The Missouri Supreme Court takes the bench on Sept. 10, 2024, in Jefferson City to hear a case questioning whether an amendment to overturn the state's abortion ban will remain on the state's November ballot. From left are Judges Kelly C. Broniec, Robin Ransom, W. Brent Powell, Chief Justice Mary R. Russell, Zel. M. Fischer, Paul C. Wilson and Ginger K. Gooch (Pool photo by Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch).

If three Missouri Supreme Court judges had their way, voters would not have a say on whether to legalize abortion statewide on this year’s general election ballot.

This November, those voters will have the option to use a power they’ve never used before — to boot two of those judges off the state’s high court.

Abortion rights groups turned in 380,000 signatures this summer for a state constitutional amendment that would establish a right to reproductive health care.

But then a Cole County circuit court judge ruled that their proposed amendment was too vague. That sent the case to the Missouri Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled that it met legal requirements in a 4-3 decision.

Now, the abortion amendment will appear on the ballot — alongside retention votes for two of those judges who dissented in the ruling that ultimately put the issue to a statewide vote.

To abortion-rights advocates like Jess Piper, it’s “instant karma.”

She is the executive director of Blue Missouri and ran unsuccessfully in 2022 to represent a district north of St. Joseph in the Missouri House of Representatives.

“You vote against us, and we can vote to not retain you,” she said. Piper will be voting not to retain Missouri Supreme Court judges Kelly Broniec and Ginger Gooch, who dissented last month in the decision to keep abortion on the ballot.

But some political and legal experts say advocates like Piper should brace for times when judges they like might get tossed off the court for their rulings.

It’d be a gamble. Kicking two judges off the Supreme Court is unprecedented in Missouri and would leave two open seats for the next governor to fill. Mounting a political campaign to remove two judges from the court, if successful, could shake the foundation of an institution that has been insulated from politics for 80 years.

“Be careful what you wish for,” said former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Michael Wolff. “You don’t know what you’re going to get on the other side.”

What judges Broniec and Gooch argued on the abortion petition case

The Supreme Court’s Sept. 10 decision put abortion back on the ballot.

Judges on both sides of the opinion contend the legal decision had nothing to do with abortion.

Rather, they say the case turned on a 1997 law that requires initiative petitions specify what parts of Missouri statute or the state constitution would be repealed by a petition.

Anti-abortion groups said that Amendment 3 was not specific about what Missouri laws would be repealed by establishing a right to reproductive health care.

Abortion-rights groups, on the other hand, said that wasn’t required because the abortion amendment doesn’t actually repeal any laws — it simply adds a guarantee in the Missouri Constitution of access to abortion. If the amendment passes, Missouri’s abortion ban passed by the General Assembly will remain in effect until it’s challenged in court.

Ultimately, the courts could overturn some abortion restrictions — not the amendment itself.

The state Supreme Court ruled that the abortion amendment met the necessary legal requirements to be on the ballot. Judge Paul Wilson also wrote in the majority opinion that requiring a petition to specify a list of laws to be repealed would be overly burdensome, making it functionally impossible to amend the constitution in the future.

In her dissenting opinion, Broniec wrote that the 1997 law requiring petitions to specify what laws would be repealed also includes laws that would be invalidated.

The abortion amendment clearly contradicts a handful of existing Missouri laws, she said, including the abortion ban that went into effect in June 2022, a law requiring a parent’s consent for minors to receive an abortion and a law requiring a 72-hour waiting period.

She said that this amendment — and any future amendment — wouldn’t have to list out every possible law that could be repealed. But, she argued, it should have listed the ones that were most obvious.

Gooch agreed with Broniec, as did Judge Zel Fischer, who is due to retire in 2033.

Both Gooch and Broniec declined to comment for this story. They are prohibited from publicly commenting on court issues under the state’s judicial code of conduct.

The 1940 ‘Missouri Plan’ to keep politics out of the Supreme Court

Unlike many other states, Missouri does not directly elect members of its Supreme Court. And to some experts, that’s a good thing.

The system of judge retention elections — rather than contested elections between two candidates — was created by an initiative petition in 1940 in response to an increasingly politicized court.

“There was a very ugly Missouri Supreme Court race between a Boss (Tom) Pendergast candidate and somebody else,” said Wolff, who is also former dean of St. Louis University School of Law.

