Former KC-area officials plead guilty to election offenses amid probe of Jackson Co. town
Two former Kansas City area elected officials on Thursday pleaded guilty to misdemeanor election offenses, striking a deal with prosecutors amid a sweeping criminal investigation into a troubled Jackson County municipality.
Jessica Caswell, a former elected board member in River Bend, a small village in the northeast part of the county, and her husband, James Hoppe, another board member, admitted that they were ineligible to serve on the board because they did not meet the residency requirement and agreed to each pay a $1,300 fine.
The plea deals, announced Thursday by the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office, lessen the couple’s charges from felonies to misdemeanors.
The original felony charges, which followed a 2023 investigation by The Star, alleged that the couple did not live in River Bend long enough to run for office.
Missouri law requires that elected officials must live in a village for at least one year before they are elected. Under the deal, Caswell and Hoppe will not be charged with felonies so long as they don’t run for any elected office or contact any other River Bend officials for five years.
Thursday’s plea deal marked the first two officials to plead guilty in a criminal investigation that has roiled River Bend, a sparsely populated and little-known village in northern Jackson County. Every official who served on the village’s five-person elected board last year faces criminal charges related to their residencies.
The arrests came after The Star revealed a series of connections between River Bend’s Board of Trustees, the village’s governing board, and Jack Mitchell, an influential marijuana businessman and proposed developer of a marijuana-based entertainment district in the village.
The newspaper’s reporting revealed that every member of the board was connected to Mitchell either familiarly or professionally. Caswell, for example, worked for Mitchell while other board members were part of his family.
Jackson County Prosecutor Melesa Johnson, who took over the office last month, said Thursday’s plea deal underscored her office’s “commitment to election integrity.”
“Candidates for public office must be genuinely connected to the communities they serve and have their constituents’ best interests at heart—which is why we have residency requirements in place in our state,” Johnson said in a statement. “Any attempt to violate Missouri election laws will face consequences.”
Lance Sandage, the attorney for Caswell and Hoppe, said in a statement that his clients “resolved their cases.”
“While acknowledging the emotional toll the legal proceedings have taken, Ms. Caswell and Mr. Hoppe are pleased with the outcome,” Sandage said. “They are eager to put this challenging chapter behind them and focus on moving forward.”
River Bend had for years been a hotspot for industrial warehouses and fostered a loose, business-friendly culture. But after Mitchell announced plans for a massive marijuana-friendly entertainment district, village business owners voiced concerns about the board’s legitimacy and questioned whether some of the members had lived there long enough to be elected officials.
In addition to the criminal charges, concerns about conflicts between the board’s decisions and Mitchell’s business have also caught the attention of officials in Missouri’s capital city, including the Missouri Auditor’s Office and the Missouri House speaker.
A statement from the Jackson County Prosecutors’ Office detailed how Caswell and Hoppe violated the state’s residency requirements when they were elected to the River Bend board on Nov. 7, 2023.
Voting records from Nov. 8, 2022, according to prosecutors, indicated that the couple lived in Independence. They did not change their address to River Bend until Dec. 12, 2022, when they filed a voter registration application.
Despite the address changes, both Caswell and Hoppe directed their mail to a different address in Gladstone, according to prosecutors.
This story was originally published February 13, 2025 at 4:30 PM.
