and much of 1978—but now the 135-unit San Francisco Towers, completed in December 1976, is about 70 percent filled, and the Crown Center people already have their eyes on another high-rise condo development for next year.
December
Piecing Together City Center Square
Until very recently, one of the tallest buildings in downtown Kansas City kept a remarkably low profile. By its location and sheer size—it covers one square city block—City Center Square has generated a great deal of speculation. Is the 30-story office tower/retail complex a white elephant, or just a few years ahead of its time? Was it built to meet a demand or to generate one? How did it come about that one of the most ambitious projects in Downtown Kansas City in decades was developed and financed by out-of-towners? And finally, just exactly who owns City Center Square?
These are vital questions because City Center Square is more than just an interesting building concept. It was the kick-off project and the key project in a master plan to revitalize Downtown.
1980
January
Capital Expenditures in a Softening Economy
While the rest of the nation cools with recessionary anticipation, a number of Kansas City firms are gearing up. The nation’s businesses may not be barricading their doors against double-digit inflation or an impending recession, but on a national basis, they appear to be more concerned with the changing economic conditions than do many of the Kansas City-area businesses. Kansas City, of course, is not immune to the hardships the economy may suffer on business in 1980, but those contacted by Outlook have a generally positive attitude about the new business year, and many will back that optimism with ambitious plans for increased capital expenditures. (Editor’s note in 2024: The economic stagnation of that era, we now know, was the final straw for voters who triggered the Reagan Revolution in that year’s presidential elections, setting the stage for an economic boom that would last a generation.)
October
Who’s Building Now?
The jobs are few and far between as inflation, recession and a cut-back in federal projects hammer at the local construction industry. “Maybe we don’t read enough news to be aware there’s a recession on,” quipped William Dunn, president of J.E. Dunn Construction Co., which specializes in commercial structures. “We’re every bit as active now as we were a year ago.”
Dunn’s sunny assessment doesn’t seem to hold true over a cross-section of the local construction industry. Most companies are as active as they were a year ago, but the activity is of a different kind—they’re hustling harder than ever for business, and it’s been increasingly difficult to find.
However, while there’s no building boom in Kansas City, it’s a long way from bust, too. Business may not be as bustling as it is in the Sun Belt, where big population shifts and burgeoning industries like Texas oil and banking and California electronics have kept contractors busy building highways, housing and commercial structures, but neither is it as bleak as in Montana, where high-interest rates, sparse population and negligible industrial growth combine to slow construction almost to a standstill.
November
Going for Broke Ain’t What it Used to Be
More than 350,000 Americans will rush into bankruptcy courts before the sand in 1980’s hourglass runs out. This number will set an all-time record and eclipse the high of 1975 by 120,000, according to the Administrative Offices in the U.S. Courts in Washington. Bankrupt businesses nationally are expected to jump nearly 80 percent over last year’s tally of 31,000. In the Kansas City area, bankruptcies are up a staggering 60 percent over 1979 levels of 2,900. Between January and July, the figure soared to 110 percent.
1981
February
The Computer Explosion
Sales of minicomputers are soaring as dealers tap the burgeoning small business market. Relatively untapped in the early 1970s, small businesses have become a new frontier for a computer industry that found technology to reduce computer sizes along with their price tags.
Kansas City, like most metro areas, has become prime hunting ground for salesmen peddling their smaller wares (both soft and hard). Research groups estimate that at least 1,500 Kansas City small businesses (defined as businesses with fewer than 500 employees) now use computers for general accounting tasks. And the market here and nationally is reportedly increasing 30 percent each year.
March
Leaving the Livable City
There’s little stopping the streams of Kansas City businesses flowing to Johnson County. Like the ancient Hebrews fleeing Egypt for the promised land, Kansas City businesses have been steadily migrating into Kansas for more than a decade. The roster of relocated companies reads like a Who’’s Who of area businesses: Coca-Cola Bottling Co., Employers Reinsurance Corp., Allstate Insurance, H.D. Lee Co., Yellow Freight, The Marley Co., to name only a handful.
In a study compiled by Coldwell Banker, the national real estate services company—which only counted companies using 10,000 or more square feet—roughly 100 companies have migrated in the past 10 years across the state line from Jackson to Johnson County. Moreover, at least for the moment, the exodus is not slowing.
May
Great Midwest Digs In
Just as the Ice Age carved out the Grand Canyon and the Rocky Mountains, it deposited in Kansas City the unusual geographical opportunity to build a second city below the one that meets the eye. Stretching from southwestern Iowa to the Kansas-Oklahoma border, the Bethany Falls Ledge is exposed in bluffs that overlook the rivers, highways and sidewalks of Kansas City.
The warehousing and storage possibilities of Kansas City’s underground are well-known nationwide. Articles describing these possibilities have appeared everywhere from The Washington Post to Time magazine. Less well-known are the efforts of local businessmen to lure manufacturing underground to open a new vista for the old caves, based primarily on their evolving asset as an energy efficient environment.
September
Association Roll Call
Centrality and low overhead have prompted groups to make Kansas City their headquarters. To improve relations and cut costs, the 500,000-member Camp Fire youth organization agreed to move its headquarters to the country’s heartland. Aided by financial commitments from local groups, Camp Fire Inc. chose Kansas City over Dallas in 1977.
With that move, Camp Fire became one of a slowly but steadily growing number of organizations relocating their national operations in Kansas City. The Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce reports that at least 60 associations and groups maintain their national or international headquarters in the metropolitan area, forming a multi-million-dollar industry.
1982
July
Keeping the Presses Rolling in a Standstill Economy
Nurtured by the presence of giant Hallmark Cards, the printing industry in Kansas City has grown to claim the No. 14 spot on a national list that ranks the sales volume for printing and publishing in urban areas.
August
Who Writes the Lion’s Share of Libel Insurance?
When Penthouse magazine was ordered in 1981 to pay Wyoming beauty queen Kimerli Pring $26 million for insinuating in an article that she was sexually promiscuous, shock waves roared through the insurance industry. Nowhere were they felt more strongly than in the offices of Employers Reinsurance Corp. and Media/Professional Insurance Inc. These two Johnson County-based companies write some 80 percent of all libel insurance policies for an industry segment that generates an estimated $25 million in annual premiums. (Editor’s note: A federal appellate court later overturned the Penthouse verdict; Pring never collected a dime from it.)
