Science played a lead role in plans to reopen the Kansas City area — so did politics
Six weeks ago, in Union Station’s cavernous north waiting room, the mayor of Kansas City and the top elected leaders of Johnson, Wyandotte and Jackson counties did something rare and rather spectacular.
They jointly explained why their public health officers had issued nearly identical, month-long stay-at-home orders to contain the spread of the deadly coronavirus.
The start and end dates were the same. So were most of the restrictions announced that Sunday afternoon.
It was an unusual public display of civic unity in a splintered and politically complicated metro area — 2 million people who live in scores of cities, big and small, within a half dozen counties that’s split down the middle by a state line.
The team effort by the region’s Core4 local governments, as they call themselves, came even before the governors of Kansas and Missouri issued directives to battle COVID-19.
The Core4’s decisions were to be guided by medical science, not political self interest and — fingers crossed — those efforts have largely been successful so far, last week’s spike in coronavirus cases notwithstanding.
“We are united by the necessary actions we have taken to support and protect the people of our communities — most importantly those who are the most vulnerable,” Jackson County Executive Frank White said at the time. “We will emerge from this stronger, better and more united than ever.”
Fast forward to last week. Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas and the city’s health director, Rex Archer, stood alone in the south lobby of City Hall announcing a phased reopening plan for Kansas City, with some businesses opening May 6 and most others nine days later.
None of the other members of the Core4 had a clue what Lucas was going to say Wednesday. They hadn’t been invited.
Political and public health leadership of Jackson, Wyandotte and Johnson counties would gather in front of Memorial Hall in Kansas City, Kansas, on Friday to announce their own coordinated efforts to extend stay-at-home orders until May 11, followed by phasing into a new normal that won’t seem like the old one until a vaccine is found to ward off a virus that as of Friday had killed 63,000 Americans.
Nobody was happy about the breakdown in unity.
“There was a coordinated effort on the original stay-at-home order,” Johnson County Commission chairman Ed Eilert said Thursday afternoon.
As to Lucas breaking with the pack the day before: “I don’t think any other jurisdiction was aware of it ahead of time,” Eilert said.
“When Kansas City announced their own plan, that caught everyone a little off guard,” White said at a Friday morning press conference.
Lucas expressed his own frustrations with the lack of cohesion in a Facebook Live interview with a TV news anchor.
“It’s not good. We’ve got one crisis,” Lucas said. “We were probably more successful when everybody was on board together.”
Scientific data supposedly governed the dates chosen for when one part of the area gets to begin opening up, while others must stay hunkered down a bit longer.
But politics has figured in all along, partly because the numbers aren’t all that reliable. Testing for the coronavirus is so spotty, no one has a good idea how prevalent it is and what the chances are for a resurgence of COVID-19 cases.
And partly — make that mostly — because politicians are torn between protecting the public health and satisfying the desires of myriad constituencies.
Businesses want to reopen. Laid-off employees want to go back to work. Parents stuck at home with the kids for six weeks want to get them out of the house for a little sanity.
Layered on top of it all is the political complexity that makes this region unique. So even when political leaders and their jurisdictions have the same numbers on which to base their decisions, it’s hard for the area as a whole to come to a consensus.
And sometimes, egos play a role, as the past week seemed to illustrate as area leaders firmed up their plans for reopening the local economy and public life.
Tuesday
Since the pandemic made its way here, the Mid-America Regional Council has been holding conference calls with local government and public health officials to coordinate the region’s response to the crisis.
The calls were private until two weeks ago when a participant secretly let a reporter for The New York Times listen in. His article revealed tension among elected officials weighing disparate timelines and philosophies about relaxing stay-at-home orders.
Last Tuesday, MARC arranged another conference call, this time with local media invited. Allen Greiner, the medical officer for the Unified Government, struck a tone of cautious optimism about recent data trends for coronavirus infections, which had started to show signs of stabilization.
“At least for now, it looks like we’re not on a continued upward trend,” Greiner said.
Rex Archer, director of the Kansas City Health Department, took a more stark tone, warning that testing in the Kansas City region remains inadequate.
Archer said Kansas City should be testing 750 people a day, every day.
“We are nowhere near that,” he said. Kansas City has conducted only 5,000 tests to date.
Archer, who has been critical of the underfunding of public health in the years that preceded this crisis, predicted a second wave of infections. He talked about how Toronto officials declared victory over a springtime SARS outbreak in 2003, only to have a substantial second wave occur later.
“I just want to caution everybody: Don’t oversell the relaxation of these issues,” Archer said. “There’s no question we will have to close this back down again.”
