If Janice Witt isn’t a threat to the status quo, why leave her a bucket of dead fish?
A few weeks ago, someone left a bucket of dead fish in front of one of Janice Witt’s campaign signs. And if Witt isn’t a threat to the status quo in Wyandotte County, where she is running for a second time to become mayor of the Unified Government, why does someone keep stealing her campaign signs?
Witt has spent the last 27 years feeding and clothing thousands of KCK and county residents, most recently through the Reola Grant Center, a nonprofit she and her husband founded in 2011.
A longtime business owner and outspoken community activist, she is running on a change-the-status-quo platform, to reduce taxes and excessive public utility fees, and to increase services and infrastructure development. As mayor, she wants to build new confidence, trust and transparency in leadership and bring basic services to areas of the county that have traditionally been without.
Others have promised all of the above, too, of course, and have not delivered.
She’s in the race because she’s fed up with the way the county has run and wants “to offer some strength, some hope for people of this community,” Witt said. For folks who’ve lost their homes because “their taxes were too damn high,” or live in darkness because Kansas City Board of Public Utilities bills are higher than their rent. “KCK is a hot mess,” she says, “but it’s my home and I love it.”
She’s in it for those who’ve raged against a “corrupt political machine” that ignores common cronyism and has accepted scandal and crime in the police ranks, but who feel powerless. “It amazes me that people find it acceptable to live this way,” she said. “I have to raise hell” to say that it’s not.
She’s done more than raise hell, suing the government over a deal that allowed former Police Chief Terry Zeigler to live rent-free in a lake house owned by the UG, and pushing for an independent investigation of police including rape and other criminal allegations against former detective Roger Golubski.
She’s made enemies, she says, “because I kick against a brick and I’m not afraid to fight.”
No, she isn’t.
Recently, I rode along with Witt through Wyandotte County, from areas west of I-435 flourishing with development — the Legends Outlets shopping district, luxury apartment and sporting complexes — built with never-ending tax abatements — to the neglected and deteriorated Northeast neighborhoods and historical Black communities with raggedy streets and no retail, or even a grocery store.
She also showed me what was left of the dead fish someone used to send her a message.
Abandonment, Witt says, is representative of the “we don’t care” attitude residents tell her they feel they’ve gotten from elected officials.
Witt says she has a plan to spread progress and prosperity to impoverished neighborhoods but she’s not sharing it for fear an opponent would beat her with her own ideas.
Unlike her opponents, she says, she has no insider or political track record to be measured against.
She’s the granddaughter of a Black sharecropper from Arkansas who settled in northeast KCK, where Witt was born and raised. He built the foundations of several Black churches still standing in the city. Her family also farmed, and she lives on roughly 30 acres of land where her mom grew the food that she, too, often gave to others.
That’s where Witt, who has owned a construction company, a catering business and two coffee shops, learned the power of feeding people as a way to bring them together, gain trust and hear from them what they expect from their political leaders.
She has degrees in human resources, hospitality and service management, and says she doesn’t want the mayor’s job, in itself. “What I want is change. But without the seat, change doesn’t happen.” Without the seat, she said, the UG can’t and won’t “get rid of the same names playing the same games.”
This story was originally published July 21, 2021 at 5:00 AM.