Can anyone root out WyCo corruption? Chris Steineger versus ‘Chicago-style machine’
Chris Steineger wants nothing less than a tax revolt and utility bill uprising in Wyandotte County. And he’s going door to door to start one.
A former insider turned angry outsider, the erstwhile four-term state senator is now running for mayor of the Wyandotte County Unified Government in the Aug. 3 primary — notably on a torch-and-pitchfork platform. He’s mad as heck about high taxes and utility bills, and he’s passing out the torches and pitchforks with his fliers as he wears out the campaign trail.
“We are a Chicago-style Democrat machine,” he says, “where they’re Democrat In Name Only, and their main concern is controlling the UG and the BPU and the cash flow, so they can give out jobs to their sons, daughters, nieces and nephews and then take no-bid contracts to all their cronies. It’s gone on forever like that.”
He’s right about that. Part gadfly, part policy wonk, Steineger comes to the tall task of taking on an entrenched machine with a striking civic and political pedigree. His father Jack Steineger was a 28-year senator before him, and his cousin Joe Steineger Jr. was Kansas City, Kansas, mayor from 1987 to 1995. The family’s Wyandotte County roots run as deep as 1868. And when Steineger’s other college-bound classmates from his 1980 high school graduating class left the county for good, he came back.
“I know almost every street in the county,” he says. “There’s almost not a street anywhere that I haven’t walked on at some point in my life. I bet I’ve knocked on 40,000 or 50,000 doors over six or seven elections. If you add up enough of those stories and conversations over many years, you pretty well know what people are thinking.”
He says what they’re thinking is what he’s thinking: Taxes and utility bills, especially after mounds of tax breaks for large corporations, are at the level where the peasants need to rebel — and, Steineger hopes, get out and vote for him.
“I feel a real growing sense of frustration with the status quo, with utility bills and taxes. I hear that over and over and over again. Everyone’s getting collectively (teed) off about this. Every once in a while it’s like a convergence of forces comes together — and maybe this is going to happen this time,” Steineger says.
He’s counting on a historic groundswell of unrest. As an unabashed critic of the Unified Government and its independently governed Board of Public Utilities, he’ll need voters upset at that status quo in order to overcome the county machine’s own voting bloc of employees and their relatives, which can be 25% or more of the total votes cast.
Studies have shown the Unified Government, particularly the fire department, is bloated compared to Wichita and Topeka, he says, and the BPU’s generous salaries, take-home pickup trucks, chronic patronage and insular governance have become an albatross around the necks of the shut-out working class.
“Affordable housing, hell — you can’t even afford to live in a house even if you own it,” Steineger says.
Steineger’s got horse sense, and a ton more horsepower than most folks I’ve met. His brain is on overdrive seemingly all the time, and his hobbies include filling boxes with newspaper clippings, files and official reports documenting public policy both past and present, as well as mapping out future policy like a general maps out war.
Sees no need for Department of Justice probe of KCK police
As hard charging as he is, and as attractive as that makes him as a reform candidate, the knock on Steineger is that he’s overly self-assured and not very collaborative.
In a lively interview with The Star Editorial Board, in which he often talked over the questioners, it was disappointing to hear Steineger dismiss proposals for a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department, and former homicide detective Roger Golubski — accused of sexually assaulting dozens of women, yet enjoying a nice retirement out and about.
During the discussion, Steineger also made a flip comment invoking violence against Golubski that will not be repeated here — a red-flag remark uttered recklessly, despite his knowing full well he was speaking on the record. A mayor can never be that loose-lipped and ill-spoken.
He further dismissed the serial rape case as The Star’s obsession, shrugging that “you miss all this other stuff that’s equally bad and it’s harming many more people. A hundred-fold more are getting screwed by the (UG) system the way it is. I can’t save everybody. Neither can you. And I can’t change the past. No one can.”
Of course not. But there’s no statute of limitations on abhorrence. Or for that matter, on murder or, as of 2013, rape. The Golubski case, and the department, demand a federal probe, and surely someone as intellectually nimble as Steineger could do that while also reforming Wyandotte County from the inside.
This story was originally published July 20, 2021 at 5:00 AM.