PAC donations to Independence mayor, days before vote on project, draw FBI interest
Just days before voting to spend nearly $1 million to buy a golf course for a solar farm project in 2017, Independence Mayor Eileen Weir received more than $10,000 from political action committees funded by the company that would go on to operate the project.
Each of the PACs is also connected to the company’s lobbyist: Steve Tilley, a former Missouri lawmaker and longtime adviser to Gov. Mike Parson.
Two years later, FBI agents have been asking questions about the project and another approved by the city council in 2017.
After a city council meeting Monday evening, Weir defended her donations, telling a Star reporter there was no relationship between the donations and her vote.
“No, I report all of my donations to the Missouri Ethics Commission,”she said. “And I haven’t had any violations or questions about those.”
Pressed further on whether the donations influenced the decision, the mayor paused. She then said: “I don’t know what you’re referring to,” before walking away from a reporter.
Yet the timing of the donations, Tilley’s role and the FBI’s subsequent interest, have raised suspicions among some city officials about the land deal.
“This tangled web has been going on for years,” said Karen DeLuccie, a member of the Independence City Council who told The Star she was interviewed by the FBI earlier this month. “I think it looks just awful. It’s a real shame.”
Scott Roberson, another council member contacted by the FBI, said the entire situation “looks very bad.”
“At the very least,” he said, “it looks like a conflict of interest.”
Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform with the Washington, D.C.,-based campaign-finance watchdog Campaign Legal Center, said that while he can’t speak to the legality of the donations, the timing “certainly creates the appearance that the money was given as an incentive or reward.”
Rockwood Golf Club
On Oct. 18, 2017, Weir’s campaign received $2,600 checks from two political action committees: Missouri C PAC and Missouri Growth PAC. They were followed, two days later, by two additional $2,600 checks from MO Majority PAC and MO Leadership Committee.
All four PACs had recently received $8,750 in donations from Gardner Capital, a Springfield private equity firm that employs Tilley, a former Missouri House Speaker, as a lobbyist.
On Oct. 23, 2017, Weir and the council voted in executive session to authorize the city manager to purchase the 94-acre former Rockwood Golf Club for $985,000. The plan was to build a solar farm in a joint venture with Gardner Capital and its construction partner, Lee’s Summit-based MC Power.
The money used to purchase the golf club came from another Tilley lobbying client, the city’s utility, Independence Power & Light.
Andy Boatright, the former acting director of Independence Power & Light, told The Star IPL staff had concerns about the solar farm project at the time.
He said his staff wanted to consider a procurement process to find the most cost-effective way of expanding the utility’s solar power portfolio, which was “something that staff was not allowed to pursue.”
Analysis by the utility projected that Independence could lose more than $15 million on solar energy projects over the next 25 years.
The city bought the golf course from a Kansas-based investment firm called Titan Fish, which had purchased the property just a few months earlier for $550,000 from a local company that had owned the closed course since 2012.
In August 2019, Titan Fish hired Tilley as its lobbyist.
Tilley, whose firm is currently among those in the running for an open contract to lobby state government for Kansas City, did not respond to a request for comment by The Star. Neither did Gardner Capital.
FBI questions
While he has no formal role with any of the PACs that donated to Weir, Tilley’s connections to each run deep:
▪ MO Majority PAC was founded in 2015 with a $560,000 contribution from Tilley’s campaign committee.
▪ Missouri Growth PAC’s treasurer is Tilley’s father, and it pays Tilley’s sister for bookkeeping services.
▪ Missouri C PAC was organized in August 2017 by John Burcham, an employee of Tilley’s lobbying firm, Strategic Capitol Consulting.
▪ MO Leadership Committee’s treasurer is Tom Burcham, John’s father and a longtime friend and political donor to Tilley.
The four $2,600 donations were the largest that Weir collected in 2017 in the run-up to her campaign for a second term as mayor.
She was also the only candidate for local office to receive a donation from these PACs that year. The rest were directed to Missouri state legislative candidates.
