Brian Platt: Mayor asked me to come up with jail price tag so high it wouldn’t fly | Opinion
On the evening of June 3, 2022, City Manager Brian Platt fired off an angry email to Mayor Quinton Lucas. It accused him of changing direction so often on plans for a new city jail that he wanted nothing more to do with the issue.
“Please refrain from disrespecting me and my staff,” wrote Platt. “It only serves to perpetuate the toxic and destructive culture created by council members that I have repeatedly requested assistance in eliminating. Please also leave me and my staff out of future jail discussions and efforts.”
I kind of think that would be like me asking to be left out of any and all future efforts to produce stories for the newspaper. But since this note was clearly written in pique, what I really wonder is whether or not his indignation was justified.
You’ve probably heard that Platt has himself been accused by his critics of creating a toxic work environment. He was suspended from his job after a jury awarded almost $1 million to a former employee who said Platt directed him to lie to reporters, and was fired in a unanimous vote by the City Council on Thursday.
On his way out, this is either some truth telling, score settling, or both.
In particular, Platt’s 2022 email accused Lucas of asking the city manager at one point to come up with “a price tag estimate” on a city jail so “impossibly high,” that it was sure to be rejected. What the mayor asked him, Platt told me in a Wednesday interview, was to “make it cost too much. Make it so it was not palatable.”
“I’m not sure where your $300 million price tag came from,” Platt wrote, “but it wasn’t from me or my team or any actual data. Attached is the preliminary cost estimate which is between $150 and $165 million.” The new jail the city now wants to build, the tax for which will be on the April 8 ballot, is estimated to cost between $150 and $200 million.
Platt said he ignored the directive to dream up a plan so pricey it was sure to be voted down, and Lucas told me in a Wednesday phone interview that he never asked Platt to come up with any such thing. “That is an outright falsehood. … I never made that directive. I never told somebody to make up something.” And never, he said, did he attempt to sabotage the effort, though he has “evolved” from not being sure that the city even needed a jail to seeing that it does. Initially, he hoped that the city and county could build something together.
‘I take offense to the email you just sent’
In an equally angry and much longer response to Platt — “You know I’m nothing if not verbose,” the mayor told me — Lucas wrote the city manager back several hours later, at 11:05 p.m. “I go to bed early because I get up early,” the mayor said, “so the fact that I wrote it at 11:05 tells you I was annoyed. I’m not a stay-up-late-to-write-an-email person.”
“Needless to say,” he wrote to Platt, “I take offense to the email you just sent accusing me of disrespecting you and your staff. First, on the merits, I have in the last several days received three, or at least two, different estimates on the jail cost. … I think my concern” that it could cost twice what it should “is quite valid. I also think it is certainly within my fiduciary duties as a city official to raise a cost concern and it is not a sign of disrespect. … You further suggest I have made up the number I shared, which actually is closer to the number shared by your staff.”
Lucas also questioned how honest it was of Platt to share his 2022 email to him with me, but not the response from him.
If a municipal jail weren’t such a serious matter, one that in fact affects every single Kansas Citian, I might just ask why “City Hall: The 29th Floor” isn’t a reality show in its final season.
This issue matters in so many ways, though — to public safety, and the well-being of our inmates, that this public war of words between the two men who have been running this town is not so funny.
So should we believe Platt, someone a jury just found directed his staff to lie?
Or is it Lucas, who has not until now been decisive in his response to whether or not Platt should be let go or kept on, who is right? One minute, the mayor sounded like Platt was nothing but a memory, and the next, he seemed to be supporting him still.
“He’s had few better or stronger defenders than me,” Lucas told me on Wednesday. “A lot of people think I’m being kind here in 2025.”
In his 2022 email response to Platt, Lucas said he had tried to work with the city manager to answer his concerns about three particular council members whose behavior Platt had repeatedly complained about.
In at least one case, Platt seemed to feel physically threatened by a former council member, and Lucas told me this in a subsequent email: “I have never felt at any point the City placed the Manager in a position where he was threatened or subjected to a hostile work environment. We worked hard, even when he made (in my view, unfounded) claims of our alleged ‘disrespect’ as well, to resolve them, giving him both a pathway to express concerns and laying out a process by which he might seek further review. “
The drama is just a distraction
Whether it’s Platt or Lucas who is right, what’s definitely true is that there has been a lot more drama behind the scenes at City Hall than could possibly have been good for the city.
“This whole story” of dueling emails, including one from her, said council member Melissa Robinson, “is a distraction from Platt wanting more money from the city.”
Another email that Platt shared is an October 2020 message from Robinson to Lucas, expressing her anger that a qualified Black woman was not hired as city manager instead of Platt, as she says in the email that Lucas had publicly promised to do: “Going from that statement to choosing a White male is unconscionable.”
Platt’s lawyer, Joanna Trachtenberg, said in an email that this means Robinson “openly states her opposition to his hiring was due to the fact that he is not a Black woman.”
Writing down that it was unconscionable to hire a white guy is Donald Trump’s distorted DEI dream come true, unless you look at the context.
Robinson said her problem with the hiring was that in her view, all three Black candidates on the short list were more qualified than Platt. And she, too, says she wrote that message in anger. “I said it, I meant it, and that’s where it came from.”
I was more interested in whether Lucas really broke a promise to hire a Black woman as city manager. But today, both Robinson and Lucas said no, he didn’t.
At a community discussion, Robinson said, someone asked if he’d hire a Black woman as city manager, “and he said sure, if someone’s qualified, I would love to see that.”
That’s not the same as the kind of promise that Joe Biden made to put the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.
Now, Robinson said, “my issue is we should follow the contract as it relates to severance and not reward bad behavior.”
Platt said he’s left Kansas City better off than he found it, and I don’t see who’d argue with that.
When he said it’s been an honor to serve a city he loves, that sounded like his bags were packed.
Perjury, race and plain old friendship
My question throughout this whole suspension has been what changed, since city officials have known the particulars of the lawsuit that recently resulted in a nearly $1 million settlement against the city for years.
That he’s being pushed out as the result of racial politics makes no sense to me, either, since Platt has also been a white guy this whole time.
Three people who should know have suggested that the jury verdict made a difference, and in particular the fact that Platt may have committed perjury by at first saying that he couldn’t remember the staff meeting where he allegedly said to lie to reporters, and then later remembered it in detail.
What these emails also tell me, though, is that this is someone who while he might have been doing deals and conquering Gaul was not necessarily making friends inside City Hall.
“We wouldn’t be having this conversation if this was just Melissa” who had problems with Platt, Lucas said. “We are trying to be responsible. If he wants a hearing to go over a long list of grievances” against him, “he can have it.”
I respect that Platt wasn’t afraid to take on his chief protector in the one email I saw, and also that instead of retaliating, Lucas asked him 1) to do his job, as required by the city charter, and 2) find a better way to communicate, while “I too will consider how this could have best been avoided, so that an exchange like this never happens in the future.”
Too bad that’s not what happened. And unfortunately, I am not at all confident that the toxic work environment Platt alleges and others do, too, will disappear with him.
This story was originally published March 27, 2025 at 5:09 AM.