November
A Local Line-Up of Foreign Firms
Reverse investment. That’s the U.S. name for a game other countries have played for some time—stimulating local economies with jobs and cash generated by foreign firms.
Kansas City is a relative newcomer to the reverse-investment game, but is learning quickly. In the past six years, the metropolitan area has attracted 13 foreign companies from Europe and the Far East. In total, these businesses created some 535 jobs locally and made $16.5 million in capital investments.
1983
April
Participative Management
It is not business as usual for many Kansas City companies. The times do not allow it. Markets have shifted, costs have increased and technology has advanced. But an equally dramatic development—one that may be harder to handle than others because it has occurred more slowly—is that employees’ attitudes have changed. Employees want more than a paycheck. They want to exert influence over their work and their work environment, and they want immediate feedback on the jobs they’re doing.
Some organizations and companies are attempting to meet the challenge by involving their employees in the decision-making process. Each organization uses its own approach but the goals are usually the same—better-quality products and services, cost containment, better morale, an entrepreneurial spirit, and creativity and accountability throughout every level of the organization.
September
Who Says the Kings are Moving?
It could happen. The Kings, the most improved team (with 45 wins and 37 losses) in the National Basketball Association in the 1982-83 season, could leave Kansas City in the summer of ‘85—just pack up and move, leaving the city shy one major league basketball team and short one major tenant for its $20.8 million, 16,600-seat Kemper Arena, on which the city and arena still owe $17.9 million. The Kings probably would go to Sacramento, where their new owners live and hold title to 435 acres of land that has been promoted as a great place to build a 17,000-seat arena.
1984
January
A Strong Recovery Gets Stronger
This promises to be a good year economically in the Kansas City metropolitan area. The national recovery, which began in the first quarter of 1983, is expected to continue, and we in Kansas City should share in the growth. Relatively stable prices and interest rates, along with the presidential election and consumer confidence, should combine to keep the economy on an upward path.
Kansas Citians should be particularly pleased, since the recession(s) of 1980 and 1982 hit the area much harder than the nation overall. But we started on the road to recovery a full six months sooner than the national economy.
April
A Look at Frank Morgan
It’s inaccurate to say Frank Morgan maintains a low profile. The man has no profile. One Kansas City businessman says writing about Morgan is “like writing about a ghost.” If that’s true, he’s the most powerful ghost you’ll ever hope never to meet.
Only when something big happens in Kansas City does Frank Morgan’s name materialize. In his mud-splattered blue ’78 Chevrolet Caprice, he’s the sort of motorist wealthy Kansas Citians parading their red Jaguars down J.C. Nichols Parkway like to honk to the side—just for cluttering the scenery. They’d be surprised, no doubt, to know the man behind the wheel is also the man behind the money for the new AT&T skyscraper and retail complex. In fact, if there’s any justice, the city fathers will rename Main Street “Frank Morgan Boulevard” when the 38-story tower is completed. Other lesser civic lights have earned such distinction.
The AT&T coup is just the latest project Morgan has backed. His money and business acumen have also been behind five major shopping malls—Metcalf South, Oak Park Mall, Metro North, Bannister Mall and Indian Springs—and a handful of smaller shopping centers. (Editor’s note in 2024: Morgan, alas, would see his financial empire crumble and face federal fraud charges, but until his death in 1993, he maintained that he was innocent of any wrongdoing.)
August
The Money Makers
Their numbers are few. Fewer than 20 Kansas Citians and a handful of Topekans belong to an exclusive fraternity of mutual fund managers in the greater Kansas City area. Their companies are Waddell & Reed, Twentieth Century Investors, United Missouri Bank and Security Benefit Life.
Yet these few companies, along with Jones & Babson (whose funds are managed locally) and DST Financial Services, have given Kansas City a prominence in mutual funds that no other city this size enjoys. The industry’s numbers are mind-boggling. At the end of 1983, there were 1,026 mutual funds in operation nationwide with cumulative assets of $293 billion and more than 23 million shareholders.
November
Death Watch at Union Station
The city’s famous landmark is rapidly becoming a monument to decay and neglect, Kansas City’s biggest and grandest haunted house is 70 years old this month. It’s a wonder that no sharp entrepreneur has opened its doors to hand-holding couples and nervous teenagers, who might wander its dark corridors to the sounds of tape-recorded howls and chain rattling. “Union Station Morgue” could be its name. The price, five dollars say, could be spray-painted on a plywood sign; black cats, ghosts and Frankenstein monster cut-outs could be glued on the windows.
Designed to last for centuries by Chicago architect Jarvis Hunt, Kansas City’s most monumental structure faces an indefinite future as a monumental ruin.
1985
March
Dressing Up the Garment District
Not too long ago, the turn-of-the-century warehouses in the heart of the city’s Downtown garment district were monuments to idleness and decay. The only traffic on the streets were rummaging vermin.
Today, the buzzing of saws and pounding of hammers send the scavengers scurrying. Kansas City’s garment district is reawakening after a decade of dormancy, a decade in which the collapse of the city’s garment industry emptied the warehouses and silenced the streets. Victimized by high union wages, cheap imports and stiff regional competition, most Kansas City garment manufacturers were forced to shut down.
May
Transportation: Two for the Road
Deregulation has revolutionized the transportation business in America by creating a competitive environment for companies in the airline, trucking and railroad industries. That environment has increased options for consumers and sent prices plummeting and soaring. It has also given rise to tension between workers and transportation companies, which are slashing labor costs in order to make a profit.
But in Kansas City, deregulation has brought about at least two additional developments: the establishment of a large Eastern Airlines hub and the establishment of a big Burlington Northern operation. Both companies, free under deregulation to set up operations wherever they wanted, pinpointed Kansas City as the place to launch a campaign for a share of the Midwestern market. Together, the two companies brought more than 300 jobs to Kansas City and increased the city’s reputation as a transportation center.
1986
March
East Meets West in Mid-America
Their story is as old as America. They come for freedom, for jobs, for a better life for their children. The names change, but the story is the same. They are Kansas City’s immigrants, and the fastest-growing group among them is Asian.
