It's getting awfully crowded in Kansas as more big names join the race to succeed Governor Laura Kelly.

Quinton Lucas marking the midpoint of his last term.

What's left on his to do list?

We have a report card on how he's delivered, on his campaign promises.

And just as Kansas City tries to present its best image ahead of the World Cup.

Here comes The Washington Post with a less than glamorous portrait of life in KC.

Plus, no Okies recall election after all those stories and the rest of the week's news straight ahead.

Week in Review is made possible through the generous support of Dave and Jamie Cummings.

Bob and Mali's Gourley, the Courtney S Turner Charitable Trust, John H mind and Bank of America, N.A.

Co trustees.

The Francis Family Foundation through the discretionary fund of David and Janice Francis and by viewers like you.

Thank you.

Hello and welcome.

I'm Nick Haines, glad to have you with us on our weekly journey through the week's most impactful, confusing and downright head scratching local news stories.

Hopping on board the Weekend Review bus with us this week.

From a star reporter and editorial writer, Dave Helling, and current star opinion columnist Patrick Toohey.

We just got name checked this week in the Washington Post.

More on that in just a moment.

Tracking the region's top political stories for KC one News Brian Ellison.

And from our Metro's newest newspaper, Next Page KC Eric Wesson.

More on the race to succeed Laura Kelly as governor of Kansas.

Straight ahead.

But first, Matt Lucas hits the midpoint of his final term, and he's marking the occasion by racking up the air miles he was hard to catch this week.

He was in Philadelphia on Monday for a summit of city leaders.

Wednesday was in Chicago watching the Royals take on the Cubs at Wrigley Field.

Friday, he headed to Cleveland for a top Democratic Party event.

In between, his office says he was meeting with his staff to strategize on what he should do for the remainder of his short time left in office.

We weren't in that meeting, but if you were Eric, what would be the biggest item you would put on his final To-Do list?

Do something about the crime.

Do something about the homelessness.

on my way here.

Yeah, I did hear, though, this week, when they finally got agreement to open a low barrier, housing a homeless shelter in Kansas City.

they've done that before.

They hired somebody that was earmarked to do that.

If you get off on Van Buren and I-70 is a car wash there, that is now a motel, people have moved into the stores and they're living in those, those areas.

Eric mentioned crime.

Is that still the biggest unmet campaign promise, Patrick?

Yeah, it has to be, and it's demonstrably so.

Mayor Lucas ran saying he wanted to keep the homicide rate under 100.

And not only did he failed to do that.

We've seen a peak this year.

We may have the highest.

Second.

Highest, forgive me.

Homicide rate ever in Kansas City.

And to Eric's point, what Kansas City and a lot of cities are failing to do is provide the basic services.

They get distracted by the nice to have the want to haves.

But really what we need is public safety, transit and infrastructure.

And that's it.

Does he still have time to fix that before he leaves off homicide?

Lord, no.

No.

I can't imagine what he's going to do that he hasn't tried to do in the past six years.

To that point, I think we we can name this as a problem, but we can recognize also the complexity of the problem and the limited tools that any one part of our government or one particular public leader has to solve it.

certainly the state controlled police board might be a piece of that.

The resources that the city has available to devote to crime prevention, the willingness of, of the city council to support those efforts are all pieces of that.

But I think there's no question that when when the story is told of Quentin Lucas's, mayorship, the crime problem will be the thing that people continue to talk about.

What should be left on his to do list before he leaves office.

Oh, well, I agree with, of course, my colleagues, that the crime rate in Kansas City is the number one problem and everything else is number ten on the list.

I mean, that crime occupies the first nine places.

but just for the sake of diversity, there are a couple of other things that are coming up.

First, the stadium debacle has to be settled one way or another in the next two years.

If that doesn't happen, though, we're not going to pin the blame on Quinton Lucas, though he's not the poster child, the name that goes on that is he.

Rightly or wrongly, if the Chiefs and or the Royals leave, even though, by the way, it was Quinton Lucas who said that a downtown baseball stadium was a maserati when he was running for for office and quickly changed his mind.

But he'll carry some of the responsibility if the Chiefs or the Royals, particularly the Royals, go somewhere else.

So that's important.

And then I do think in the next two years he'll want to pay some attention to what happens with the Plaza.

And, you know, if that was the shopping district continues to be one third empty, that will also be seen as something the mayor could have had some impact on.

So again, it's crime.

Nobody would even dispute that it's crime.

But those are a couple of other things that might be on his plate.

