By Joe Miller

Back when Kay Barnes was still mayor, a developer told me that development attorneys would sometimes offer to help him secure tax breaks for projects he was already developing.

You see, attorney fees are among the billable expenses for these projects. So development attorneys stand to make an easy buck if they can get an already-planned development thrown into the public trough.

My developer friend is a good guy, so he said no.

But still. To me, this is the strongest evidence I’ve ever seen that the system is corrupt.

Tax incentives are just that: incentives. They’re designed to stimulate developments that the market can’t – such as a new grocery store in a poor neighborhood, like the one that recently opened in Kansas City, Kansas.

In Kansas City, though, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of these tax breaks were doled for developments that were locate the overwhelming majority of the time in wealthier areas of the city, such as on the Plaza or on undeveloped farmland in the suburban north.

That’s not happening these days.

And I’m not hearing anymore stories about attorneys shopping deals.

What I am hearing is a lot of talk about how the mayor put a tattooed ignoramus on the TIF Commission, which oversees distribution of tax-increment financing, the city’s most-used tax incentive.

I’m on pretty good terms with several members of the commission (I helped a couple of them get appointed), so I decided to call them up and see what’s happening.

As usual, my old friend Kelvin Perry was the most forthcoming. He has represented the Kansas City School District on the commission since 2006 – before Mark Funkhouser was elected mayor.

He sounds happier these days then he did when he was calling me when I worked in the mayor’s office.

"When I first came on board, projects were just crammed down our throats,” he says. “Now we have open discussion about these projects. We're not going to have any more of this nonsense where you run anything through.”

Which sounds great. Except, it’s only temporary, right? As soon as Funkhouser leaves office, which may well be when his first term ends in 2011, someone new will come along and appoint all new people to the boards and the incentives scam will be back in business, right?

Perry tells me no.

"I don't care who the mayor is,” he says. “Those days are over.

“I just think we are getting so much done as a group,” he adds, “it could be Funk, (mayoral candidate Mike) Burke, Sly (James) – it wouldn’t change much.”

And what they’re getting done is nothing short of a complete culture change. They’re digging into the very foundations of the tax incentive program – its core policies, the way the administrative staff works and communicates, the kind of legal representation the commission receives, how the public is engaged in decision making – and looking for ways to make it impervious to the kind of corruption it fell prey to before.

More than that, though, they’re looking at how to ensure that tax incentives are distributed for the good of the greater community, not just narrow benefit of a single development area. It’s more of a holistic view of economic development, one that takes into account not only the size and scope of construction projects but the impact on vital resources such as the health and education systems, and the city’s infrastructure needs.

“I don’t just represent the city,” says Warren Adams-Leavitt, one of the mayor’s new appointees. “I’m also a representative of Jackson County. And I live within the boundaries of the school district and the public library. It doesn’t make sense to be constantly at odds.”

I’m going to talk more in-depth about the new TIF Commission’s specific goals in next week’s column.

But for now I’m dying to know just one thing: What about that tattooed guy?

The biggest obstacle is the City Council's interference with staff at the TIF Commission. It's almost as if they don't need a TIF Commission. That needs to stop. The Commission needs to independently evaluate proposed projects, free of Council influence. That is what the public expects and it is what they deserve."

“Stretch is asking some really good questions at our meetings,” Perry says of Jeff Rumaner, the artist and urban developer who Funkhouser appointed last month to much controversy.

Pressed for details, Perry replied vie email that Stretch recently dug in on a discussion about a property that’s part of a TIF project in Midtown. After learning of its value as determined by staff, he suggested it could be worth more if it were put out for a bidding process to determine value. This, in turn, would bring more money back more quickly to the city.

Not bad for a guy who doesn’t know his alphabet.