In an interview the following day, Archer said political leaders can often be swayed by vocal opponents to popular ideas. Polling has shown broad support for stay-at-home orders.
“If I was getting 100 complaints to open up compared to one thanks for not having opened up, I would feel pressure in a particular way,” Archer said.
Dagmar Wood, a Platte County commissioner who has sounded skepticism about the local reaction to the coronavirus, cited President Donald Trump’s economic adviser Stephen Moore. He has said there’s a link between the increase in deaths from suicide or health issues and the stress of unemployment.
David Alvey, the UG mayor, said in a later interview that he didn’t understand Wood’s reasoning.
“Let me ask you this: If we had widespread contagion and widespread death ... will that not bring the stress, the panic, the suicide rate and the mental health problems in even greater measure?”
Alvey said in a later interview. “Not having to overwhelm the system is much less stress on the system than overwhelming the system.”
Wednesday
With Archer at his side, Lucas stood at a lectern in the ornate art deco lobby of City Hall at noon on Wednesday. Normally a hive of activity, its 29 floors were vacant save for the gaggle of news reporters and photographers that Kansas City’s 35-year-old mayor had summoned.
The occasion was Lucas’ surprise announcement that some of the city’s businesses would be allowed to open nine days earlier than previously announced. He also unveiled a set of rules governing who could reopen when and under what circumstances.
But in introducing his “10-10-10” plan, he seemed to anticipate criticism that his May 6 “soft reopening” date was jumping the gun.
Before reopening economies, White House guidelines say, there should be a 14-day downward trajectory in documented cases or positive tests as a percentage of overall testing. Wyandotte County doesn’t hit that mark, for instance.
Kansas City, on the other hand, has seen a decline in new COVID-19 infections over the past four weeks, but occasional daily spikes show that the disease is still spreading.
Lucas is aware of that, but stressed that his city’s phased rollout plan will rely on science over political expediency.
“We need to continue to listen to doctors, not politicians,” he said.
Wearing a mask, Archer took his turn, warning what would happen if the new rules weren’t followed and the virus surged again
“Anybody that’s listening today knows that this virus hasn’t gone away, it’s still going to be present in every state,” he said. “So as we ease these restrictions, if we don’t have the capacity to quickly put out that outbreak, that fire, then we’ll be back to very draconian measures, whether it be at a state level, a city level or across the whole country.”
Other members of the Core4 hadn’t been backgrounded on either the new date or elements of Kansas City’s plan.
And it wasn’t the first time they’d felt blindsided in the weeks after that show of solidarity at Union Station.
After Core4 medical directors recommended extending the original stay-at-home order to May 15 from its original end-date of April 24, some of Lucas’s peers were surprised when he arranged to be the first of them to announce his plans at 5 a.m. April 16.
This time, it was up to Johnson County Commissioner Mike Brown to relay the announcement of Kansas City’s partial rollback of its reopening process at Wednesday afternoon’s meeting of his county’s planning task force.
He’d read it online and saw it as further evidence that Johnson County should honor the deadline for the county’s stay-at-home order that was in effect at the time and reopen this Monday rather than a week later, as the county’s public health director was suggesting.
If flattening the curve was the county’s goal, he said, “we’ve accomplished the task.”
Any extension, he said, would be “mission creep.”
Thursday
Thursday morning’s regular meeting of Johnson County’s Board of Commissioners was supposed to be routine. Because Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly wasn’t going to announce until that evening her decision on whether to end or extend the shutdown, commissioners saw no point in discussing the county’s reopening strategy that morning as originally planned.
They’d do it Friday afternoon instead, when they could modify their plan on who could open what and when to better conform with Kelly’s. Counties are allowed to have stricter rules, but their restrictions can’t be looser than the state’s order.
But public health officer Joseph LeMaster wasn’t willing to wait another day to announce his decision.
Even though Johnson County had seen a steady decline in COVID-19 cases that would justify reopening the county along with the rest of the state on May 4, LeMaster said, he was prepared to sign an order delaying reopening one more week.
“The virus does not respect county lines,” he explained, and said he and the health directors in Jackson and Wyandotte counties felt it wise to reopen on as close to the same date as possible.
With Jackson County not set to open until May 15 at the time, the plan was to split the difference and together open on May 11.
Chairman Eilert and three other commissioners saw the logic and didn’t object.
“We don’t want to go back to the situation we were in three weeks ago,” Eilert said.
But Brown would have none of it.
“I have a concern that the economy has not been factored into this decision,” he snapped.