If in the next two years the stadium issue is not resolved, will we really, as a public be blaming Quinton Lucas?

Patrick.

Gosh, that's a great question.

I am amazed at how all the parties in this, debacle seem to have failed from the team owners, to the politicians on both sides of state line.

I want to read the book, that comes out in ten years about about what's going on behind the scenes.

But it's it's very difficult from the outside to know who's who's the good guy.

Okay.

You're on chapter three currently.

Yep.

That's okay.

Am I right?

Well, I am retired, so I have some writing time on my hands.

But but Patrick is completely right that, all sides deserve.

In fact, I've written this for the newspaper.

All sides deserve approbation for the way they've approached this issue over the last several years.

And that does not exclude the teams.

The teams have had problems deciding what they want to do.

The politicians have been, horrible on this issue.

No one comes out of the smelling good if you listen to the backroom conversations.

If they had a kept the baseball stadium in East Village instead of moving into crossroads, they got a pushback.

They got people more engaged in the process.

That was Mayor Lucas.

His idea was to put it there and connect it to.

So you certainly put a little bit of a finger of blame on him.

okay.

What do you know?

He's got two years left.

We're at the midpoint now.

are we any the wiser as to what he does when he leaves office?

He's still a very young man.

I can't believe he's just going to go back to being a law professor at the University of Kansas.

Bryan, my sources close to the white House say it's very unlikely he'll be offered a position in the cancer.

Okay.

no, I mean, I think, well, first of all, it is two years left.

Nick, I think this might be just a little premature to, to be writing the final chapter of, that's that's a quarter of his entire tenure if he finishes his term.

but but as to what he does next, I think the general trajectory of the political system in the country have, have somewhat narrowed the options and the things he was willing to consider, obviously, folks to speak about, congressional race.

People speak about, other opportunities in the state, but those seem very limited for, a city leader from Kansas City who's a Democrat.

Let's stick with city matters for a moment.

With food assistance programs being cut all across the country, more cities are now considering publicly funded grocery stores, including the leading candidate to be the next mayor of New York City.

But a Washington Post story this week says Kansas City offers a cautionary tale.

The post points out how the city poured millions into the a supermarket at 31st in prospect, and yet it's now on the brink of closure, pointing out rotten odors and empty shelves around here.

A good thing don't last too long.

I watch people walk in and walk out.

I can tell you today, right now, it's damn near dead.

Now.

We've talked about this issue before, but now it's getting national eyeballs on the story.

Eric.

Exactly.

At the time that we're supposed to be cleaning up our image showing projected strength and how wonderful we are ahead of the World Cup.

And then here comes the Washington Post with this story.

I mean, what went wrong and is it too late to fix it?

The city was slow to respond to a lot of issues that were going on there that were just getting emotional about it there.

There was a lot that was going on that the city was slow to respond to, the crime in the area.

And I think people need to get a clarity.

They did put the money into the entire shopping center.

All of that money didn't go into.

So we talked when we talked about more than 12, $20 million, which is referenced in the story.

We're talking about the whole shopping center, not just that grocery store.

So that gives a bit of a false impression.

But don't we want cities, though, if there are issues of getting, fresh produce in certain parts of our community that you want the government to step in and trying to help out, and is it wasn't this a noble effort to do that?

Patrick?

Certainly people want government to step in and try to help out, but we really need to judge these things by how effective they are.

And I think this was doomed from the beginning.

First of all, that grocery store had already sat vacant for ten years when the city got involved, which tells you that private investors looked at this and decided it wasn't a good idea.

There were other grocery stores serving that area.

We didn't have a food desert as a lot of people talked about, but ultimately, what the city needs to do is provide for those basics.

And if a city has, public safety, if they have transit, if they support infrastructure, then private investors can come in and meet the need.

But when the city skips those basic things and tries to jump to the end to provide amenities, the writing's on the wall.

You know.

The post also exposes lots of other problems, from unchecked crime to the city's lack of a jail.

I mean, this was everything that they were presenting to the country that we perhaps don't want to have seen.

what?

As ahead of this biggest event we are holding in our history.

Yeah, of course we don't.

And but the reality, too, is that a lot of visitors to Kansas City will never see that grocery store, will not see even the crime problems that we've already talked about on this program because, the experience of the daily life of a lot of Kansas citizens is invisible to a good many other Kansas citizens, much less visitors to the city.

I think our problems as a city are are a little more systemic than that, and not easily reduced to a comment on on how it will affect World Cup visitors.