Their influence can be seen by passersby on storefront shop signs like Szechuan Restaurant, Hung Vuong Market, or Chung’s Tae Kwon Do School, and the Vietnamese character lettering of River Quay graffiti. Less visible, but increasingly important to Kansas City, are the names on faculty listings of area colleges, employee rolls of research facilities, medical-staff rosters at the region’s hospitals, and names in the boardrooms and administrative offices of companies engaged in international trade.
June
The Best Little
Warehouses in Kansas City
Remember the industrial park, that real estate creature of the 1950s, where huge concrete-block warehouses squatted behind patches of grass and acres of asphalt, tractor-trailers lined up along one side and railroad cars the other? In its day—and its day wasn’t all that long ago—the industrial park was considered quite the innovation, a pleasant alternative to the grimy, crowded conditions prevalent in traditional city manufacturing and warehouse districts like Kansas City’s West Bottoms.
But just as the industrial parks of the 1950s made the West Bottoms and its ilk obsolete, a new genre of industrial real estate development has come along to make most industrial parks as dated as tailfins on a Plymouth. Whatever the reason, the result is the same: industrial parks and the huge “bulk space” warehouses are out. Sleek new developments called “business parks,” filled with architecturally distinct buildings catering to a new generation of American industrial businesses, are in.
September
Southbound
Some call it the Southern Corridor. Some just South. For our purposes, we’re calling it Southland. Lots of business people think of it as The Office, since that’s where their offices are. To even more folks it’s simply Home. But whatever you call the area south of 83rd Street, east into Missouri, and west into Kansas, you’ll call it something. You are going to have to take it into account.
Commercial and residential growth to the south is booming. Ten years ago, no one you knew had an address anywhere near 150th Street. Or, as one long-time Midtown resident put it: “I used to get a nosebleed south of 103rd.” And it seems like just yesterday that the land and sky out that way did look empty enough to feel like high altitude.
That’s changing. And changing fast.
1987
May
Strip Tease
With office and warehouse markets amply supplied, shopping centers are the seductive new real-estate romp. K.C. developers are all eyes. For each development “fad” the public observes, there almost always are sound economic and demand-oriented reasons for development to occur. This is best illustrated by the most recent category of commercial real estate to boom in Kansas City, the strip shopping center.
Currently, while there are preliminary plans for new regional malls in Olathe and western Shawnee, there are no new malls under construction. But for the strip center—the I-shaped or L-shaped neighborhood or community shopping center often anchored by a grocery or discount store and filled out with card shops, pizza delivery stations, and beauty salons—1987 will be remembered as a year of tremendous expansion throughout metropolitan Kansas City.
September
Bring Down the House
While Kansas Citians are preoccupied with the Allis Plaza’s health, the fate of the Hotel Muehlebach may be hanging in the balance. For more than 50 years, it represented the best Kansas City had to offer. Its stylish elegance catered to generations of America’s elite and put rest to the notion that Kansas City was a no-account cowtown without a decent place to hang your hat.
But the music died in the 1970s, the guests went south to the Country Club Plaza, and the Muehlebach began to hemorrhage red ink, losing more than a million dollars in its last year of operation before its new owner, Executive Hills Inc., shut its doors.
And though virtually every developer, Downtown businessman, and civic booster prefaces any comment about the Muehlebach with hopes that this faded jewel can be polished to its former luster, that seems unlikely. (Editor’s note: Marriott Hotels bought the Muehlebach in 1996, refurbished it, and made it part of a complex with the Kansas City Marriott Downtown.)
1988
March
Apartment House Blues
Landlords can’t fill their buildings and they can’t sell them. Tax reform has changed the economics such that most owners owe far more than potential buyers can pay. To imagine what it is like to be a Kansas City apartment-building owner in 1988, think back to a summer Sunday in New York a few years ago, when George Brett of the Royals had a game-winning home run disallowed in what has become known as the infamous “Pine Tar Game.” Similar expressions of anger and frustration no doubt have been released in private all over town in 1986 and 1987 by Kansas City apartment owners just as bewildered and angered by the effects of the 1986 Tax Reform Act on their business.
Simply put, the apartment business in Kansas City has been depressed since 1986, the market at first paralyzed by the uncertainties over how Congress would change the tax code and then, when the law was passed, hamstrung by its provisions.
November
Plans, Plans, and More Plans
For 40 years, Kansas City has been planning to redevelop the riverfront. Isn’t it about time to get started? In another room, a stack of plans sits yellowing. Each tier represents a failed attempt to develop the riverfront. At the bottom, a 1947 drawing depicts a golf course on the riverbank; a 1964 plan suggests an industrial center; somebody wanted a park there in 1971; later in the decade, it was an aquarium.
Recently the Economic Development Corporation, an umbrella organization for the city’s planning and development groups, hired a new planner who will help rework the old plans into a new one.
Up to $100,000 has been spent on plans for the river, city Development Director Robert Collins says. That much money could purchase 200 streetlights for the riverfront; a mile of sidewalk; twelve acres of sod; or two earth movers to clean up the bank.
Instead there are plans, talk, and optimism.
1989
January
Economic Outlook for 1989 and Beyond
After six years of expansion, the Kansas City regional economy is showing signs of easing up. Layoffs, plant closings, and corporate relocations during 1988, while offset by other business expansions, nevertheless exposed some of the softness in the region’s economy.
If the consensus forecast of slower national economic growth in 1989 and 1990 materializes, the Kansas City area could experience its slowest period of economic activity since the early 1980s.
April
To Market, To Market
As competition tightens, Kansas City law firms are searching for means to please existing clients and find new ones. Four years ago, “marketing” was a dirty word in Kansas City legal circles. Paul Schmitz remembers because he set a precedent at that time as the first marketing person hired by a Kansas City law firm. Shortly after his hiring, he was interviewed by Corporate Report about his new duties at Shook, Hardy & Bacon and the emerging field of law firm marketing. When the article subsequently appeared, he found himself in hot water. “There were several people quite upset,” recalled Schmitz, who went on to become an independent marketing consultant. “Shook didn’t want other firms to know it had a person on full-time doing marketing.”
Things have changed considerably since then. Shook, Hardy & Bacon and many other Kansas City firms now recognize the need for marketing, even if they’re not quite sure what all it entails.
October
Hallbrook: Who, Why and How Much?
