KC officials take the stand over demotion of ex-spokesman who claims city lied to public
A workplace dispute that at its core questions the transparency of Kansas City’s government is in the hands of a Jackson County jury this week.
Was Chris Hernandez, a TV news reporter turned communications director for the city, pushed out because he was being asked to go against his principles and lie to the public? Or did he lose his job because he wasn’t meeting the high expectations of a new boss who thought Hernandez wasn’t highlighting the city’s accomplishments enough?
Testimony in support of both arguments will try to sway the jury in a trial that began this week in the employment discrimination lawsuit that Hernandez filed against the city two years ago. It hinges on a Missouri law that protects whistleblowers, which Hernandez claims to be for challenging what he deemed as dishonesty from the city’s top administrator.
In the nine years that Hernandez oversaw the city’s office of communications, he claims to have stuck to the principles he learned in journalism school. He believed his job was to provide the city’s taxpayers with facts, rather than spin.
But his new boss had other ideas, Hernandez claims. A year after Brian Platt moved into the city manager’s suite on the 29th floor of City Hall, Platt revealed himself in a January 2022 staff meeting as someone willing to fudge the facts to make himself and his administration look good, Hernandez says.
And when the former KSHB 41 reporter resisted what he saw as Platt’s willingness to lie to the news media and the public, Hernandez claims he was forced to find another position within city government or quit.
“This case is about integrity,’’ Hernandez’s attorney Lynne Bratcher said in her opening statement on Tuesday.
Assistant City Attorney Tara Kelly countered that idea in her opening remarks to the jury, insisting that the case is, instead, about a communications director who failed in his job by resisting Platt’s overhaul of the communications department and falling short of expectations.
One of Platt’s top priorities when he became city manager in December 2020 after holding a similar position in Jersey City, New Jersey, Kelly said, was to re-engineer what he saw as Kansas City’s fragmented and unfocused communications department. She said Platt found Hernandez unable and unwilling to implement his strategy.
“The plaintiff simply failed to deliver,” Kelly said.
The trial will likely not finish until early next week. In addition to Platt and Hernandez, the witness lists include a number of current and former top insiders within city government.
Among them is Mayor Quinton Lucas, who Kelly said will testify that he supported Platt’s decision to remove Hernandez as communications director months before Platt finally did so in August 2022.
Hernandez transferred to another department to take a job with fewer responsibilities and filed for early retirement in the fall of 2023.
‘PR, NOT Public Information’
The first to take the stand on Tuesday was Kerrie Tyndall, a former assistant city manager who, like Hernandez, is suing the city for employment discrimination. And like Hernandez, Tyndall contends that she was forced out of her position as the city’s top economic development staffer after challenging what she claims was Platt’s unethical behavior.
In her still-pending lawsuit, Tyndall said that Platt and a City Council member tried to coerce her into doing things that favored developers and were not what she felt were in the best interests of the city.
But the main reason for her testimony in the Hernandez suit was to both bolster Hernandez’s claim that Platt aimed to market the city’s accomplishments with a positive public relations effort and to suppress facts that might detract from that effort.
Tyndall’s office was down the hall from Platt’s and close to the office of Melissa Kozakiewicz, an assistant city manager who worked with Platt previously in New Jersey before he moved to Kansas City.
She joined him here five months later, in May 2021. One of Kozakiewicz’s first assignments was to fix the city’s messaging effort, which neither she nor Platt felt did enough to emphasize his administration’s efforts to among other things fix potholes, make the streets safer and provide updates on construction of the new airport terminals.
Tyndall said she overheard Platt and Kozakiewicz privately — but loudly enough for others to hear — denigrating the city’s communications staff, which she felt was inappropriate.
But what she also found offensive was a handwritten sentence on a flow chart in Kozakiewicz’s office that Tyndall could see through her colleague’s office window.
It read “PR, NOT Public Information,” which Tyndall took to be what Kozakiewicz and Platt believed should be the aim of the city’s communications staff.
She took a photo of that chart on what turned out to be the same day that Platt called Hernandez into his office to discuss his removal as communications director, Tyndall said.