And, you know, provocatively in Graham's Magazine this week, claims Kansas City should put out an alert to World Cup visitors.

The local business magazine reports.

Nothing on the official Kansas City World Cup website warns visitors that they have a ten times better chance of being murdered in Kansas City than they would in New York City.

Do we not have an obligation to tell them?

I think that we do have an obligation to present the best possible Kansas City we can present now, whether that's kind of sugarcoating some of the real underlying issues that we have here, I think that they they have to market and nobody's going to say, hey, don't come here because you're going to get killed, but kind of just back up for one day, one second.

The thing about the Lynnwood shopping Center Sound fresh is it serves a lot of elderly people that don't have transportation or means to go to other grocery stores just quickly.

Nothing in Kansas City panics leadership more than bad publicity in a national publication.

You could write about Sun Fresh and the Lynnwood Shopping Center as the star is done and all the people around this table have done for years, suddenly it's in the Washington Post and the crisis is upon us, which is always a frustrating thing.

and the other thing to keep in mind is, while perhaps the, a warning is exaggerated, some sort of notice.

Hey, you know, make sure you know what you're doing.

If you're a visitor and the places you should and shouldn't go.

The fact is, the other cities are not blameless or immune to these problems.

If you think Kansas City has a homeless problem, go to Los Angeles.

I mean Los Angeles.

Half of the people there are living under a bridge, I don't know, so I don't know.

That's a winning pitch for Kansas City, but I'm not in Los Angeles.

But of course, my job isn't to have a winning pitch for Kansas City.

My job is to try as a reporter and demonstrate reality as it is.

And the fact is that all urban areas have challenges.

We have more than most in some areas in other places, we're doing fine.

If you haven't been keeping score, the race for governor in Kansas just got a whole lot more crowded this week.

It's not quite the dirty Dozen, but the number of Kansans who looked in the mirror and saw the next governor looking back at them has now grown to 11.

The latest to join the race, Kansas Senate President Tim Masterson.

Donald Trump is taking DC head on and he is taking the country back.

We it's time we elect that same thing here.

Most of the action is on the Republican ticket.

You've got four big political names elbowing each other for attention.

Senate President Tim Masterson, former Governor Jeff Colyer, Secretary of State Scott Schwab and Insurance Commissioner Vicki Schmidt, who has the easiest path to being nominated.

Do you think Jeff Colyer, the former lieutenant governor who's run before, as this as the, field on the Republican side widens, the bar you have to clear to get the nomination shrinks.

And so people with, with name recognition and some history with the party are, presumably the favorites.

Masterson is fairly well known that the next session, by the way, will be incredible to watch because of his candidacy.

but maybe call for, you know, maybe some of the other Republicans who are seeking to run will have to spend some time getting their names before the Republican public again.

I'm still waiting on Kris Kobach.

Someone may have intelligence that I don't have, but I think Kobach still wants to be governor.

If he runs, he would be the favorite.

Now, some other remarkable things happening, actually, on the Democratic side of the governor's race this week.

Are we about to see something exceedingly rare?

A competitive Democratic primary for governor is the second Johnson County Democratic senator throws his hat into the ring, Ethan Corson.

But perhaps the biggest surprise this week is who isn't joining the campaign.

Laura Kelly's running mate, Lieutenant Governor Dave Toland, said he would not seek the office.

That's an unexpected stunner.

What happened?

Wasn't he considered the front runner on the Democratic side?

He was, or at least one of the frontrunners because of his experience with Laura Kelly.

But Laura Kelly's reaction to this race is fascinating.

On ABC's This Week, the former Twitter, she was a fugitive in her praise of Ethan Corson.

Right to the extent of Cindy Holsinger, about whom she said nothing.

And that's suggested he will have some help in this race that she will not.

Yeah.

It's hard it's hard to think that that's unconnected to the decision of the lieutenant governor.

correct.

And to to not run.

and I don't know that it anybody saw that coming.

Now, having said that, no one would ever have accused Dave Toland of stealing the spotlight from Laura Kelly during his tenure.

I, I'm not sure that he made that many motions that suggested he was really excited about being governor.

And especially about, running for governor as a Democrat with a very uphill battle, no matter who the Republican opponent is.

so I, I'm not so shocked that he decided not to run, but I think the timing suggests that, a full on endorsement of Ethan Corson is probably on the way from the governor.

And that really changes expectations in that race.

And what happens to Laura Kelly?

I mean, she's now only got a year left.

You said about, well, there's a lot of time for Quinton Lucas, but she's not going to be your left.

