Comment: The EDC is using words like like equity and inclusion. We are skeptical about what these words mean to some of KC's most priviliged. You should be skeptical too. This agency is built to divert and abate funds for education of low-income children for "projects" that profit big lawyers and big construction. We reject the notion that downtown should still be first in line for big taxpayer subsidies. It's time for real economic equity to benefit real neighborhoods.
Excerpted from KCBJ...
It’s been a season of change at the Economic Development Corp. of Kansas City. After CEO Bob Langenkamp shepherded the EDC through a headquarters move at the end of June, he resigned on July 5. The agency found an interim CEO in Greg Flisram, its former senior vice president of business and real estate development who has been with the EDC since 2014.
Flisram told the Kansas City Business Journal that the EDC treated the move as an opportunity to revamp itself and alter how the business community understands it by rebranding and placing its strategic priorities front and center.
“We saw it as an opportunity to rebrand,” Flisram said. “We want to live our mission a little more, and we thought that being in a still-emerging neighborhood with a story still being told — and being a part of that story — was important to us.”
The quasi-government organization oversees several entities charged with granting incentives to projects in Kansas City, including the Planned Industrial Expansion Authority and the Tax Increment Financing Commission of Kansas City.
...Flisram said the EDC also has several strategic initiatives aimed at economic equity and inclusion, helping move the organization beyond merely a transactional role to something more meaningful to the businesses it helps.