Frank White steps into tense spotlight before recall vote. Inside KC town hall
As Jackson County residents decide whether or not they will vote to recall Frank White at the end of the month, the embattled county executive has stepped back into the public eye to plead his case.
White appeared Monday night at a town hall event co-hosted by Kansas City PBS and the Kansas City Public Library. Moderator Nick Haines, who hosts “Week In Review” for Kansas City PBS, guided a somewhat terse discussion between White, Jackson County legislators Sean Smith and Megan Smith, Urban League of Greater Kansas City CEO Gwendolyn Grant and Greg Vonnahme, a political science professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
“[The recall election] is strictly putting the power in the hands of the voters and residents of Jackson County,” said Grant, who has publicly called for White to resign from office. “If people are disenfranchised and upset with their leaders, they ought to hold them accountable.”
White, a Democrat, has been county executive since 2016. If he is recalled on Sept. 30, a temporary replacement will be immediately appointed by either the county legislature or a judge.
Supporters of the recall criticized White’s conduct, leadership and perceived lack of responsibility to the public.
Opponents of the recall warned that the special election could be costly and disruptive and questioned the motives of those with a public interest in unseating White early.
“Some political scientists have called recall elections the ‘nuclear bomb of politics,’” Haines said. “Is it good for democracy for somebody to just collect a bunch of signatures to oust somebody from office?”
Jackson County residents collected more than 43,000 valid signatures in favor of recalling White between 2023 and June 2025. About half of the signatures were gathered by grassroots organizers mostly in the eastern part of the county, while the rest were heavily facilitated by Democracy in Action, a political action group whose funding sources are not publicly available.
Attendance and attitude
Some members of the Jackson County Legislature have repeatedly criticized White for declining to attend meetings of the legislature, often sending a member of his staff to answer inquiries on his behalf.
Both Sean Smith and Grant said they find it disrespectful when White chooses to skip a meeting.
“The public, a lot, has a perception that Frank isn’t working for them by not showing up for legislative meetings while we’re in the middle of a budget stalemate,” Smith said. “It’s just apparent from the inside and from the outside that the desire to collaborate and fix things isn’t there.”
As County Executive, White is unable to propose new legislation in the county’s weekly meetings. Whenever the legislature passes a new ordinance, White has 10 days to either approve or veto it, though a legislative supermajority can override his veto.
Smith also accused White of “locking the legislature out” of executive offices. White, meanwhile, pushed back by noting that he is not required by law to attend legislative meetings and that he sends staffers as a “courtesy.”
Ongoing dysfunction
White said that he began attending fewer meetings over time as dynamics between the legislature devolved into what he sees as “performative politics.”
“I’ve been in office for 10 years, and my door has always been open to anyone who wanted to come and visit and talk,” White said.
Other legislators, however, don’t think a recall is the right solution to improve dynamics between the county executive and the legislature. Megan Smith, the only legislator who did not vote to authorize the recall election, argued that the election’s $2 million price tag will harm taxpayers more than the ongoing tension between White and some of her colleagues.
“I honestly don’t think that Frank showing up to our meetings will help the legislature function any more cohesively than what it is right now,” Smith said. “So the legislature has to take a great deal of blame as well as part of this whole process, because we’re here to work together.”
The ongoing dysfunction in the legislature and between legislators and the executive have affected the county’s ability to allocate money and fund certain programs.
During Monday’s conversation, Grant criticized White for “sitting on” $70.2 million in federal ARPA funding awarded to Jackson County, saying that his administration has prevented social services organizations countywide from having full and immediate access to the COVID-19 recovery grant money because of a disagreement with legislators over the budget.
“Frank’s recall is about poor leadership and incompetence and the unwillingness to work with the legislature to solve problems on behalf of the people,” Grant said.
Property tax debacles
Legislators and other panelists were split on how the recall could affect ongoing discourse around property tax valuations in Jackson County.
Sean Smith said that many residents feel White and his administration are to blame for the county’s ongoing issues with property tax assessments, which have enraged homeowners facing spiking valuations in recent years, namely since 2019.