I mean, what does she just ride off into the sunset?

My, my sources indicate she is not going to be offered a position in the Trump administration.

Okay.

If I was just as well wired at the white House as Brian, I could revive my moribund career.

I think that, again, I think there is still some pressure on her to run against Roger Marshall, but I don't think increasingly it looks like she'll decline that opportunity.

So she may just take senior status, much like Kathleen Sebelius, and work behind the scenes.

quickly before we leave this topic, though, Nick, who knows who Ethan Corson is?

I mean, that name is really unfamiliar, to most Kansans.

He's from Prairie Village.

Cindy Hauser is also a local product.

That's an interesting development for Democrats.

But whoever the nominee is is really going to need a boost in the general election.

It doesn't help that he's also from Johnson County.

Yes.

Correct?

Correct.

I'm sure we'll talk about that more in the coming year.

But but Ethan Corson from fairway, a relatively newcomer, to the state legislature compared to Cindy Hole.

Sure.

But he does have this national experience, this experience at the national level that suggests he's probably more tied to, to Democratic leaders and maybe Democratic money.

Jackson County Executive Frank white has done something no one else has been able to accomplish over the past year.

He's managed to knock the stadium story off the front page.

White's fate has become Kansas City's newest and biggest political drama.

This week, we learned a little more about the recall election that could oust him from office.

While we're still waiting for a judge to rule on whether a recall election can be held and when we've been told local election offices aren't even preparing for an August ballot any longer.

So what are they preparing for, Eric?

Well, one is is preparing for the judge to rule.

That's Jackson County is my understanding that the Kansas City Election Board is preparing for it.

They just don't haven't put any dates on anything.

The court is going to rule.

I think what they're probably going to have to prepare for is whenever it happens, it's going to happen.

what I think is interesting is that we're still learning more about, how this unfolds and what it what what even happens after, a recall occurs.

we of course, as we shared last time, last time I brandished copies of the, of the county charter, that we even with public broadcasting cuts.

Yes, we're able to print some, you know, I use double sided.

Okay.

but the the reality is that, the replacement occurs at the hands of the county legislature, not, not with a new election immediately.

The new permanent county executive doesn't get elected until what would have been the end of Frank White's term.

at the end of 2026.

I actually found that surprising.

So I assumed that if voters, were to recall Frank white, we would then have an election to decide who his replacement should be.

But actually, the legislators themselves will decide.

And, I'm assuming then if they're the ones doing the picking on, they're more likely to pick one of their own than an outsider to be in that role.

I am sure there is all sorts of politicking going on among them to to determine who's going to follow up Frank white.

But, this is what kind of makes the difficult issue for me is that I don't know what's coming next.

I am not confident at all that if Frank white is removed, that property assessments get any better or a stadium negotiation gets any better, this just seems to be let's get rid of this one guy.

And we're not talking about what comes next and what will change.

And what actually if he survives the recall effort whenever that election takes place.

Eric, how would government be then, if he still maintains that position?

And, how difficult will it be to get things done then?

I think everybody would want be in a state of shock.

Okay, survive a recall.

But I think it would be confusing as to the candidates that want to be the interim there.

board all of them come in saying, hey, I want to fix this asthma problem.

I going to fix it, I know how to fix it.

So whether or not they'll be able to jail together as one like they should be, I think that remains to be seen.

I mean, a cynical person might answer your question, Nick, with, well, well, what are they getting done now?

Every story that we've talked about and the most media have talked about over the past many months has been either about Frank white and the possible recall about anger and frustration over tax assessments and the apparent inability to resolve the situation has been about bickering among legislature members or, in some cases, criminal charges against, legislature members.

I'm not sure much would be different if, if Frank white survived the election, at least some people would say, this this tenure is already had a really rough go.

Has Donald Trump put the final nail in the coffin of any chance that the Kansas City Chiefs would change their name this week?

The president says he will block a new stadium deal for the NFL's Washington commanders unless they restore their former Redskins name.

I always thought it was conceivable that the Chiefs might consider a name change if they were to move from Arrowhead, Arrowhead rather, and build a new stadium.

But does the president's actions this week signaled that we're further away than ever from a Chiefs rebrand?

Dave?

Well, we're, of a way far away from a Chiefs rebrand because the Chiefs steadfastly refused to rebrand.

They have.

I mean, I've written that story several times.

I've talked to Chiefs leadership.

They just really believe in that name.

They believe it adds to their success on the field.

They just have no interest in trying some other alternative, either renaming the current stadium or renaming their team.