When Hallbrook Farms is completed, it will be home to 450 of Kansas City’s upper-income families. Right now, the development is the talk of the real estate community and the cocktail-party circuit, not only because of the spectacularly designed homes sprouting up there but because of the speed at which Kansas Citians have been snatching up the lots, which generally are priced from $125,000 to $775,000.
People are calling it the new Mission Hills, but it’s not old-line, Mission Hills money buying Hallbrook homes. Ask brokers where all these luxury-home-starved people are coming from, and they’ll tell you: Primarily other Johnson County neighborhoods as well as some corporate transplants.
1990
February
The Old College Try
If you haven’t checked the prices lately at your nearby institution of higher learning, prepare for a surprise. College costs doubled and more during the 1980s. And if the current trend continues, a college degree from a private university might will cost six figures in the 21st century. That fact is causing sticker shock for many Baby Boomers who’ve finally finished paying off their own student loans and are beginning to think about how they’ll finance their kids’ college educations.
But don’t panic, financial advisers say, and don’t become obsessed by this one financial hurdle. Instead, parents should get their own savings and investment strategies worked out before worrying about college tuition bills.
June
In Search of Common Ground
Emanuel Cleaver faces this mayoral challenge: to create harmony in a city of growing political factions. After 11 years on the Kansas City Council, the last three as mayor pro-tem, Emanuel Cleaver has become one of Kansas City’s most prominent political leaders—a forceful and respected voice in community issues. With Mayor Richard Berkeley vowing to end his City Hall tenure, Cleaver has been signaling that he wants the top job.
He’s already bowed out of next year’s Fifth District Council race, but it’s not because he wants to rein in the hectic pace of his life. Instead, he has commissioned several polls to determine whether Kansas Citians are ready to elect their first black mayor.
1991
January
The Riverfront Gamblers
Against all odds, Kansas Citians are betting on a revitalized River Market area. It has to rank as one of the most daring real estate developments in recent Kansas City history. First, there’s rehabilitation, which backers of the River Market project quickly will tell you is the most difficult kind of real-estate development to manage.
Next there’s the image problem. Revitalization in the River Market district flourished briefly in the 1970s and then flamed out, the victim of mob corruption and violence that remains a stigma on the area. Add to that the timing. Real estate is in the dumps. Bankers are nervous. And as the nation’s longest peacetime economic expansion draws to a close, the prospect for business start-ups is dim.
Yet the initial signs are promising for Kansas City’s $40.6 million River Market redevelopment.
March
Up in Smoke
Although they billow endorsements, local political clubs’ power has nearly been extinguished. Whrrr. Whrrr. Whrrr. Can you hear it? It’s the sound of Tom Pendergast spinning in his grave. He’s stirring because in Tom’s town, like the rest of the metro area, political clubs are declining, perhaps dying, as a major electoral force. A roll call of local political experts gives a vote of “no confidence” for the future of clubs, except for a handful that have transcended traditional club boundaries.
November
By the Light of the Moon
The new moonlighting has nothing to do with those people. In a specialist society, the new moonlighters have developed another specialty, another career interest. The moonlighting career might be worlds apart from the daytime profession, or it might be a natural outgrowth of what the person does by day.
Whether an outlet for untapped or underused talent, a retail product or a service that goes beyond the scope of a 9-to-5 job, or a “have-it-all” approach to life, moonlighting fills the bill.
Moonlighters want money, prestige, success, a little fun, and a chance to help others or advance knowledge in a particular field. Sometimes they can’t get all that from one career. So they need two.
At least.
1992
September
VR’s (Not-So) Civil War
“There are no Thompsons at J. Walter Thompson,” Chuck Curtis says. “No McCanns at McCann-Ericson.” And, as of June 18, no Valentines at Valentine-Radford. That was the day the five executives—President John Valentine, Executive Creative Director Scott McCormick, Director of Integrated Marketing T. Craig Ligibel, Chief Operating Officer Freda Schroeder, and Boasberg Valentine-Radford Vice President Jerry Schleicher—walked.
The resignations followed a series of events that began in late May, when Valentine, McCormick and Ligibel, unhappy with Curtis’ ambitious acquisition program and the high rate of staff turnover, asked the CEO to resign. Curtis refused and rallied his forces, including clients and the media. Two days later, the board voted to drop the motion for Curtis’ departure. In less than three weeks, Curtis was waving goodbye to his detractors and their supporters. (Editor’s note in 2024: And as a result, VML formed as an ad agency, and today is one of the largest in the world.)
October
Tug of War
North Kansas City’s most treasured asset sits on a wooded bluff overlooking the clutter of fast-food restaurants, liquor stores, convenience shops, and industrial warehouses crowding the east end of Armour Road. The biggest mistake any local can make is to forget how jealously the town guards its city-owned hospital—a beige brick complex surrounded by 50 acres of rolling lawn that for years has been the most profitable hospital in the metro area.
Les Haymons lost his $347,496 job as hospital president because he made that mistake.
“I think he thought the hospital was his,” says Terry Myers, the new chairman of the North Kansas City Hospital board that fired Haymons in June. “It isn’t.” After taking the hospital from near collapse to prosperity, Haymons clashed with financially strapped town leaders over control of the hospital’s rich reserves.
This summer, the skirmish escalated into a suburban version of a Wall Street takeover battle. Haymons, a deposed executive who knew more about profits than politics, withdrew from the fight, exacting a $1.06 million settlement in lieu of a lawsuit. And townspeople are reeling from a painful lesson: that local governments and city-owned hospitals can make for a dangerous mix.
1993
February
How Much Do We Want Their Money?
Rarely has Kansas City’s commitment to wooing convention business been so apparent. Skyscraper cranes, workers hun-ched over fountains of sparks, and acres of steel and concrete are bridging Broadway with an expanded Bartle Hall. City leaders talk to billionaire presidential candidates and other developers about building a new convention hotel Downtown. Banker Crosby Kemper Jr. flashes his checkbook to help keep the Future Farmers of America convention in Kansas City.
“It would be unthinkable not to meet their request,” Kemper said after the association threatened to shop for a new host city if Kansas City didn’t ante up $365,000 a year, as well as other incentives, to keep it here. “The convention is as much a fixture in Kansas City as the waters of the Missouri. What’s more important to Kansas City than the FFA convention?” (Editor’s note in 2024: The FFA, it seems wasn’t impressed with Kemper’s cash infusion; it relocated to Louisville in 1999, then Indianapolis in 2006.)
