It was after I’d turned off my tape recorder, at what I thought was the end of a second long recent interview with Kansas City, Kansas, Mayor Tyrone Garner, that he summed up by saying, “Literally, I’m terrified” by what goes on inside the Unified Government. So of course, back out came the notebook and pen.
No, he’s not terrified for his physical safety, he said, but by the thought of all the “questionable things” that might be going on inside the UG that he doesn’t even know about: “There are some things in this building that are questionable. I feel very uncomfortable because of some of the red flags I’ve seen” since taking office in 2021.
So uncomfortable, he said, that “I’ve turned things over to the authorities,” including the information that led to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation’s 2022 probe into alleged misuse of the taxpayer-funded purchasing cards that had been issued to 363 employees who were charging an average of $7 million a year. “That was me,” he said. “This place scares me.”
(That investigation was closed, a spokeswoman for the KBI told me, after Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree’s office decided not to file any charges in the case. Why that was, I don’t know, since neither Dupree nor his spokesman, Jonathan Carter, answered my question about it.)
And Garner isn’t the only UG elected official troubled by “questionable things.” At Wednesday night’s Board of Public Utilities meeting, board president Rose Mulvany Henry said the BPU is so dysfunctional that she is considering resigning.
“I didn’t say I am leaving, but I’m definitely doing some thinking and praying on whether or not I’m making a difference,” she told me in a phone interview Thursday. “Folks are clamoring for help and having difficulty getting by,” she said, and “If I’m leaving at the end of a lot of days questioning whether or not I’m making a difference. … A lot of folks who’ve come into local government recently don’t love to hear, ‘But that’s the way we’ve always done it.’”
“I’m very troubled by the prospect” of Mulvany Henry stepping down, BPU board member David Haley told me. “We can’t go back to leaving everything up to the will and whim of staff with no oversight.” More or less forever, he said, “there have been excesses, especially among employees and subcontractors. It was run like a big candy store.”
Which is particularly inexcusable in a county where 1 in 5 children lives in poverty, where there are vast food deserts, not only historic but real-time redlining, crushing taxes and electric rates. And where, because development has not benefited those who need it most, the mayor is right when he says, “It looks like somebody dropped a bomb on Northeast.”
Garner is frustrated, too, by his inability to make change happen, or even get information out of UG employees he has no ability to hire, fire, demote or discipline. “At one time, the mayor was an authority figure.” But according to him, that’s no longer the case.
‘I’ve had doors slammed in my face’
When the governments of KCK and Wyandotte County merged to become the Unified Government in 1997, the whole idea was to crack down on corruption, spur development and do away with one layer of bureaucracy.
But the way the charter was written had a bunch of unintended consequences, too, in Garner’s view essentially putting staff in charge, though they’re unaccountable to either elected officials or voters.
Then, in 2022, UG commissioners voted to undercut the mayor’s power further by limiting what had been his chief ability, which was to set the agenda for commissioners. Previously, he could stop a proposal from even going to a vote, and now he can’t.
In a compromise Garner agreed to, he can send a proposal back to a standing committee, once and once only, but then when it comes back out of committee, it goes to a vote whether he agrees or not. He can also veto a proposal, but with a veto that can be overridden by a majority of commissioners.
That change “did degrade the authority” the mayor has, Garner said, “but I compromised because if I hadn’t, I would have been down to running the meeting and taking selfies with babies and grandmas.”
Now, “I just provide leadership, whatever that means. And the county administrator reports to me, but does that mean that I supervise him, or that he gives me a report?” Mostly, he said, “I can advocate, just like you can.” And he can use “leverage,” he says, but as a non-politician, he says he’s not entirely comfortable doing that. “It’s like I’m sitting in the middle of a lake in a boat and there’s no way to row it.”
He’s had UG employees refuse even simple requests, like fixing a pothole, clearing trash or providing information that might help him get clarity on what’s happening inside a bureaucracy that seems to feel free to ignore him.
Once the commission approves anything, he says, “it goes to staff. Staff has the complete discretion to spend the money as they choose, to decide who and what gets resources, where and when. The problem I see is that the mayor and commissioners can’t get a pothole fixed, because by our charter we can’t tell staff what to do. I’ve had employees tell me no! ‘Not on our do-list, Mayor.’ I’ve had doors slammed in my face.’’
“Why is there this level of obstruction? Since I’ve been mayor, I haven’t gotten the level of cooperation and support as mayors that I’ve come to know from the past. Because I’m Black? I don’t know what it is.”
Commission meetings ‘borderline Jerry Springer’
After Garner retired from the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department in 2019, “I moved out of Wyandotte County. I was one of those individuals that said you know, I don’t see the value in living in Wyandotte County. I moved to Johnson County, like a lot of other folks, because (of) the amenities, the goods and services and the resources.”
He only moved back to run for mayor in the election held in November of 2021 because “some folks asked me to move back” to run. He did that because he thought maybe he could help, he said. “I lost my house coming back here” — a house he couldn’t afford to get back into now, he adds, “and I was naive. I thought I could get in there and change things. I struggle,” he said, “because of the nepotism and the cronyism that has been the story of this city.”
Would he move back again to run, I asked him, knowing what he knows now? “I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s challenging. To answer that, I would say yes, because people I’ve talked to have said, ‘Mayor, if you had not been in the position, we would not have had a voice.’ And if I haven’t done anything else, I think that I’ve educated pockets of our community to how our government runs.” And doesn’t run.
Many residents are so fed up that public comment time at commissioners meetings has “been borderline Jerry Springer a few times,” Garner said.
So what now? The UG was never going to “disunify.” Asking residents how they felt about unification, as Edwardsville Mayor Carolyn Caiharr did on her own time, was according to Garner part of an effort not to pull the government back apart, but to gather information that might help officials think about the unintended consequences of unification, and how those might be addressed.
One thing he learned through that effort, which was announced last fall, is that “it’s a violation of our code of ethics to talk about changing the form of government. They put triggers in place.” The whole discussion, he says, has pretty much been “mothballed.”
Yet it’s clear that more audits are as urgently needed as ever, along with changes to the charter to reform a bureaucracy that in many ways still operates like the machine that unification was supposed to dismantle, only as a bunch of mini-fiefdoms.
Do I think that a different mayor could, under the current system, do more to root out the corruption, calcification and inequity that Tyrone Garner describes? Not really, no, though others might be less willing to talk about it.
That he has essentially opened a vein here is a kind of cri de coeur to his fellow commissioners, as well as to his constituents, to stop accepting the status quo: “I know there’s a movement that everything’s great. But you’ve got a lot of dissatisfied individuals.” It’s not hard to see why he’s one of them.