Pendergast was a political boss in the early 20th century who controlled Kansas City Hall, the police department and even some statewide elections.

“If you wanted to be a judge in Jackson County or even on the Supreme Court of Missouri,” Wolff said, “a person you needed to go see was Boss Tom. That didn’t necessarily mean that you were going to be the best judge.”

But legal scholars at the time argued for a way to hold judges accountable when they misbehave or perform incompetently.

That created the “Missouri Plan” that nine other states copied and that 10 more followed roughly.

A judicial nominating commission — the chief justice, three members of the Missouri Bar Association and three nonlawyers picked by the governor — creates a list of potential nominees.

The governor then picks a nominee from that list to serve on the Supreme Court for one year before facing a retention election.

Judges who are retained face a retention election every 12 years until they retire at age 70.

No campaign to kick out a Supreme Court judge in Missouri has ever been successful.

Peverill Squire, a political science professor at the University of Missouri, said that although the governor has some say in who gets nominated, the nominating commission has successfully protected the court from partisan politics for the most part.

Gov. Mike Parson “has not been particularly aggressive in that regard,” he said. “They do have to go through the judicial nominating commission that might take some of the edge off of the heavy partisanship.”

Retention races can be a flashpoint for more partisan politics

Piper posted a video to TikTok shortly after the initiative petition Supreme Court decision, calling on voters to not retain Gooch and Broniec. The video has garnered more than 13,000 likes and 1,600 shares. Since then, she said she has met with voters who told her they wrote down the judges’ names so they’d remember in November.

“They’re really angry,” she said. “We didn’t just do the job, we killed it — 380,000 signatures when we only needed 180,000. It angers people across the political spectrum because you don’t have any right to take away my voice.”

Even if voters toss out the judges, Parson’s probable successor, Republican governor candidate Mike Kehoe, likely would replace them with two conservatives.

“He would appoint people in much the same manner that Parson did,” Piper said.

A Ballotpedia study in 2020 found that only three judges had lost retention out of 155 elections across the country since 2008. The other 98% percent won their races.

In nearby Iowa, voters removed two judges from the Supreme Court when they were up for retention in 2010 after the court unanimously overturned the state’s ban on same-sex marriage in 2009.

A conservative Missouri group attempted to remove Supreme Court Judge Richard Teitelman in 2004. The campaign argued that Teitelman was opposed to the death penalty and in favor of abortion, and that he opposed the right to firearms.

Missouri Supreme Court judges are prohibited under the code of judicial conduct from making any public statements on how they would rule on any given issue. If they do, they must recuse themselves from any case involving those issues.

That backs judges into a corner in those targeted campaigns where they can’t effectively defend themselves against claims that they support or don’t support an issue.

“It was a campaign generated by the (prospective) speaker of the House,” Wolff said of the 2004 retention campaign. “He was targeting some districts where they were trying to gin up the conservative voters. I don’t think they knew or cared who Judge Teitelman was, but they could get people to the polls.”

This article first appeared on Beacon: Missouri and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

(Getty Images)

Until they get in touch with him, organizer TJ James says, many people with a felony conviction have no idea that they have the right to vote.

And it’s not for a lack of interest, said James, an organizer with the Metro Organization for Racial and Economic Equity, or MORE2.

“I’ve had people that I work with where they’ve been told specifically at the polls that they cannot vote,” James said. “They’re being told while in prison, ‘You can never vote again.’ And people, unfortunately, just don’t do the research.”

When a Kansas or Missouri resident is convicted of a felony, the state automatically deletes their voter registration. But once they complete their parole or probation, most people with felony convictions regain the right to vote.

The Sentencing Project noted in October 2023 that nationwide, more than 2 million people with felony convictions have regained the right to vote since 1997.

Can felons vote in Missouri?

Generally speaking, a felony conviction only temporarily suspends a person’s right to vote in Missouri. The only exception is if the felony is related to elections or voting — such as tampering with ballots or threatening voters. Election crimes convictions, both felonies and misdemeanors, cost a person the right to vote in Missouri.

Missouri automatically wipes the voter registration upon conviction of a felony, and the person convicted must reregister once they have completed their sentence, parole or probation.

If a voter has any issues at the polling site — for example, if the poll worker incorrectly tells them that they aren’t allowed to vote because of their felony conviction — James encourages them to call a local election office.

