Can anyone stop Clay County’s corrupt commissioners? Help from courts, lawmakers needed

Corruption and tyranny are easy to spot from afar, but often difficult to recognize right in front of you. It’s simply hard to fathom someone being unscrupulous and despotic in your very presence.

Yet there’s no escaping the fact that corruption and tyranny are both on full and open display on the highly dysfunctional, wholly unexplainable Clay County Commission.

Two members of the three-person governing board have blissfully entangled taxpayers in expensive, endless litigation on two bizarre fronts: oddly fighting for the legal right to stop feeding and caring for inmates in the county jail and warring with the state auditor in an effort to prevent an audit demanded by lawful citizen petition.

The latest gambit by Commissioners Luann Ridgeway and Gene Owen is an attempt to appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court a unanimous 3-0 ruling by the state Court of Appeals ordering commissioners to fund the jail. They first asked the Court of Appeals to transfer the case to the higher court, a request that was summarily denied. Now Ridgeway and Owen have until the end of the year to appeal to the high court directly.

Simultaneously, and without explanation, Ridgeway and Owen have obliged taxpayers to pay for yet two more criminal/civil lawyers for assistant county administrators Laurie Portwood and Brad Garrett, costing $375 and $400 per hour, respectively.

Why do two county administrators suddenly need their own tax-paid lawyers, above and beyond the county’s already-on-duty Husch Blackwell firm? County Clerk Megan Thompson, a candidate for Ridgeway’s seat, certainly wants to know, as should every taxpayer in Clay County.

“We deserve to know why our tax money is being spent on criminal defense lawyers when the men and women of the Sheriff’s Office have been dangerously underfunded,” Thompson wrote on Facebook. “The dysfunction of the commission may now have crossed the line to criminal conduct.”

Truly, though, Ridgeway and Owen’s plainly absurd attempt to appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court in the jail funding case should alarm the entire region. It’s yet another dangerous delay in paying for inmate food and health care.

Fact is, it’s only by the forbearance of private, currently unpaid food and health care vendors that the jail hasn’t already had to be emptied out: Sheriff Paul Vescovo, who admits “night sweats” over the prospect, estimates that, absent food and health care, half the jail’s 300 inmates would flood the streets, with the other half being farmed out to other jails in the area.

That scenario would endanger everyone in the region.

“Our vendors continue to go above and beyond, but we need to submit payment very soon,” Clay County Sheriff’s Capt. Will Akin says. “Hard to say how much longer they will provide services without payment, but they are sending us correspondence that demands they be paid. We are grateful they have come this far with us, but they cannot continue to operate without payment for too much longer.”

While the courts are the best short-term hope for forestalling such a debacle, long-term help is necessary from the state legislature. And the Clay County delegation is on it.

“We are pretty united as state legislators that we want to hold people who are subverting the will of the people accountable,” state Sen. Lauren Arthur tells The Star. “We’re all looking for solutions to this problem.”

Arthur cites five possible changes in the law: providing for citizen recalls of county commissioners throughout the state; expanding the county commission to five members to prevent such a “tyranny of two”; requiring counties to honor lawful contracts; a requirement for public comment periods at meetings; and tightening laws surrounding document retention and transparency.

It’s amazing such things must be considered — especially a law requiring county officials to abide by contracts they enter into, which ought to be reasonably assumed. Then again, lawmakers have rarely seen anything like the tag team of Ridgeway and Owen.

“We’re trying to react to some things that we never even imagined we’d see,” Arthur says.

And to combat tyranny and corruption in our midst.

This story was originally published December 19, 2019 at 5:00 AM.