Lucas to Missouri lawmakers: don’t give police board ‘blank check’ over more KC funds

Local officials last year fought over the Kansas City Police Department’s budget in City Council, on the Board of Police Commissioners and before a Jackson County judge.

On Tuesday, it was a Missouri Senate panel of almost exclusively St. Louis-area lawmakers who heard Mayor Quinton Lucas’ plea not to increase the required amount of money Kansas City must commit toward KCPD.

The current minimum required by Missouri law is 20% of the city’s revenues. A bill sponsored by Sen. Tony Luetkemeyer and discussed by the state senate judiciary committee Tuesday would raise the minimum to 25% That is roughly the level of police spending in the current city budget.

Luetkemeyer filed the bill after Lucas and a supermajority of City Council moved last year to reduce the police budget to the prescribed minimum and make the spending of the remaining $42.3 million contingent on negotiations between the police board and the city.

A Jackson County judge eventually restored the original budget. But Northland Republican lawmakers vowed to push back, labeling the surprise move by Lucas an attempt to “defund the police.” They held it up as proof that locally elected officials should not have control over KCPD, one of the few municipal police departments in the country not directly controlled by city government.

Lucas has said he wanted the $42.3 million to be spent by the department on officers assigned to community policing and crime prevention programs. His ordinances came with an additional $3 million for the department to start a new class of recruits at the police academy.

The mayor said his proposal was more a failure of timing than policy.

“I know my own mistakes. We ended up having this discussion at a time where the political discourse was not good for anything related to police and budgets,” Lucas said Tuesday. “But what you did not see … was us saying we’re going to take this money from the police and hand it to some other organization or department in Kansas City.”

He said he feared the legislation would provide the state-appointed board of police commissioners, a “blank check” to spend additional city funds with no guarantee the money would go toward local priorities such as crime prevention programs or raises for officers. Lucas holds the sole locally-elected seat on the board and has pushed the department not to spend funds for salaries on the department’s legal settlements.

The legislation was heard as the city council prepares to take up the police budget in March. The police board in November passed a $281 million budget that includes a guarantee that $135 million will go toward covering pay increases.

State lawmakers Tuesday spent much of the hearing over Luetkemeyer’s bill rehashing last year’s budget moves.

Sen. Bob Onder, a Lake St. Louis Republican, said he didn’t believe the budget move wouldn’t have affected police personnel. Chief Rick Smith testified that the vast majority of the police department’s budget covers salaries; $42 million is about 18% of this year’s police budget.

“The numbers just don’t add up,” Onder said.

It’s not clear how much priority the bill would take during a month of packed agendas and tight deadlines for the General Assembly. Luetkemeyer said he does not yet know when the judiciary committee, which he chairs, will send the bill to the Senate floor.

If passed, the measure would require approval from Missouri voters to go into effect in order to get around a constitutional provision that prevents lawmakers from requiring additional spending by cities.

Lucas on Tuesday also pushed back against a section of the proposal that would require the city count more revenue streams, such as taxes for special services and airport fees, in its budget when calculating the share that goes toward the police department.

Luetkemeyer accused local officials of “bait-and-switch math,” by excluding certain revenue streams from the calculation, to reduce the amount spent on KCPD.

But the bill, Lucas said, would inflate state-required police spending by more than $100 million, well beyond KCPD’s current budget requests.

“The city needs to do right by its police officers,” he said. “We can’t tell voters that we will do one thing, (such as) pay for fire services or airport services, and divert it to another use.”

The Star’s Glenn E. Rice contributed reporting.

This story was originally published January 11, 2022 at 4:02 PM.