On Wednesday I broke the news that there’s a major shakeup of the city’s development incentive programs underway. So far the response has been overwhelmingly skeptical.

A lot of the skepticism centers on Mayor Funkhouser’s apparent involvement. The Mayor is, according to one of my sources, “working very closely with Chesser on this.” That would be Mike Chesser, chair of the Economic Development Corporation of Kansas City.

“This is all about power,” another insider told me. “It won’t change anything. It’ll just shift the power to a different group. The Mayor is pushing for it because he wants a win. He thinks it will help him get reelected.”

I’ve heard this so often, and from so many different people, that it feels almost like a universal truth: You can’t trust anything the Mayor’s involved with because all he cares about is reelection.

What throws a monkey wrench into everybody’s conspiracy theory, though, is Chesser.

Nobody has anything bad to say about him.

The harshest criticism I’ve heard came from a comment on this very website.

“Chesser says there has not been an outpouring of compliants (sic) about EDC and its administration,” the anonymous commenter wrote. “You might want to get to the bottom of why Chesser doesn't hear the County, School District and Library compliants (sic) that are loud and clear to the rest of us.”

That’s a good point. As EDC chair, surely he’s well aware of these complaints, some of which have come in the form of legal documents in a potential lawsuit.

And I have to admit that when I talked with Chesser last week I was a little dismayed when he responded to a question about the inherent conflict of interest in the current development incentive system: the EDC gets most of its money from a commission on every development incentive it can get approved.

“I’ve heard that theory,” Chesser told me. “I have not seen that.”

OK. So he plays his cards close to his chest. I guess that’s why he’s a corporate CEO and I’m a blogging grad student.

He also downplayed the significance of the documents I’d obtained, saying, “That’s all work product. It’s not been vetted by all the stakeholders. There isn’t anything cast in concrete.”

When I asked about the document outlining a “potential new Economic Development Corporation business model,” he said. “That’s not a proposal. It was just for the purpose of getting people’s ideas on the table… Everything is on the table, including that.”

Makes sense, I guess.

But then, if there were other proposals on the table, why didn’t any of those seep into the gossip mill and eventually make it to me, documents and all?

He didn’t have an answer to that because I didn’t ask him; I thought of it just now as I was writing. Not that it matters. It’s a rhetorical question.

Bottom line, from Chesser’s point of view: “This is about achieving the goals we’ve established – improving efficiency, reducing redundancy, building trust in the community and focusing more on business retention. At this point, we’re far from that. But I’m optimistic we will be able to come up with a strategy.”

All good goals, and I guess I’m optimistic, too. Skeptically optimistic, if that’s possible.

I’ll put it this way. I like Chesser and I trust him. I also know that he is in a very privileged position as CEO of one of the biggest companies in town, Great Plains Energy, better known as Kansas City Power & Light.

Based on what I’ve seen, Chesser seems to have the right mix of integrity, earnestness, clout and power.

He’s also something of an outsider. He grew up in Baltimore. He’s not a member of a Kansas City dynasty like the Kempers, Halls or Dunns. He didn’t go to Pembroke. In fact, he grew up quite poor. So he’s not stuck in Kansas City tradition, so to speak.

I first met him at a dinner at The Kauffman Foundation that I attended as a representative of the Mayor’s Office. When I told him I used to work for The Pitch, he said that my old paper printed the best thing he’d ever read about himself. The paper quoted an environmental activist as saying he’s "pretty good -- for an executive."

While I was in the Mayor’s Office, I worked closely with him and his staff, and with the staff of a nonprofit for which he serves as board president, to try to build support for a citywide education summit.

It was a tough time to go to bat for the Mayor: the first time Funk tried to get rid of the city manager, when he was brutally vilified at a City Council meeting by the city’s black leaders. Still, Chesser got involved because, he said at the time, it’s unusual when a mayor is willing to go to bat for the school district, and we should take advantage of it.

He arranged a meeting of the Business Leaders Roundtable, which is a small elite group of CEOs within the Civic Council of Greater Kansas City, which is a slightly larger small elite group of CEOs that carries a lot of pull in the KC power structure.

We met in a high-tech boardroom on the Cerner campus north of the river. For those readers who believe that the city is run by a secret society of rich white men, this was the perfect setting for your conspiracy thriller. It looked just like Dr. Evil’s headquarters in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. I wouldn’t be surprised if there had been a tank of laser-beam-shooting sharks under the floor.

Anyway, it didn’t work out, obviously. There was to be no education summit, in no small part because the Mayor refused to accept any of compromises that came out of the meetings I had with Chesser’s nonprofit staff – which could serve as a harbinger of possible doom for the current collaboration on eco devo reform.

But there’s one thing Chesser kept saying throughout the process, and that I’ve heard in other situations, that really impressed me, and continues to impress me.

It goes something like this:

“Kansas City has some problems, sure, but they’re nowhere near as bad as the problems in the big cities back east. It seems to me that we ought to be able to solve them.”

I’ll second that.

Here’s hoping we do.