Judge: Council, mayor broke law in taking police money. Effort to remove them is on
Should eight Kansas City Council members and the mayor be removed from office, one way or another?
Now that a judge has ruled that eight council members and Mayor Quinton Lucas violated Missouri law in clawing back $42 million from the police department in May, a woman leading a recall effort against them wants them thrown out of office for good measure.
Shannon Bjornlie of the grassroots group Taking KC Back says the law the council and mayor violated, known as Chapter 84, provides for $1,000 fines for each offense — and that offenders “shall forever thereafter be disqualified from holding or exercising any office or employment whatsoever under the mayor or common council or municipal assembly of said cities.”
Bjornlie has written to Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, asking him to “pursue this matter and make sure (the mayor and council members) are held accountable as the statute dictates.”
For his part, the state-run Board of Kansas City Police Commissioners’ lawyer Patrick McInerney says the board won’t seek a punishment phase for the council and mayor. “The board sought exactly the relief the judge ordered — nothing else,” he said in a text.
Regardless, the recall election effort arising from the May 20 police budget clawback now has added fuel.
“Let’s get them out of office before they can do more damage to our city,” Bjornlie says.
Take KC Back first targeted District 4 Councilman Eric Bunch, and on Sept. 22 filed affidavits to recall the mayor and at-large council members Katheryn Shields, Brandon Ellington, Andrea Bough, Lee Barnes and Kevin O’Neill. While the group is disputing the government’s numbers of valid signatures on Bunch’s recall petition, the move to recall the other council members and mayor has only gained steam with the judge’s Tuesday ruling against the city, she says.
“It has. We’ve had more people ask to (circulate) petitions, and definitely more people asking where they can sign,” she says.
Since the newest drive seeks the recall of five council members and mayor, citizens are being asked to sign all of six petitions at once. But most are happy to do so, Bjornlie says, noting that no one has declined to sign them because of the volume.
Quinton Lucas’ statement angered people
Bjornlie says Mayor Lucas’ defiant statement after the court ruling Tuesday — that the police money will be in play for real next year — only angered people and gave the recall drive more wind in its sails, even more so than the court ruling itself.
“I think that this ruling and the fact that the mayor made the statement that he did is going to garner us more support,” she said. The recall drive has about 30 days to come up with 13,713 signatures for each council member and the mayor.
A statement from Lucas’ office noted that, while the Back the Blue pro-police organization came to the Northland this summer “peddling lies, dividing our community, and turning a profit on merchandise,” his focus “remains on ending our decades-long homicide crisis and building a safer Kansas City for all of our residents.”
Is this all an attempt by the eight council members and mayor to defund police? Probably not the best way to look at it. The mayor insists the May 20 ordinances weren’t defunding the police because the department could have negotiated with the city manager to get some or all of the funds back. Maybe a better way to look at it is an effort to defund traditional policing — by diverting that money to other forms of crime prevention. Either way, the money is diverted from traditional policing.
By state law, the city must spend at least 20% of its general fund revenue on the police department. Taking away $42 million from its current budget would lower the department’s funding to that minimum.
It’s just that the City Council majority and mayor tried to do that after the police budget was locked in for this fiscal year — which the judge properly ruled the city couldn’t do under Chapter 84.
Other attempts to defund traditional policing across the country have attracted national attention. Bjornlie says she wishes this one would.
“If I could figure out how to get the national news to cover it I would, because the local news for the most part is silent,” particularly on the recall effort, she says.
After the City Council and mayor were found to have violated the law, perhaps word will spread.
