Local business owners Lynn Hinkle and Kathi Vandel have reached a milestone in their careers. Each one has founded and successfully run businesses for decades and each has earned the highly sought job of working on the new $1.5 billion, single terminal Kansas City International airport.
Contractors include a large percentage of women and minority-owned businesses, along with disabled veteran-owned businesses and disadvantaged businesses.
Hinkle has owned the public relations firm Astra Enterprises Inc. since 1995. She named the company in honor of the Kansas state motto, Ad Astra per Aspera (To the stars through difficulties). Before Astra, she owned and operated an advertising agency in Topeka, Kan. for 10 years.
When she moved to Kansas City she got more into public involvement and public relations and got away from advertising, but during her time in Topeka she did a lot of advertising for state tourism.
“We worked with the chambers of commerce and we got liquor by the drink for Kansas,” Hinkle said. “When I moved to Kansas City I kind of converted my experience over to public relations. I’d always considered myself a writer so now I get to use those skills in a different way. You don’t have to keep a big office and have a big staff, it was a lot more flexible and I was a single mom raising four boys. I needed flexibility in my life.”
Her first major project in Kansas City came about because the Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base was being converted into the CenterPoint-Kansas City Southern Intermodal Center.
“It was very controversial so I really earned my chops with the Richards-Gebaur master plan and project, Hinkle said. “It took a year and I managed to bring pro and con forces together around the same table for decision-making so that we could find consensus and we were successful, so that was a taste of what it could be like.”
Although she experienced a tire-slash incident during the contentious project, she is proud of the result.
Her next project was the KCI terminal Improvement project, which slowed down traffic considerably at the airport during construction.
“The project was more challenging getting people to not show up 10 minutes before their flight like they were doing before 2001, but you had to make people understand they had to allow more time for the construction, and then 9/11 happened so we had already conditioned people that they were going to have to take more time with all this change to really make it a requirement that they get to the airport well ahead of time,” Hinkle said. “I recently interviewed Leonard Graham, president of Taliaferro & Browne. They have a major proportion of the engineering work for the land side, which are the roads that approach the terminals, and we talked about how during this construction phase until it’s finished in 2023 people will access terminals B and C, and then how they will access them after - so all of that road work is a major, major effort. Getting those roads planned and taking down Terminal A was the initial step in the project”
Traffic between terminals B and C is now restricted to one lane.
Hinkle also worked with former Mayor Kay Barnes on the Sprint Center, which opened in 2007.
She also works with the Kansas City Strategic Partnership Program. She particularly likes helping to promote a program which was developed by Clark Construction, which is one of the partners in the construction project at KCI.
Through the two-year partnership program with the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, selected employees gain valuable business know-how. The Strategic Partnership Program’s intensive, MBA-style curriculum is aimed at local small businesses, including minority- and women-owned businesses. “The program really prepares you to pitch and win projects,” Hinkle said. “I love going to the graduation class for the Kansas City Strategic Partnership Program because you see between 30 and 40 businesses excited and proud to have achieved it. The pride they have is the most rewarding thing to see. And it’s so diverse — from a Muslim woman that has a cleaning company to women who have trucking businesses and have been hired to work at KCI and haul away that excess debris after the terminal was torn down. It’s exciting to see the networks they have created together. There are now 40 businesses from all over the city who are connecting to each other and bidding together on packages. To me that’s very exciting. Now, I’m really focused on the minorities and women in business and trying to highlight what their involvement is and what their background is. The most challenging things working on the project so far is that there are so many small businesses to talk to and promote and so trying to be inclusive and making sure that we give them their due is important because they had to do a lot to win the opportunity and they’re going to have to do a lot to perform.”
Seeing people who have not had the opportunity to be at the policy-making tables because of their gender or ethnicity is something she wants to help change. Hinkle says her passion for helping women and minorities comes from a deep place within her and intensified in the 1990s when her friend Gov. Joan Finney asked her to host some Russian dancers and singers who were visiting Kansas. When she spoke to them through translators she realized Russia was lacking in women who held public office.
“Nobody was training women to run for political office so I started going to Russia in 1993 and working with women there to encourage them to run because I saw how it was here in 1992 when 12 women ran for the U.S. Senate and that was a world record for us. So, I already had a feeling of wanting to empower more women. As a mother of four sons I wanted more Russian women and Russian mothers sitting at the policy table making decisions about war. That was kind of a labor of love. I created a nonprofit called Women of the World for training women. I went to Russia six times during the 90s.”
One of her most memorable experiences in Russia was getting a call from the American consul general who told her to go meet with the deputy mayor in St. Petersburg the day before her training sessions began. She was told the deputy mayor wanted to know what her training was all about. When she arrived at the city hall in St. Petersburg she walked down a long hallway in the building where Vladimir Lenin had lived, which Catherine the Great had built as a women’s university. She was told she wouldn’t need a translator since the deputy mayor spoke perfect English. “We sat down at the table and my chair was really low so I felt like I had to sit up like a child at the big table,” Hinkle said. “He came in and sat down on a big elevated throne-like chair looking down at me. He grilled me for an hour about what I was doing and what my credentials were and who my trainers were and what their credentials were. He asked what we were going to be teaching the women and who the women were. At the end he said he would send his campaign managers to the training and I asked if they were women and when he said no, I told him they couldn’t come then. So he said he would send a video crew to tape the training and I told him no. He asked if I would meet with his campaign managers before I left Russia and answer any questions they had and I said I would be glad to. When I got back to the apartment my Russian friends who were helping to organize the training sessions asked where I’d been because everyone had been looking for me. I said I had to go meet with the deputy mayor. They asked what his name was since there were many. I said it was some guy named Vladimir Putin. They looked at me and asked what he wanted and I told them he wanted to send his campaign managers to the training and I told him no. They stepped back a little bit and asked if I knew that he was the head of the KGB. I said well, nobody bothered to tell me. That would have been good to know.”
