Federal grand jury subpoenas Independence records as FBI seeks council expense reports
A federal grand jury in March issued a subpoena demanding records of non-public meetings of the Independence City Council, The Star has learned through a records request it submitted to the city on Friday.
The grand jury subpoena sought minutes describing discussions and votes taken during three City Council executives sessions, which are meetings that council members are allowed to have outside of public view to discuss certain sensitive matters.
It’s not known from the subpoena what the grand jury’s interest was in those three meetings, but in two of the meetings — held on Dec. 19, 2016, and May 15,2017 — council members discussed the fate of the Missouri City Power Plant, which belonged to the city-owned utility Independence Power & Light.
In the third meeting, on Oct. 23, 2017, the council discussed and voted on buying 94 acres of the former Rockwood Golf Club for $985,000 and leasing a portion of the property to MC Power Companies for 30 years to expand the Independence Solar Farm.
The Star has previously reported on the FBI asking questions about Missouri City and Rockwood. The subpoena is the first public indication of a grand jury, which meets behind closed doors with prosecutors to decide whether indictments are warranted, looking into Independence matters.
Separately, FBI agents on May 8 requested receipts submitted by four members of the Independence City Council for reimbursement during the entirety of their council terms. The four council members for whom the FBI sought expense records were Curt Dougherty, Mike Huff, John Perkins and Tom Van Camp.
A city clerk replied to the FBI that Huff and Perkins have never submitted receipts for reimbursements, but supplied more than 200 pages of records reflecting meals and travel receipts submitted by Dougherty and Van Camp.
It’s not clear why the FBI sought expense records for the four council members. FBI spokeswoman Bridget Patton said the agency could not confirm or deny the existence of an investigation.
The Star called the number Van Camp has listed on the city’s website on Friday night; his wife said that Van Camp declined to comment.
Huff, a former IPL employee who was elected to the council in April 2018, said he was not a member of the council when the Missouri City and Rockwood deals were struck. He said he disagreed with the then-council’s decisions on both projects while he was an IPL employee.
“I wasn’t even a council member,” Huff said. “It doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Dougherty and Perkins did not respond to phone calls and emails seeking comment.
Dougherty and Perkins are up for election on June 2. Perkins faces no opponent, while Dougherty is in a competitive race. It’s not clear who is the subject of the FBI’s or grand jury’s interest, but there is no indication that it is either Dougherty, Perkins or other Independence officials.
The FBI also requested video of an April 3, 2017, Independence City Council meeting, as well as minutes from a June 23, 2017, meeting of the Public Utility Advisory Board, a group of political appointees that makes recommendations to the City Council on matters pertaining to IPL. The meeting in question discussed the Missouri City Power Plant proposal.
Missouri City Power Plant
The decommissioning of the Missouri City Power Plant, an IPL coal-fired electric generation facility located north of Independence, attracted controversy because of the decision by a majority of the City Council to award a contract to a firm called Environmental Operations, which bid $9.75 million to do the project.
Another company, Commercial Liability Partners, submitted a bid for $4.45 million.
Environmental Operations has political connections. Its general counsel is former Missouri House Speaker John Diehl, who resigned in 2015 for sending sexually charged text messages to an intern.
Stacy Hastie runs Environmental Operations, which was described in a 2012 story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as dominating projects under the Missouri’s brownfields tax credit program, designed to assist with costs of cleaning up contaminated sites. The story identified instances in which Environmental Operations would win bids on projects upon which it had previously been hired as a consultant.
The Post-Dispatch also reported Hastie and his executives were frequent donors to Missouri politicians in both parties, including $27,000 to former Missouri House speaker Steve Tilley. Tilley, now a lobbyist, has counted IPL as a client since late 2016.
Expense reimbursements sought by the FBI show Dougherty and Van Camp met more than a dozen times for taxpayer-funded meals at various local restaurants to discuss city business between October 2015 and February 2017, when Missouri City was put out for bid.
Receipts show several of the meetings were called to discuss the Missouri City project.