Asked by attorney Erin Vernon, another one of Hernandez’s attorneys, how she interpreted that, Tyndall said “that the administration I was working for was prioritizing image over public information.”
In her testimony on Wednesday, Kozakiewicz said that was incorrect. To her, public relations (PR) was a means of putting information in context for the public.
“PR is a way of taking information and creating a narrative around it,” she testified.
“Does this create a plan to lie to the media?” assistant city attorney Jason Conkright asked.
“No,” Kozakiewicz said before court broke for lunch.
Lying as a strategy?
In the lawsuit, Hernandez alleges Platt attended a meeting with communications employees in January 2022 and discussed strategies for handling Kansas City news media.
During that meeting, Platt allegedly raised the prospect of lying as a “legitimate media strategy.”
And when Hernandez said that would hurt the city’s credibility when reporters learned they had been lied to, the lawsuit alleges Platt began seeking advice from the human relations department on how Hernandez might be removed from his job.
Brooke Givens, then the communications department’s liaison to the water department and a former TV news producer, testified on Wednesday afternoon that she attended that meeting by video and was shocked by Platt’s remarks.
According to her notes of the meeting, Platt told of how a former mayor in Jersey City would often lie to the news media and saw no reason why that approach wouldn’t work in Kansas City.
“The media will say whatever they want. We will say what we want and just retract it with no problem,” was how Givens recorded Platt’s remarks.
After the meeting, she sought out a co-worker at the water department and expressed her shock.
“I told this person, the city manager just said go ahead and make up numbers for the media. They won’t check it anyway,” Givens testified. “That’s what they did in Jersey City.”
Platt’s testimony was scheduled to begin late Wednesday afternoon and continue on Thursday morning.
But in a deposition in October 2023, Platt said he could not remember making those remarks and denied that he ever instructed anyone to lie to the media.
Inflated pothole stats
In the spring of that year, the city communications team prepared a press release regarding how many miles of street lanes would be resurfaced based on funds available in the upcoming fiscal year.
A drafted press release stated “nearly 300” miles, according to the lawsuit. Platt then had the communications team remove the word “nearly.”
Days before a press event about the road resurfacing initiative, the lawsuit alleges Platt knowingly inflated the benefits of the project on social media by saying the city would be repaving “400 plus” lane miles.
“Our summer of street resurfacing is well under way. 400+ miles planned for this spring and summer! But what’s under the old asphalt is sometimes something more special: 100+ year old brick pavers and original street car track here on Brooklyn Ave!” Platt wrote in a Twitter post on May 6, 2022.
Hernandez alleges that he was concerned Platt was lying about this number, as no other staff were aware of an increase in the miles to be paved.
“It was clear to Plaintiff that Mr. Platt just wanted an even larger number and did not care if the number was true or not,” the suit reads.
In a statement to The Star in December 2022 after Hernandez filed his suit, a city spokeswoman stood by the street resurfacing figure Platt had shared.
“As an institution committed to transparency, the City stands by any statements and welcomes inspection of any facts related to our transformative work to have already resurfaced 387 lane miles of roadway this fiscal year — substantially exceeding our resurfacing efforts in each of the past five years,” city spokeswoman Sherae Honeycutt said in an emailed statement.
“As the City Manager previously shared, this number has the City on track to meet and exceed 400 lane miles in this fiscal year, which ends April 30, 2023.”
In referencing lane miles to be completed by April 2023, Honeycutt’s statement differed from Platt’s tweet specifying the spring and summer of 2022. It was unclear if Honeycutt was referring to a different statement by Platt.
Another point raised in the lawsuit concerns a story published in The Star regarding the city’s work on potholes. The lawsuit claims Platt was angry about the story, and instructed staff to call the newspaper and say that “the numbers were wrong” when they were correct.
Hernandez says in his lawsuit that Platt asked him why another member of the communications team had resigned and other staff members were leaving. Hernandez says he told Platt many were upset with the way they were being treated.
The following month, the lawsuit says Platt told Hernandez that he did not possess the “shared vision” for the communications department and was reassigned.
Former Star reporters Anna Spoerre and Bill Lukitsch contributed reporting.
This story was originally published February 26, 2025 at 2:26 PM.
