Suspended Kansas City manager: Nothing in those lawsuits was news to City Council | Opinion
Mayor Quinton Lucas does not make it sound like suspended Kansas City Manager Brian Platt is going to be in that job much longer. He’s not exactly saying, “Brian who?” but close.
The two men are meeting on Sunday afternoon, at Platt’s request.
In a Friday interview in his office in City Hall, Lucas said that while he didn’t know what was going to happen next Thursday, when the council is expected to decide whether Platt will keep his job, “I think it’s fair to say, in a review of many of our discussions this week, that I don’t know if it will be easy to just go back to the way things existed before.”
Before, he means, the public learned from news coverage of Platt’s civil trial that a jury awarded a $928,829 payout to former city spokesman Chris Hernandez. Hernandez alleged he was forced out of his job because he would not give in to Platt’s suggestions that he should feel free to mislead the media, just like they did back in Jersey City.
Two other lawsuits that name Platt had been filed long before this one went to court, and Lucas said that of course there is worry that others will get in line for their million dollars. “That’s a very real concern, a very real concern.” That makes it hard to see how Platt can stay.
But in a Saturday phone interview, Platt told me that there was nothing in any of those three lawsuits that was news to members of the City Council, not just after they were filed but at the time the actions discussed in the suits were taken: “Nothing referenced in the lawsuits was unknown to the council.”
If that’s the case, though Platt didn’t say so, then that could change the city’s legal and financial calculus, and make it harder to send him on his way. If he was doing what members wanted done, then that puts them on the hook.
I asked council member Kevin O’Neill about Platt’s assertion that “nothing referenced was unknown,” to him and his colleagues, but he said he couldn’t comment on an active personnel issue. “We’ll see where we are on Thursday.”
Platt: ‘I really want to stay’
Platt also said “I really want to stay” and “I’m really proud of the work we’ve done. Kansas City is better off” than when he got here, he said, and told me he is receiving a lot of support from those all over the city who agree.
Lucas said he has heard some praise for Platt, too — “Damn it, he actually did stuff for me” — but mostly, it’s the “no” vote that has come out. “I’ve heard from a lot of members of the public who have very real concerns and would expect them to be addressed if he were to return. And I think it’s fair to say that has not been done yet.”
Has Lucas heard from other city employees with complaints about the way they were treated? Only from social media posts, he said, and those were “consistent with what some of us learned more about in connection with the litigation.”
You brought him to Kansas City, right? “I did,” Lucas said, through a search firm that identified him as a major find.
And no, he does not feel like Platt should have been better vetted. A lot of folks “said this is the bright and up-and-coming star.”
Clearly, Lucas sees something of himself in Platt: “I take a lot from the voters. When I was elected I was a 34-year-old man, and what I took from the voters was saying yeah, he may well be imperfect” — here he referred to his 2018 arrest — yet they decided “we think he’s worth a chance” anyway, “because he seems ambitious, has ideas.”
He was talking about that time he fell asleep in his car after a party in Lawrence and was charged with suspicion of DUI. The charge was tossed, and the incident was not a major issue in the 2019 mayor’s race.
But Lucas likens voters accepting him despite that lapse to his hiring of Platt, even with a couple of marks against him: “The city said we want to see how you can deliver basic services and still do big things. Who can put us in position to deliver on that? I went for that ambitious, shooting star type of approach that sometimes works very well for you and sometimes does not.”
‘I didn’t want to testify’
OK, so when did it start to fall into the “does not” category?
“When you hear more about how people feel in an institution,” Lucas said. And that seems to have happened just recently, in the courtroom. “From that litigation, and particularly the testimony of Maggie Green,” who said on the stand that she was “terrified” of losing her city communications job over an accurate Star story about street repaving. “There was probably a very different amount of impact on people we either weren’t catching or weren’t listening to closely.”
“Sometimes in life,” the mayor said, “you get very into the numbers: The population’s growing, employee salaries are up. … The metrics have not been bad, and a lot of us lived in a world of metrics.”
Do you regret testifying for him in court?
No, Lucas said, though “I didn’t want to testify. It wasn’t necessarily a desire of me waking up to do it.”
But you didn’t have to do it, right? “I was asked by our own attorneys to testify.”
“I think the hardest thing in life sometimes is reading through to somebody’s personality for real. It wasn’t that he fired people with whom he had differences, but how he went about it has raised questions. You do start to see after a while, ‘Huh, why are we seeing some of the similar complaints?’ And that contributes in no small part to why you saw action” — Platt’s suspension.
It seems to me that a big question is going to be sorting out actions that our elected representatives may have approved — firing people, let’s say, though I don’t know that — from the far more amorphous issue of how those directions were carried out.
And whether Platt stays or he goes, the city could have a very expensive legal mess on its hands here.
This story was originally published March 16, 2025 at 5:08 AM.