September
Voice N the Hood
Colleen Hernandez, director of Kansas City Neighborhood Alliance, is charged with making the city’s older, inner-city neighborhoods attractive, viable places to live. It’s a game of beat the clock, and sometimes it seems as if the clock is winning. Between 1980 and 1988, more than 4,000 affordable housing units were demolished, and only 1,695 were constructed in Kansas City, leaving an estimated 51,000 people without adequate housing. Federal support for housing dropped from $30.2 billion in 1981 to $3.2 billion in 1988.
Still, local leaders believe that if anyone can make a dent in the city’s deteriorating neighborhoods, Hernandez can.
1994
March
Fire and Ice
Kansas City’s urban renewal depends on a handful of developers, some private, some public. The question is: Can they coexist? For 30 years now, cities across America have wrestled with the same problem: White flight, dwindling tax bases, and a severe decline in employment have stamped what sociologists call a “doughnut hole” out of the cities’ centers. From Boston to Birmingham, once-proud urban areas languish as businesses with money turn toward the suburbs.
Kansas City is no exception. But while some cities, such as Atlanta, have made great strides in revitalizing their urban cores, Kansas City’s efforts have resulted in only isolated pockets of redevelopment, such as Twelfth and Brooklyn. What’s the problem here?
For Mayor Emanuel Cleaver, the answer is simple: “The Atlantas, Chicagos, New York Cities have more rich black folk. What we see in a few isolated spots in the central city here are anomalies.” But the problem is more complex than that, and it’s inextricably linked to issues as divergent as race, crime and financing. At the heart is an emerging debate about private and public development.
May
Picture This
No longer just a luxury, videoconferencing saves time and money for everyone from rural hospital patients to business people. A child in western Kansas sits on an examination table in her doctor’s office, unaware that she’s about to be seen by a University of Kansas Medical Center pediatric cardiologist from miles away.
Over a television screen, the KU specialist greets her, then begins an examination. With the help of the child’s regular doctor, who’s in the room with her, the specialist listens to the child’s heartbeat and breathing and inspects X-rays, electrocardiograms, and sonograms over the monitor.
This long-distance medical exam is but one of the ways organizations are increasingly using videoconferencing to save time and money and bring information and services to remote or far-flung areas. Businesses use videoconferencing to hold business meetings, which saves the cost of national and international travel. Universities use it to bring instruction to students in remote areas. And some organizations use the technology to recruit employees, narrowing the field of candidates over the phone lines before flying in the finalists.
September
Boom Street
Fifteen years ago, the only business that considered locating on Johnson County’s 119th Street was a tractor company, attracted by the area’s farmhouses, tin-sided outbuildings, and abundant bean fields. Today, crops still landscape some sections of the suburban roadway, but bean counters of a decidedly different sort are calculating the area’s potential yield.
The 7-1/2 mile stretch of 119th Street, running west from State Line Road in Leawood to Pflumm Road in Olathe, ranks as one of the hottest commercial real estate sites of the metropolitan area. It sports some 5 million square feet of prime office and retail space waiting to be developed.
1995
January
Meeting of Minds
Visitors to Kansas City might view an exhibit at Bartle Hall, attend a meeting in Corporate Woods, spend the afternoon at a suburban golf course, and in the evening enjoy dinner and live jazz on the Plaza, without ever knowing they’ve crossed a state line. But for metropolitan residents, the state line can be as divisive as the Mason-Dixon Line, providing opportunities for disagreement, stereotyping, and name-calling.
Like the rest of the metropolitan area, institutions of higher education have had to contend with the state line, competing for students, grant money, and faculty. But in recent years, educators in Kansas and Missouri have joined in ventures that cross the state line.
March
Drawing the Line
A tax could alter our perception of the state line, the county lines, and the lines that divide our cities and towns, say some area residents, politicians, civic leaders, artists, and arts administrators. But not just any tax, a quarter-cent sales tax, a bistate tax for the five-county area that, if plans become reality, could create metropolitan sodality, repair Union Station, support the first bistate cultural district in the country, and buttress the area’s cultural establishments and amenities. Approval of the tax would be historic.
September
Critical Mass
When Kansas City International Airport opened 23 years ago, developers hoped the land around it would fill with homes and offices. That didn’t happen. The airport always seemed halfway to Iowa, sitting at the end of a long haul through miles of vacant land. Weathered for-lease signs hung on the few buildings that rose from the countryside, a testament to wishful thinking and a warning to those naive enough to believe, “If you build it, they will come.”
Time, however, may finally be catching up with the airport and the area around it. Low lease rates have led some Kansas City businesses to relocate to the area, and large blocks of available office space have lured companies outside Kansas City there. Today, the area’s occupancy rate is 95 percent.
1996
November
Unzipped
Plenty of sex businesses want to make money in Kansas City these days, and the most popular, like Bazooka’s, have begun approaching the market in an upscale way. Forget the seedy topless bar image. Today’s nude “juice bars” (so-called because they don’t serve liquor) are known as “gentlemen’s clubs,” and their strippers have become entertainers.
Dirty bookstores have gone upmarket, too. At Ray’s Video on Main, for example, out-of-town newspapers sell alongside fetish newspapers. Owner Ray Cain says many of his best customers arrive in limousines—from Johnson County. Even some escort services (read: illegal prostitution rings) are advertising “upscale” services, promising the women who work there as much as $2,000 a week.
Here and around the country, the sale of sex has become a trendy, billion-dollar business.
1997
March
Publisher’s Note
You know the adage about the month of March and how its legendary winds of change have been known to rearrange the landscape. In this case, the landscape is the staff box over there to your left. You’ll notice that Show-Me Publishing is now listed as owner and that Joe Sweeney is listed as publisher.
To be sure, there have been a number of changes going on inside Ingram’s these past few weeks. Most of the changes are imperceptible; they have more to do with legal points and transfer agreements than the actual printed product. If you are worrying about whether Ingram’s, the magazine, will become something less than the readable, informative, interesting business publication that it has always been—don’t.
I’m Joe Sweeney, and I like Ingram’s too much to change its spirit. Oh, we might tweak it here and there. Massage the look, energize the content, adjust a few levers, turn a few valves. But by and large, this magazine will always look, feel and read like the Ingram’s you know.