Earlier in 2017, another political action committee connected to Tilley – Missouri AG PAC – donated $300 apiece to Independence Councilmen Curt Dougherty and Tom Van Camp.
Around that same time both councilmen also received $500 checks from Mark Gardner, president of Gardner Capital.
Both councilmen would go on to support the solar farm project.
Approached by a reporter after Monday’s council meeting, Van Camp said “no comments,” before being asked any questions.
Roberson and DeLuccie separately confirmed to The Star last week that they had recently been contacted by FBI agents about the solar farm and another controversial project approved by the council in 2017.
Both council members said they were aware of others who had also been questioned by the FBI but declined to name them.
Roberson said Tilley came up during his interview.
“I spoke with the FBI a little bit about Steve Tilley,” Roberson said, “but I don’t know anything about Steve Tilley except for what’s been reported.”
$10 million contract
The other project FBI agents inquired about, according to Roberson and DeLuccie, was a nearly $10 million contract awarded to a St. Louis company to decommission an electric power plant in Missouri City owned by Independence Power & Light.
The $10 million price tag was twice the amount bid by another company for the project.
The company that won the contract, Environmental Operations, is owned by Stacy Hastie, a regular donor to Tilley in the General Assembly who lent him a private plane to attend campaign events.
Tilley’s relationship with Hastie has drawn attention before, most notably in 2012 when lawmakers earmarked more than $1 million to a project being co-developed by Hastie’s company.
Hastie did not respond to a request for comment by The Star. But he told the St. Louis Business Journal that his company has “done nothing wrong.”
“We did a lot of community engagement up there,” Hastie told the Business Journal, “and our competitors did not.”
Tilley also has a longstanding relationship with John Diehl, who served as Environmental Operations general counsel when the Independence contract was awarded. Diehl resigned from the legislature in 2015 after The Star revealed his relationship with a 19-year-old statehouse intern.
The Public Utility Advisory Board, a citizen-led committee that makes recommendations about Independence Power & Light, did not support awarding the contract to Environmental Operations.
Boatright, the former acting director of Independence Power & Light, told The Star that IPL staff did not want to recommend Environmental Operations because the lower bidder “had more relevant experience, and the decision was ultimately taken out of our hands.”
Lawmaker-turned-lobbyist
This latest brush with controversy is nothing new for Tilley.
In 2009, while he was serving as majority leader of the Missouri House, the FBI questioned lawmakers about his role in blocking legislation that would have undercut lawsuits filed by Tom Burcham, the longtime friend and treasurer for one of the PACs that donated to Weir.
The legislation would have allowed cities to continue imposing multiple sales taxes for general purposes or capital improvements. Burcham had sued several cities arguing that the practice violated state law.
Burcham was awarded $20,000 in attorneys fees in one of the lawsuits, which he said he later donated to charity.
Burcham’s PAC had contributed more than $100,000 to Tilley, though both denied any wrongdoing.
When he resigned from the legislature in 2012, Tilley still had more than $1 million in his campaign committee. He invested a big portion of it in a Perryville bank, and later to donate to candidates who then hired Tilley’s consulting firm.
Lawmakers felt Tilley had found a loophole in Missouri’s campaign finance laws, ultimately taking aim at his practices by passing legislation in 2016 requiring elected officials to dissolve their campaign committees when they register with the Missouri Ethics Commission as lobbyists.
He was hired to represent Independence Power & Light in 2016. The city council voted to increase his pay in 2018 from $66,000 to $120,000.
Tilley has drawn increased attention of late due to his close relationship with Missouri Gov. Mike Parson.
Parson and Tilley have been friends for years, and Tilley has long served as a political adviser to the governor. Analysis by The Star found a quarter of every dollar raised during the first six months of 2019 to elect Parson governor was connected to Tilley.
And since Parson took the oath of office in June 2018, Tilley’s business has greatly expanded.
The week before Parson took over as governor Tilley was registered to lobby for 25 clients, according to data provided by the Missouri Ethics Commission.
In the 17 months since he has registered to represent 62 new clients.
This story was originally published November 26, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