On July 18, 2016, Dougherty, Van Camp and Perkins met to discuss demolition of Missouri City. They spent $81.87 on dinner at Café Verona in Independence with John Carnes, a former city councilman and county legislator who was convicted in 1989 of bank fraud and bribing another council member.
Two days later, Dougherty headed to the West Bottoms to discuss the Missouri City project over a meal with Joe Campbell, who owns an investment company in Kansas that played a role in another controversial Independence project, the former Rockwood Golf Club.
Later in July, Dougherty had lunch with Independence Mayor Eileen Weir at an Applebee’s, though no reason for the meeting was listed. Around the same time, Dougherty, Daggett and Van Camp met at Twin Peaks to discuss IPL issues.
On July 29, Dougherty, Van Camp and Perkins spent about $40 at the Kross Lounge in Sugar Creek to discuss Missouri City and other IPL issues, city records show.
In the Dec. 19, 2016, executive meeting minutes subpoenaed by the grand jury, former IPL director Andy Boatright discussed with the Independence City Council various options for the shuttered power plant.
Council member Scott Roberson asked about the potential of refurbishing the facility and giving it away, saying it would be perfect for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Dougherty said the building was dangerous and needed to be gone, while Van Camp said it had no value and likely cost more to keep and insure, according to the minutes.
During the Independence City Council’s April 3, 2017, meeting, of which the FBI requested video, Perkins stated that the city had received proposals for the Missouri City project. He said he’d “like to kind of see the progress moving with that” and asked City Manager Zach Walker for a recommendation from staff within two weeks.
Weir said she was “caught off guard” by the discussion of the Missouri City project as the bids had just been received days earlier.
“I’m not comfortable that in two weeks that we would be able to make a decision on that...We spend two weeks looking at a lot of very routine things and this is something that is not very routine,” Weir said. “So I guess I would have concerns about bringing that forward if I understand your motion.”
Roberson sought to hold off on voting until an ongoing study was completed.
Dougherty said he trusted city staff’s expertise in weighing the issue. But he said he continued to receive complaints from citizens about city bureaucracy trudging on “at a snail’s pace.”
“And never does anybody really seem to want to pick up the pace and roll up their sleeves and dig into it,” he said. “Let’s just get this thing figured out.”
Van Camp said staff had not been slowing down the process, but he said it was time for the council to make a move.
“I think we’ve plowed the ground,” he said. “I think the discussion has been had several times and now’s the time to act.”
In the May 15, 2017, meeting minutes given to the grand jury, the Independence City Council discussed a vendor with whom to enter into contract negotiations.
Roberson and council member Karen DeLuccie said they did not want to spend money on the project when there was no mandate to do so, according to the minutes. Weir said she favored doing the project on the city’s terms because of a previous, unspecified contract in which new guidelines by the Environmental Protection Agency cost the city more money. Weir said she preferred Environmental Operations because of its presentation and reputation.
Roberson asked why the city should choose Environmental Operations when its proposal was twice the amount of another bid, and Perkins replied that change orders — alterations in the original scope of a project — were inevitable with the low bid, which he thought was “oddly low,” according to the minutes.
During a June 23, 2017, meeting of the Public Utility Advisory Board, of which the FBI obtained records, some members questioned why the city council seemed rushed to select Environmental Operations.
Rockwood Golf Club
On Oct. 23, 2017, the City Council met behind closed doors to vote on buying 94 acres of the old Rockwood Golf Club for $985,000. DeLuccie, who was absent from that meeting, said later the city paid too much for the property. Roberson voted against buying the property.
Just months before, a firm called Titan Fish bought the Rockwood property for $550,000 from a previous owner who owned the shuttered club for years. Titan Fish is run by Joe Campbell, the Kansas businessman who met with Dougherty in 2016 in the West Bottoms.
Later in that meeting, the Independence City Council voted to finalize a 30-year lease with MC Power Companies to expand a solar energy farm on the former Rockwood the city voted to acquire. The solar farm project also involved Gardner Capital, a Springfield firm that donated money to political action committees with connections to Tilley, the IPL lobbyist, which later made contributions to Weir’s campaign committee in 2017.