— Joe Sweeney, Ingram’s Publisher
July
Start Your Engines
The race is on. Kansas has the early lead and Missouri is scrambling to catch up. After recently passing a measure to allow for public financing, Kansas could be the host state for a motorsports superspeedway in the Kansas City area. Missouri defeated a similar measure but, not to be outdone, has also promised to offer incentives to International Speedway Corp., a Florida-based builder of race tracks.
The prize is a 1.5-mile, multi-purpose race track that would, according to figures compiled for ISC, generate millions of dollars for the local economy.
October
KC’s Ad Agency Boom
Madison Avenue, move over—Kansas City is making its share of noise on the national advertising scene. It used to be that an advertiser seeking help would look for an agency located near a big body of water, say for instance, the Atlantic or Pacific oceans or Lake Michigan. That’s no longer true because here in the Midwest, Kansas City advertising has burst onto the national landscape like a shooting star.
It is now considered one of the country’s fastest-growing advertising communities, according to both trade associations and industry consultants.
1998
February
Kansas City’s Future Comes Into FOCUS
The curious have come from as far away as South Africa and Ireland to learn more, and calls and letters have poured in from cities across the U.S. In each case, the question is the same: How did Kansas City pull it off? The object of this global curiosity is the FOCUS plan, Kansas City’s long-term blueprint for guiding the city deep into the 21st century. Painstakingly developed over five years with the input of more than 3,000 volunteers, the plan, by all accounts, is the most comprehensive, citizen-driven strategic road map ever laid out by any U.S. city.
FOCUS stands for Forging Our Comprehensive Urban Strategy and was designed to replace the brief, 50-year plan sketched back in 1947 by local administrative legend L.P. Cookingham.
August
Follow the Yellow-Brick Road … or Not
For some, Oz is a mythical land. For others, it is a $590 million theme park in search of a location in the Kansas City area. For those who believe in the latter, the scramble is on to make it a reality in their locale. According to Robert Kory, chairman and CEO of the Oz Entertainment Co., site selection has been narrowed down to three possible locations: just west of the planned Kansas International Speedway in Wyandotte County, at the abandoned Sunflower Ammo Plant in Johnson County and in north Smithville in Missouri. The decision is still up in the air as far as the Oz people are concerned. (Editor’s note in 2024: As we know now, it didn’t happen. But the development story had a happy ending: In 2022, the Sunflower site was chosen for the largest development in the history of Kansas, the $4 billion Panasonic Energy EV battery plant.)
November
Casinos Roll the Dice
Few private enterprises in the history of America have dedicated more energy to turning out the vote than the Missouri casino industry. The casinos want the people of Missouri to legitimize the hybrid phenomenon known as “boats in moats.” Specifically, Amendment 9 would permit casinos to operate in “artificial spaces that include water” within 1,000 feet of the main channel of either the Mississippi or the Missouri rivers. Voter approval would reverse a 1997 State Supreme Court decision to the contrary.
1999
June
Commitment to Commerce Reaches New Heights
Technology, pending deregulation and mergers and acquisitions are forcing banks of all sizes to react to market conditions. Greater efficiencies and improved products and services are the ultimate goal of the banks as they expand into other areas of financial services. Kansas City area banks are in a state of flux: Whether they’re one of the largest in the nation or smallest in the region. The future is anything but certain.
2000
January
Kansas City’s Dream Team Plans the Future for 2050
From a gathering of 14 people with widely diverse geographic, cultural and business-sector backgrounds came a vision of Kansas City in 2050. Among it’s pillars: A. “Kansas City has the strongest suburbs in the country … and for this reason may likely never emulate the strong urban cores of Boston or Philadelphia. B. “Future economic development and infrastructure demands will be managed by establishing a regional authority that will likely dissolve the influence of city and state government as we know it today. C. “By 2050, we anticipate that government will become more intrusive in health care, if not providing the means, then certainly regulating the distribution of service for equality’s sake. D. “The impact of freight moving through the marketplace will be immense.” E. The more it is analyzed, the more logical it appears that a metropolitan-wide Unified Government may prevail in our future.”
2001
September
Restoration
If we pursue the opportunity we have been given, future generations will look back upon Sept. 11, 2001, not as the day when the World Trade Center collapsed, but as the day when America was reborn. The America (we) recreate will be a different place. We will not have lost our innocence. We’ll have lost our pettiness. And we will be a better nation because of it.
2002
May
The Future of the KC School District
On Tuesday, May 23, Ingram’s hosted the 17th of its forums in the Industry Outlook series. The subject was the Kansas City School District. And the atmosphere, as expected, was more charged than any we had seen before. Never before have so many key people with so much collective knowledge of what is arguably America’s most notorious school district gathered for a public discussion—one that was in turn amusing, unsettling and invigorating.
2003
March
The Compound Fracture of Health Care
The problems facing the nation on the health-care front are daunting. The uninsured are no longer the poorest of the poor, not even close. They are often risk-takers, people who choose the things they know they need or people who are unable to qualify for coverage due to the fact they don’t belong to a larger group. The fastest-growing group among the uninsured are those who make $75,000 or more a year.
2004
September
Downtown Development
Although you may not know it, Kansas City has embarked on the largest Downtown resurgence in more than half a century. Almost everyone knows fragments of this explosion—Kansas City voters clearly got the message when they approved last month’s arena proposal. It’s been hard to miss the discussion of the H&R Block headquarters and the nearby Power & Light District project. One thing’s for certain—the Downtown Kansas City we know today will not look the same as it will in 2008.
2005
January
What’s Next?
Things change. In essence, the recent announcement of the Sprint Nextel merger is a story of two companies changing and scrambling to survive against giants. It is also the story of two bright, energetic executives understanding that even when change is imminent, a company still has a choice. It can choose to be the agent of change. Or it can wait around to be the victim. The merger, valued at $35 billion, would create the nation’s third-largest wireless cellular telephone company and would go by the name Sprint Nextel. Officials for both companies put the combined entity’s total equity value at $70 billion.
