Kansas City Manager Brian Platt keeps his job — for now — after council ratifies suspension
Brian Platt is suspended indefinitely, but still technically has his job, after a Thursday Kansas City Council vote left the city manager’s fate in limbo.
Two weeks after Platt was suspended without explanation – but with much speculation – from the job he has held since December 2020, the City Council voted 13-0 to ratify that temporary suspension. The move is not the same as firing him.
Platt has 10 days in which to request a public hearing to make his case before Kansas Citians to remain city manager, according to the city charter. If he chose to do that, the City Council would vote again after the hearing. Or he could resign.
More than two years remain on his contract, but Mayor Quinton Lucas told The Star he is confident that the matter of Platt’s continued employment will be resolved in the coming weeks.
The decision came at the end of the regular weekly City Council legislative session and after a 90-minute closed session during which the council met to discuss his fate.
Assistant City Manager Kimiko Gilmore will be acting city manager until there is some resolution of Platt’s status. She has been filling in since Platt’s suspension was announced.
Platt has issued few public statements and did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the council’s decision.
The last time Kansas City elected leaders fired a city manager was in 2009, when Wayne Cauthen was dismissed after six years in the job. His interim replacement was Troy Schulte, the city’s budget officer at the time, who went on to fill the job on a permanent basis for a decade.
Schulte resigned at the end of 2019 to make way for a city manager more to the liking of the city’s new mayor, Quinton Lucas. Platt, 39, was Lucas’s favorite out of a field of finalists who interviewed for the job. Like Lucas, Platt was in his 30s, a young man with lots of ideas on how to make the city a better place to live.
Building on what he learned as city manager of Jersey City, New Jersey, Platt wanted to shake things up at City Hall. He focused on progressive projects, such as building a solar farm at the airport. But at the same time, he doubled down on improving basic city services. He overhauled the way the city plowed snow in the winter and repaved streets during the warmer months.
Platt also paid close attention to the city’s messaging to the public and the press. Some former communications staffers said he placed a priority on public relations over public information.
Platt’s brash and demanding manner also rankled some of his subordinates, who claimed they were forced out of their positions for being reluctant to cut corners or allegedly lie to the news media at his suggestion in order to burnish the city’s reputations.
Both criticisms ultimately worked against him, and it was Lucas, his patron for all four years, who ultimately delivered the message to Platt two Thursdays ago that he might be on his way out.
On Wednesday, a coalition of civil rights groups sent Lucas and the City Council an open letter urging them to fire Platt immediately.
Lucas suspended Platt with pay on March 6, the day after a Jackson County jury verdict awarded former city communications director Chris Hernandez nearly $930,000 in damages in his whistleblower lawsuit against the city.
Hernandez alleged that Platt demoted him after Hernandez resisted Platt’s suggestion that it would be acceptable to lie to the news media about the city’s activities and accomplishments. Two other other former members of the communications staff backed up Hernandez’s account with their testimony during an eight-day trial.
Platt denied suggesting that city officials lie to the public.
The jury also heard testimony from a former assistant city manager who also claimed that Platt demoted her for refusing to engage in what she described as unethical behavior.
The Urban Council letter said Platt had during his tenure at City Hall “a well-documented pattern of racism, sexism, mendacity, and retaliation against Black, Latino, and female employees.”
But Platt’s supporters said that was untrue and defended his leadership of the city’s 4,000-plus employees.
In a social media post this week, the city’s former water department director and now Platte County administrator, Wes Minder, said Platt was getting a raw deal.
He agreed with a local talk radio host that racial politics played a role in the move to remove Platt as administrator of all city operations.
“So @PeteMundo nailed the Brian Platt issue this AM. What he didn’t point out is that he never had a fair shot in this town with some folks because of his ancestry,” Minder wrote.
But Black civil rights leaders said Platt would not have survived in the job as long as he had, if he wasn’t white.
Claiming that Platt had “weaponized city resources against Black employees,” failed to uphold the city’s commitments to equity in economic development projects and had not adequately addressed discrimination within the fire department, the Urban Council said Platt was lucky to survive in the job as long as he did.
“...if Platt had been a Black man with a smattering of these infractions, his removal would have been swift and merciless.”
This story was originally published March 20, 2025 at 4:54 PM.