White and his administration have repeatedly insisted they were catching home values up to the market after years of the county undervaluing its properties. He maintains that the changes his administration made to the assessment process have made the county’s property tax system more fair.
More than 50,000 residents appealed their residential and commercial property valuations during the 2023 cycle, which led to the state intervening, accusing the county of improperly raising values that year without doing the required inspections and — after a back-and-forth series of lawsuits — ordering how residential properties would be assessed in 2025.
Megan Smith said she doesn’t expect the recall to have any direct impact on residents’ property tax bills this year, which are currently being finalized as school boards and other taxing entities set their levy rates.
The county Board of Equalization is also still hearing nearly 11,000 appeals from the most recent assessment cycle.
Stadium funding
White has repeatedly decried the recall push as a punitive attempt from his political opponents to seize power, which he says they could use to push through financial decisions he has opposed — notably, approving the use of Jackson County funds toward stadium projects for the Chiefs and Royals.
Monday, White again called the upcoming special election a “power grab,” claiming that the recall effort didn’t gather steam until his opposition to the teams’ push last year to pass a 30-year sales tax to fund a new ballpark and renovations. In the months since, the teams have floated the idea of moving their stadiums to Kansas or elsewhere in Missouri, prompting state and county legislators on both sides of the state lines to try to lure the teams through incentive funding packages.
“[The teams] had a better deal with the legislature, who was going around me to get this on the ballot,” White said. “I wanted to negotiate a better deal for you, the taxpayers, with the teams. Right now they’ve got the best deal of any sports team in the country.”
White said that he sees himself as “standing between” the county and those with a major financial stake in the stadiums’ locations.
“Prior to the stadium vote, the recall was going nowhere,” White said. “After the stadium vote, $400,000 went into the recall, the recall election. So I really feel like it’s a power grab for politicians and for backroom deals for the stadium.”
Are recalls common?
Haines, the moderator, said that attempts to recall politicians are fairly common, but most recall campaigns die before they make it to the threshold for an election.
Former Kansas City Mayor Mark Funkhouser, current Mayor Quinton Lucas, and Prairie Village Mayor Erik Mikkelson have also been the target of multiple recall campaigns over the past several years, Haines said.
“We hear about recall elections all the time,” Haines said. “None of them, though, have gone absolutely anywhere, which makes what we’re going to have as this vote right in front of us so rare and historic.”
Vonnahme, whose research focuses on topics including elections and civic engagement, said that recall elections have gone up and down in frequency over the past few years and tend to only be legally possible on the local level.
About one in a thousand local elected officials faces a recall effort every year, Vonnahme said.
In 2024, 108 recall elections were held across the country, Haines said. Seventy-seven were successful, while another 16 led the politicians in question to resign before election day.
“Most of those, as you talked about locally, fail,” Vonnahme said. “Once they get on the ballot, then most of them succeed.”
What’s next
In Jackson County, the signatures collected to recall White represented just over 20% of the votes he earned during his last election in 2022. A recall vote would take a simple majority, but some came to the town hall hesitant to vote in the recall without a full sense of their options.
Several residents wrote in questions ahead of time or asked White questions via microphone, mostly voicing their opinions about his relationship with the legislature or asking White about his plans if he stays in office.
“I won’t vote to remove Frank White until I know for certain who his replacement will be,” one resident wrote in Monday.
Kansas City attorney Stacy Lake, who lost to White in the Democratic primary for County Executive in 2022, has thrown her hat in the ring to try to run again if voters oust White.
White’s opponents in the legislature, including Sean Smith and Manuel Abarca IV, have also hinted that other candidacies could be announced closer to the recall.
“What we have is good options that have been presented to us already, and the hope is that we’ll have even more options,” Sean Smith said Monday. “...New names will continue to appear until the recall is successful.”
White’s temporary replacement must also be a Democrat, though a Republican could also be voted into the office in 2026.
This story was originally published September 16, 2025 at 5:13 PM.