2006
June
The Coolest Companies in Kansas City
The coolest companies in Kansas City. Now there’s a topic bound to cause heated debate. Five criteria to quantify cool: Imaginative work environment. Innovative products and services. Innovative employment processes. A sense of team cohesion. Passion and pride among employees. Cool companies may be difficult to define, but to paraphrase former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, we know them when we see them. They are companies with the competitive edge: Midwest Research Institute (now MRIGlobal), Teva Neuroscience, Perceptive Software, Dimensional Innovations, Ferrellgas, Boulevard Brewing Co., Children’s Mercy Hospital and the FBI—yes, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
2007
January
Bi-State Bio-Mission Converges
Cancer. Childhood obesity. Heart disease. Bioterrorism. These are just some of the ills and evils that companies throughout the Missouri-Kansas region are combating on a daily basis. This combat has necessitated the area’s becoming a growing force in the biotechnology industry. Kansas City has more than 200 bioscience companies that employ more than 20,000 people, representing two percent of the city’s total workforce. Kansas City has more than 200 bioscience companies that employ more than 20,000 people.
2008
May
On a Wing and a Prayer
Can Missouri land mega-projects such as the $400 million Bombardier assembly plant? Kansas City, Platte County and the state of Missouri have been down this road before. The region has put itself in a position to land that airplane assembly plant and the roughly 2,100 quality, high-paying jobs that go with it. In the just-concluded General Assembly session, rural and city lawmakers from all corners of the state came together to approve tax-credit legislation in the House. It’s downright astonishing that business and civic leaders in St. Louis were among the biggest proponents of a project slated for Kansas City. (Editor’s note in 2024: Of course, the plant never materialized; Bombardier was using the threat of locating to Kansas City as leverage for a better deal elsewhere.)
2009
October
When One Door Closes
The pace of bank failures in the U.S. has accelerated and is approaching triple digits for the first time in 17 years. But reflective of what has been dubbed the “Zone of Sanity” with more conservative banking practices in the nation’s interior, it’s worth noting that only three Kansas banks and four Missouri banks are among the casualties to date. But sane or not, banks in the Kansas City region have been pummeled: According to FDIC statistics for the second quarter, 29 of the 52 in-district commercial banks saw their assets decline from first-quarter levels, and 21 posted losses for the quarter ended June 30. If you’re on the positive side of those numbers, though, this may be looking more like an opportunity than a crisis.
November
Power Play
Cap-and-trade bills. One version is moving through the Senate, one through the House. Each has as its main goal a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. Neither, say utility executives and free-market advocates, bodes well for the energy industry—or customers. The local economy seems particularly vulnerable. The Midwest derives 80-90 percent of its electric power from coal, the chief villain in this morality play.
2010
June
The Big XII-minus-2
How in the wide, wide world of sports does a power football conference like the Big XII, which has had a team in the Bowl Championship Series title game seven times since 2000 (including this year’s!), end up on the edge of extinction? How is it that the athletic programs at Missouri, Kansas and Kansas State, so important to the successes of that same conference and so vital to this region’s sports identity, could be written off as little more than expansion fodder for a second-tier conference?
2011
June
Joplin’s Will to Rebuild
A determined business community projects the mindset of a city crippled by the May 22 tornado: Joplin, they say, will be back. More than 400 business buildings were erased by a top-of-the-EF-5 tornado. It carved a nine-mile incision, at some points nearly a mile wide, into the city’s south-central section. The storm killed 158 of Joplin’s 50,000 residents. In its wake were 8,000 homes and businesses destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, the nine-story skeleton of St. John’s Regional Medical Center—the region’s largest employer—and a level of economic ruin that will take years to fully calculate.
2012
July
Welcome to World-Class Kansas City
We like to use that salutation because we don’t consider it an idle boast. So, we encourage our visitors here for the All-Star Game to engage in what the greater Kansas City region has to offer. And we urge you to come back when you can stay a while longer. Especially if you own a business and are pondering expansion operations here. Yes, the eyes of the world will be on Kansas City with the All-Star Game this month. But after the hoopla dies down, this city’s business contributions to the world will keep us batting 1,000.
2013
October
A Looming Boom
It hasn’t grabbed the big headlines one might imagine, given where the real estate markets have been over the past half-decade. But something big is going on in the Kansas City area. The statistics bear out that area general contractors, along with architects, designers, sub-contractors and professionals in the trades, have made it through more months of belt-tightening than they’d ever imagined. But for those who’ve survived, it’s time to start ratcheting things back up.
2014
October
Wheels of Progress
The Kansas City area’s automobile manufacturing plants play an increasingly vital role in the local economy. The industry pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the region as automakers retooled for new products and as a result of a new labor agreement. The area is home to Ford Motor Co.’s Kansas City Assembly Plant in Claycomo and the General Motors Co. Fairfax Assembly Plant in Kansas City, Kan. The Ford plant, which produces the F-150 pickup truck and Transit commercial van, employs about 7,500. The GM plant produces the Chevrolet Malibu and the Buick LaCrosse—the latter switched out in 2017 for a Cadillac crossover SUV—and employs nearly 2,500.
2015
November
Baseball’s Promised Land
One word summarizes the year 2015 in Kansas City: Royals. After 30 years wandering Major League Baseball’s desert, Kansas City follows up its 2014 seven-game loss in the World Series with a five-game rout of the New York Mets. The party that ensued several days later drew a crowd estimated at 800,000 to the streets of Downtown—that’s more than a third of the total MSA population. Anyone who doubted the accuracy of those figures, in all likelihood, wasn’t trying to navigate traffic to a Downtown office or workplace the morning of that parade. The crowd partied as if it knew that celebration wouldn’t be coming back around for another 30 years—prescient, indeed, given the quality of the on-field product over the following three seasons.
2016
November
Railroaded
Former banker, library chief executive and libertarian thinker R. Crosby Kemper III called it “the most un-democratic election in Kansas City since the Pendergast era.” But the spring vote cleared the way for construction of the $102 million starter line for a Downtown streetcar system (all 2.2 miles of it). That development itself, over the next two years, would continue to set the stage for talks about extending the line to the UMKC campus near the Country Club Plaza. Again, voters meeting strict eligibility criteria are asked to approve expansion in 2018, and they set the wheels in motion for just that.