Hinkle said the March 2023 deadline for the airport completion is when about a half million people will show up in Kansas City for the 2023 NFL Draft which will be held near Union Station. “I think that Kansas City is on the brink of a big transformational time that has really been part of what I’ve personally experienced,” Hinkle said. “That NFL draft in 2023 is going to be a huge sort of a Super Bowl coming-out party for Kansas City.
Lightworks
Kathi Vandel founded her company Lightworks Inc. in 2002. She had worked as an engineer for a company in downtown Kansas City for 10 years in a role similar to the one she has with Lightworks but she got tired of the long commute from Weston each day and wanted to be able to focus on her family.
“I needed flexibility for my growing family and I decided to open my own business so I could be in charge of my schedule and have more flexibility,” Vandel said. “I started by myself but about a year-and-a-half later a woman named Allison Evans joined me and she is still with me today.”
Contributed photo
Kathi Vandel at her store Lightworks in Weston.
When the business continued to grow and get busier, more employees were added. There are now six people working at Lightworks. After working in collaboration mainly online, Vandel decided to open a studio space in The Crossroads area in Kansas City to serve as a design hub where all the employees who worked remotely could come together.
“It was just the two of us for a very long time but when we got the airport contract we had to hire people so we’ve doubled the people that work here,” Vandel said. “That project has been a blessing but we’ve also got a lot of other projects in addition to that so it’s kind of moved us into a different area. “We have more capabilities so we’re able to do more because we have more staff.”
She said historically lighting firms like hers are small for the most part, but there are a lot of them around the world. Because the specialty firm is on the small side, Vandel said they call the business a boutique company.
The company may be small, but it’s an important bridge for architects and interior designers in helping them bring their visions to life.
“We come up with concepts and designs for lighting in commercial spaces mostly, then we do all the engineering calculations to figure out what products to use and evaluate those different products using all kinds of different aspects for output and manufacturing and then we put that all together in a set of construction documents,” Vandel said. “Then we work with the contractors on the project which we call construction administration. Once a contractor is building, they also put together products that they are going to supply based on our drawings and then we approve their revisions. The company does the plans not the installation. The bigger the project the more work it takes to get to the point of installation.”
She has four different contracts on the airport, two with Henderson Engineers working on the terminal lighting for the building and also the parking garage. She is working with civil engineers, Taliaferro & Browne for the streets, parking lots and exterior parts of the project.
Landscape architects, LAND3 Studio also works with Vandel on the landscape lighting.
“The only thing we’re not doing anything at all on is the back side of the building where the planes are,” Vandel said. “We don’t do anything from the back of the building out to the runways, we don’t touch any of that. We’ve already issued roadway drawings for construction and it’s all getting rerouted. We’re into design development right now which is a phase of our design documentation and we’re getting moving on the initial study on the parking garage.”
Lightworks has been working on the airport for about 18 months. Initially, the company helped in coming up with the numbers for the project’s budget for approval by the city council.
“It’s a lot of work but we have processes that we’ve developed over the years,” Vandel said. I have thought this seems like an overwhelming massive project. We’re just methodically working our way through it and putting information that we’re calculating and determining into the building model. We had a lot of work up to the point the budget was approved but we’re well into the design phase now and we’re working very hard on it.”
Construction drawings are now done three-dimensionally and Vandel uses a program called Revit. She said they used to draw a light fixture on a plan, but now they can actually put it into the model.
“All the different disciplines are doing this, so they can go into the model and tell if things are conflicting - if we have a light fixture and there’s a water line running right through it or there’s a beam in the way, so you’re working out some of the kinks during the design of the project,” Vandel said. “It’s supposed to make construction quicker. I think that’s why it was developed, so we could work out some of the coordination issues before construction started. It’s not faster on our part because you have to think three-dimensionally but it’s supposed to make our jobs easier.”
This is the biggest project she has ever worked on. Before that her largest project was the Loews Hotel, a convention center hotel next to Bartle Hall in downtown Kansas City. She also worked on Hollywood Casino, Nebraska Furniture Mart and the Legends development. The business is involved with projects all over the U.S. and internationally.
“We work on so many different projects it makes it interesting,” Vandel said. “We do offices, we do churches, we get involved in new streetscapes and it’s such a variety. It’s rewarding to know that you had an impact on the built environment in and around Kansas City even though most people might not even notice it. But hopefully they will have a nice experience in these spaces. We don’t necessarily want people to notice the lighting, but we want them to notice that beautiful stone wall, not particularly the lights that are shining on that wall.”
Environmental sustainability has been an important element of the project. All the lights will be LED and the lighting controls will include automatic light adjustment according to available daylight.
Lightworks is unique Vandel said because they work differently from most businesses. She said the company is remote, nimble and focused on providing a good lifestyle and a good workplace balance while working efficiently. “We get in and get our work done and try to focus and then we go on and do our other life stuff.”
After working as an engineer for 30 years, she believes the people she has worked with over the years trust the company because Lightworks’ employees are good at what they do. She said they don’t actively market the business because in the construction world word gets around.
“There’s enough work around right now that we don’t have to market ourselves, we’re kind of blessed that we are so busy,” Vandel said. “The best part of being in the lighting design business is just seeing your projects come to fruition. You spend all this time working on them and you see them during construction and they’re coming to life before your eyes. It’s really fun.”
The fact that Kansas City required a certain percentage of participation on the airport project from women and minority-owned business over and above previous project participation is important to Vandel.
“They were trying to be really aggressive and to get smaller firms involved in this project and it’s helping a lot of people,” Vandel said. “It’s taking us to our next level.”