It has nothing to do, really, with, what President Trump has said.

I grew up in Washington, DC.

I've always known the team as the Redskins.

I still have Redskins merchandise, which I protect.

I can't imagine that the fever, the national moral panic over team's names will extend any further and certainly won't cause the Chiefs to change.

I will just say briefly, we wrote a lot about the chop, the tomahawk chop, which is in certain parts of Kansas City, causes a cringe every time it happens.

The Chiefs won't even try and stop that again.

They think it's part of what they're doing.

And to respond to Patrick's point, I think there are a lot of parts of the Kansas City community who would not think of this as a national fever.

They would think about this as matters of dignity and identity, regarding their status as Native Americans and Indigenous people whose imagery and language is being used to as, to, to, to cause an implicit oppression of them.

But the chief is named after a man who was a historic person here in Kansas.

That is baloney.

Baloney, Jim.

Oh, of course they all.

Oh, it's troll okay.

Oh, yeah, that's just baloney.

Always has been.

The University of Kansas mascot, Jay.

Hawkers were domestic terrorists from the Civil War.

If no one's going to get upset about that name, then I'm not impressed with getting.

All right.

Now, before we get to our Big Story segment, just a quick note to let you know about what's been happening behind the scenes here at the station.

One week after all, our federal funding was cut.

Three quick take homes.

Hiring is on hold to travel is being restricted.

And perhaps the biggest news of all our decades old Kansas City PBS magazine and member guide is going away.

Oh, yes.

I thought you might say that.

it's about a $300,000 a year effort that, with all the printing and the mailing cost, it'll be the most noticeable early casualty of the funding cuts will keep you posted regularly about what else is happening now.

When you put a program like this together every week, you can't get to every story grabbing the headlines.

What was the big local story?

We missed?

At least one fatality this week from a deluge of rain.

It's the second week in a row that local flooding forces emergency responders to conduct water rescues.

The chiefs head north, has training camp gets underway in Saint Joseph.

Ted Lasso begins filming in Kansas City.

Surprising shoppers on the plaza this week.

Is pen way point in trouble?

The Ferris wheel is up, but complaints spilled over weeds of Hope to construction.

There's no word on when the rest of the development might be built.

Early voting now underway in the window County mayor's race.

Six candidates are campaigning to succeed Tyrone Garner, who is not running for reelection.

Fearing for its funding.

CU eliminates gender pronouns in official communications from emails to zoom calls.

And many of you have complained about kids on scooters and e-bikes.

Overland Park now considering a major crackdown.

Thing is a large number are head injuries a lot of confusion really, about what are the rules where folks are supposed to be?

Are they supposed to be on the sidewalk or in the street?

actually, you traveled here by Scooter Eric.

So I'm just wondering whether the concern over a potential crackdown was your top story.

Mister, I'm shaking in my boots.

I chose to head going in the gates and bringing a positive spin on Kansas City.

maybe they could use that for the World Cup.

For people coming in as a marketing to Brian.

after a long wait, on Thursday morning, the streetcar authority announced that the southern extension will open on Friday, October 24th, will connect, residents and, and people who work in the city to a wide range of restaurants and businesses and Umkc and someday, perhaps, me to a downtown baseball stadium will succeed.

And so you can finally go shopping on the plaza and leave your car at home.

Patrick, I can't wait for that.

so the story I pick, I'll shamelessly promote one of my columns was that the unified government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas, did away with their parking mandates for a number of years in the old part of downtown.

This is a great move that gets an unnecessary and costly regulation out of the way from developers and people who want to build homes, and people just want to be entrepreneurs and open restaurants.

And so so they used to be things like you had to have free parking spaces per how many feet of space.

And that went away.

It's a nightmare in Kansas City, Missouri to figure this out, but moves by K and even by Saint Louis show that maybe cities are learning that what they need to do to increase development is get out of the way.

This week, the Trump administration withdrew federal loan guarantees for the Grain Belt Express.

That's a power transmission project to bring power from the wind fields in Kansas and Missouri, and then through Missouri to other communities.

That will become critical next, because every community in America wants to build a data center, which sucks electricity and water.

But electricity, like almost no other development in the world.

And so the ability to produce power and move it to where it's needed is going to be a huge issue in the next decade.

And on that, we will say a week has been reviewed courtesy of star contributing opinion columnist Patrick To and Eric Wesson from next page, KC from KC, while Brian Ellison and News icon Dave Helling and I'm Nick Haines from all of us here at Kansas City PBS.

Be well, keep calm and carry on.