Why did KC Mayor Quinton Lucas change rule on COVID-19 contact tracing and not say so?
Is Mayor Quinton Lucas being straight with us?
I sure didn’t get that feeling this week.
The Kansas City mayor was savaged nationwide as a “Nazi” the last several days in conservative media, and the government he runs was even threatened with legal action, all for trying to track the spread of the coronavirus.
As it turns out, Lucas stealthily changed the city’s mandate for businesses and churches to record identities and contact information for all visitors staying more than 10 minutes, and made it voluntary. That significant change happened over a quiet weekend and was finalized Monday, without so much as a press release or associated hoopla. Just an update to the wording that appears on the city’s website and a statement to three media outlets that apparently asked about it.
Strange. It’s as if he didn’t want people to know that what was once mandatory is now voluntary. Maybe he knew that making the registration requirement voluntary would make it next to meaningless, which it does.
Yet more troubling is the way this vital information — consumers, businesses and houses of worship all need to know what the reopening protocols are — had to be extracted from the mayor’s office with a set of journalistic pliers.
In a lengthy conversation Tuesday, the mayor never once mentioned that the visitor-registration order had been altered from mandatory to voluntary. He carried on as if it had always been voluntary.
When it was abundantly clear that the city’s original unambiguous mandate had been rewritten into a squishy recommendation, the mayor’s office was still, disingenuously in my view, maintaining that all he did was “clarify” it. Um, no sir. You changed it. Big difference. Huge shift for business owners and pastors across the city.
Why try to finesse it like that? Even after playing 20 questions with his office, I can’t say for sure.
It might be, besides the fact that he may have wanted to retain the order’s “mandatory” mojo, he hoped to avoid giving his vociferous critics a victory. If so, epic fail: National religious freedom advocate Liberty Counsel had rained reproach down on Lucas in a Friday article online and in subsequent media interviews, coincidentally at about the same time that Lucas began to back off the mandatory nature of the order. On Tuesday, the organization crowed, with some justification, “Kansas City Repeals Name Gathering Order.”
I personally find it more than a little creepy for the government to be asking for the comings and goings of citizens. But if it’s private organizations that collect and retain the information — against the advent of an outbreak of a serious disease, so others who were in the building can be notified — then, yes. The Star Editorial Board would have stood by that mandate longer than the mayor has.
And unlike him, we would’ve made no bones about it.
This story was originally published May 7, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