LeMaster countered that he had taken into account the hardship the extension would place on businesses and workers. But he said he was concerned that an earlier reopening date would undo Johnson County’s success in reducing the number of people being diagnosed and hospitalized with COVID-19.
While the county’s own trend line qualified it to reopen this Monday, neighboring Jackson and Wyandotte counties still had too many new cases of infection to meet the White House guidelines for when it would be safe to start up their economies.
With a quarter million people going back and forth between Johnson County and its neighbors every day in normal times, LeMaster said, the county risked seeing a spike in COVID-19 cases if it didn’t wait and try to coordinate with its neighbors on a reopening date.
And in Kansas, public health officers have the power to shut down public gatherings to control disease outbreaks.
“Barring any complete explosion of cases and hospitalizations,” LeMaster said, he doesn’t foresee another extension.
No county in the region has been hit harder by the coronavirus pandemic than Wyandotte County.
Unified Government commissioners during a special meeting Thursday afternoon were shown data that indicated infection rates in Wyandotte County were four times higher than surrounding communities. The 55 deaths in Wyandotte County are more than anywhere else in the Kansas City area.
Outbreaks in nursing homes like Life Care Center of Kansas City, Kansas, and Riverbend Post Acute Rehabilitation have accounted for a significant share of Wyandotte County’s deaths and infections. But clusters in businesses like Kellogg’s Bakery and National Beef Packaging illustrate the hazard in congregating in business places.
Still, Greiner, the county’s medical officer, sees signs that hospitalizations and deaths are showing improved trends.
Alvey, the UG mayor who faces his own pressure to get people back to work, said he’s deferring to the judgment of Greiner and others on the county’s medical team
“If they’re recommending to me that we have to stay closed or remain under this order until this time, that’s what we’re going to do,” Alvey said. “I’m not going to argue with them.”
Alvey said local governments on the Kansas side of the metro area have been fairly well-aligned in their philosophies and coordination on the coronavirus response.
When discussing the Missouri side, he pulls some punches.
“Clearly it seemed to me there was a real pushback on what Kansas City, Missouri, was doing by the surrounding suburbs,” Alvey said of the Tuesday MARC discussion. “At least some of that is ... I’m not going to say that. I was going to give you something really juicy, but I won’t. I don’t want to politicize this.”
The Unified Government on Thursday released what so far is the most detailed plan in the region of how it anticipates a gradual re-emergence from a stay-at-home order that lifts on May 11.
A series of zones, fashioned after the colors on a stoplight, will begin in succession after May 11. A red zone still envisions people staying at home for the most part and outdoor gatherings of no more than 10 socially-distanced people are allowed. Yellow and green zones relax those restrictions, allowing outdoor gatherings of 25 and 50 people, respectively.
For the Unified Government, known at times for its rough-and-tumble politics, commissioners on Thursday brooked no serious objections to the proposal.
Friday
On Friday morning, speakers in front of Memorial Hall in Kansas City, Kansas, took their place on blue stickers placed on the ground — put there to keep everyone six feet apart.
With masks covering their faces, Alvey, White and Eilert took their turns briefly discussing their respective county’s post-May 11 plans. They had the appearance of being unified, and they spoke as if they would continue to coordinate among the three of them.
For the most part, it appears that the three leaders have the support of other elected officials in their communities. Eilert would go back to a special meeting of the Johnson County Board of Commissioners and fend off a motion by commissioner Brown, who sought to bring before a judge a legal challenge to the county medical officer’s authority. Brown’s motion failed by a 3-4 vote.
Aside from the wind, Friday morning’s outdoor event resembled in a lot of ways the initial Core4 press conference in Union Station. Except there was no Quinton Lucas.
Afterwards, Alvey declined to discuss the politics of the situation, saying the focus needs to be on the virus.
Still, the absence of the leader of a city of nearly 500,000 residents was hard to miss.
Lucas did not respond to a request for comment on the matter Friday, but in his Facebook Live interview on Thursday said it would have been better if the Core4 had been able to better coordinate their reopening dates and strategies.
“I think it’s a failure we have all these different rules in every jurisdiction,” he said.
Kansas City extends into Clay and Platte counties, which are opening Monday along with most of Kansas and Missouri outside the metro area. Jackson, Johnson and Wyandotte counties have their plan.
As mayor of the largest city in the area, Lucas said he feels a responsibility to take the lead on important issues, but also thinks he and the others need to do a better job working together.
It felt better, he said, when the Core4 was one.
“We need to do better with that, frankly. I think this separate set of rules is crazy,” he said.
This story was originally published May 3, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