2017
May
No Good Deed …
Perhaps no other local issue would come to dominate public policy discussion in Kansas City—this year and the following—as much as an initiative undertaken by Burns & McDonnell to start the wheels moving on a makeover of Kansas City International Airport. But after working with Mayor Sly James and financial power players to chart out a strategy for a single-terminal airport following years of business-sector demands for upgrades at KCI, the proposal is quickly shot down by critics who cite its no-bid nature and lack of notice to the public that it was coming. The city eventually awards a contract for a $1.2 billion remake—later estimates would approach $2 billion—to Maryland-based Edgemoor Infrastructure & Real Estate, with Burns & McDonnell later securing a portion of the project.
2018
July
Mayoral Madness
What do you get when six City Council members, a former U.S. Senate candidate, a civic gadfly and assorted dreamers all decide that fate is calling them to succeed Sly James as mayor of Kansas City? You get the kind of crowded-field dynamic that allowed newcomer Donald Trump to outlast 16 veteran Republican politicians to become the GOP’s presidential nominee in 2016. There’s no Kansas City equivalent of what Trump brought to the national scene, but a fragmented field gives hope to a dozen declared candidates that they will prevail in 2019’s municipal elections. About the only certainty to emerge from the field over the next three months was that Jason Kander wouldn’t be claiming the title in 2019—though considered an instant front-runner by many when he entered the race in June, Kander pulled the plug on his candidacy in October, citing personal issues related to his military service in Iraq a decade ago.
November
Freight Expectations
When the last lines of Kansas City’s logistics history are written, it’s likely that a pivotal chapter will focus on the year 2013. In March of that year, an upstart commercial realty firm founded just months earlier, NorthPoint Development, secured approval from the Edgerton City Commission to take the lead on a stalled-out logistics park being built just east of that hamlet in southwest Johnson County. It was envisioned as a companion to a new intermodal facility that BNSF Railway was about to bring online. Just a month later, the new Logistics Park Kansas City saw ground broken for its first tenant, DeLong Grain Co., which was planning a 25,000-square-foot grain distribution facility there, the first steps in an 18-million-square-foot logistics giant and a game-changer for the sector.
2019
August
Finding the Healers
Well-known to medical professionals for a generation has been the graying of the Baby Boomers, whose charter members turned 73 this year. They’re ushering an unprecedented demand for geriatric care and treatment of the chronic conditions that accompany aging: orthopedic maladies, cancer, cardiovascular diseases and strokes, neurological diseases, vision, kidney and bladder problems—a smorgasbord of aches, pains, and never-ending treatments. Less well known outside the medical profession is this stark reality: Many of those Boomers—like the ones who follow them into retirement age over the next 12 years—are themselves drawing paychecks from hospitals, medical centers, clinics, and physician offices. In short, many of those who made careers of providing care are about to switch teams.
2020
February
We Did It!
Fifty years after their previous appearance, and one year after a heartbreaking loss to New England ended their season one touchdown away from the Super Bowl, the Kansas City Chiefs come roaring back. Tearing through the AFC’s best teams—after spotting each one of them double-digit leads—the Chiefs fall behind again in Super Bowl LIV, then put on a fourth-quarter display that grabs the Lombardi Trophy from the waiting clutches of the San Francisco 49ers.
It’s their first NFL championship.
March
COVID-19 and the ’20 Crash
Interviews with experts in epidemiology, health-care delivery, banking, business law, disease modeling, and public health organizations offer assurances that, while the outbreak should be taken seriously, it does not present a threat that justifies panic buying, fear-driven changes in investment strategies, product hoarding, or the kind of hyperventilating coverage that drives up ratings for the 24/7 news channels. The takeaway from many of those experts is that if the virus is to truly be contained, top-down initiatives will never match the power of hundreds of millions of individuals acting in their own best interests to minimize their risk of exposure.
2021
December
Home-Grown Generosity
Following a year that began with a Kansas City Super Bowl victory and celebratory bash, quickly pivoted into the biggest global pandemic in a century, and wrapped up with perhaps the most divisive presidential election in generations, it was easy to overlook something wonderful. For the first time in the history of local philanthropy, the 25 largest foundations produced grants and gifts that surpassed $1 billion in a single year. It was a milestone achievement, even in a community known nationally for being exceptionally giving on behalf of causes that serve the needy.
2022
May
Will Inflation Crush the U.S. Economy?
Despite a bevy of positive economic indicators, Americans appear to be uncertain, anxious, troubled. That’s what inflation of nearly 8.5 percent will do. It saps confidence. It means our dollar buys less this month than last, and unless my income is rising at a rate faster than inflation, our standard of living is falling. We Americans haven’t seen this kind of inflation in decades, and we have been surprised by it and are worried.
Enemies at the Cybergate
All buildings—commercial as well as residential—are getting smarter. But you’re making a stupid move if you don’t know how smart the technology is as your company melds ever more closely into the Internet of Things. From HVAC systems to electronic access to controlled lighting, the points where your operations interface with the rest of the world create enormous risks.
June
Game On!
The opportunity is here. Kansas City has been selected as one of 16 North American cities to host the FIFA 2026 World Cup. This is a big deal. The Economic Impact for a host city for the World Cup is absolutely massive. Held every four years, the World Cup is easily the most watched sporting event in the world. Millions of eyes will be on Kansas City, possibly billions. We will be on the world map once again. The “I” in KCI may actually begin to have meaning.
2023
April
Kansas City on a Roll
Yes, there was much to celebrate after winning a second Super Bowl in a three-year span, but Kansas City continued to shine in the eyes of an entire nation with the NFL draft stage show set up, drawing an estimated 300,000 people Downtown for three days of football-related festivities and fan fever over selections made by each of the 32 teams. It was a fitting capstone to a heady winter/spring season following the come-from-behind victory over the Philadelphia Eagles to secure the Chiefs’ third Lombardi Trophy.
2024
January
Looking Back and Ahead
Throughout 2024, Ingram’s 50th volume will take you back through the past half-century of business in Kansas City, steadfast in our belief that we’ll never be able to build the city we hope this can be if we surrender our understanding of how we got where we are today—and how challenging and rewarding that journey has been. In the coming months, we’ll break down in detail and decadal increments, the business deals that would re-create a regional economy, double the population of a metro area, stretch our concept of “suburbs” from 75th and Metcalf to 151st and K-7 Highway in Johnson County, well past that new airport in the Northland, pushing to the Lafayette County line on the east and into the far reaches of Jackson County’s southeastern quadrant, eventually creating a 318-square-mile community of communities.