However, if the problem is that the person has not registered, there is no recourse after the voter registration deadline on Oct. 9. Voters must register before that deadline because Missouri does not allow same-day voter registration.

Can felons vote in Kansas?

Like in Missouri, a felony conviction in Kansas results in a temporary loss of the right to vote. Once a person has completed their sentence, parole or probation, they will have to reregister. The Kansas voter registration deadline is Oct. 15.

However, it gets fuzzier when a person owes fines and fees for restitution.

“There are tens of thousands of people in Kansas who are still on probation solely for financial reasons,” said Micah Kubic, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Kansas affiliate.

That is relatively distinct to Kansas, he said.

Legally, probation could be indefinitely extended until those fines are paid. Some judges may choose to end a person’s probation before they’ve fully paid their debt, but it’s ultimately up to the judge’s discretion.

Kubic said that judges in Sedgwick County are less likely to restore voting rights before fines are paid.

Right to vote in jail

Some detainees at county jails in Kansas and Missouri may still be eligible to vote.

In 2022, MORE2 estimated that there may be upward of 400 eligible voters jailed in Jackson County. Kubic estimated that the number of eligible voters in Kansas jails is in the thousands.

“If you are in jail and not been convicted,” James said, “then your voting rights have not been taken away.”

To cast a ballot from jail, voters will need to make sure they are registered to vote and submit an absentee ballot request before the deadline.

In Kansas, the absentee ballot request form must be received by Oct. 29. In Missouri, it must be received by Oct. 23.

Jails may allow voter registration groups to enter, but it varies from county to county.

Kubic said that most counties in Kansas do not have vote-from-jail programs, but the Kansas ACLU is working to make those programs more common.

“(It) can be as simple as allowing the local election commission or county clerk to bring a stack of absentee ballot request forms,” he said. “They don’t have to be complicated to work.”

This article first appeared on Beacon: Kansas City and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Rural broadband has been a top priority of state and federal officials (Jared Strong/Iowa Capital Dispatch).

Free internet?

It sounds like a nice dream. We’d all love to ditch the $80 a month we pay for the ability to stream movies, do doctor’s appointments from home or check in on our cousin’s latest Facebook post.

But in North Kansas City, residents get a steady online connection with no monthly bill.

Anyone there who signs up for KC Fiber can get internet service with no monthly bill. And not just a janky dial-up connection — it’s high-speed gigabit internet, at speeds comparable to Google Fiber, AT&T or Spectrum.

It took $10 million from the city’s hefty gambling tax revenue and eight years of troubleshooting, while dodging a legal challenge from a telecom provider and dodging a state legislature restricting city-run broadband.

North Kansas City is one of few cities in the country that give away high-speed fiber internet service to residents as a basic city service.

The City Council “saw it as a city utility, very similar to water and wastewater,” said Kim Nakahodo, North Kansas City’s deputy city administrator.

She said the council members hoped free internet would seduce businesses and residents to North Kansas City.

It’s a part of a growing movement nationally to treat broadband as public necessity — like mail service, roads and sewers — rather than a luxury. Cities like North Kansas City spend tax dollars to build broadband networks, rather than relying on the free market to provide an essential service.

But municipal broadband programs like North Kansas City’s KC Fiber are tricky. For eight years, the city spent more money on its fiber network than it planned for — about $1 million between 2009 and 2010 — and it took years for North Kansas City to get its program out of the red.

And now that fiber-optic internet is available in most parts of the Kansas City area, it’s becoming less likely that cities or suburbs will compete with private businesses already selling high-speed service.

The bumpy road to free internet

North Kansas City kicked off its $10 million fiber network plan in 2006, hoping to install high-speed internet hookups to all 2,500 residences and 900 businesses by the end of that year.

It was an ambitious plan. It didn’t go so smoothly.

The first hiccup came in the courts. Time Warner Cable, now known as Spectrum, sued North Kansas City, arguing that it could not go through with its plans without a citywide vote under Missouri law. A federal judge ruled in North Kansas City’s favor, and the city charged ahead with its plan.

Then came financial problems.

North Kansas City was spending a lot of money to run its fiber program, and the money it charged customers (before it made service free for residents) wasn’t covering the cost of running it. A state audit found that operating losses ate up $1 million of the city’s gambling fund in 2009 and 2010.

So in 2014, the City Council changed course and signed a deal with a local business called DataShack (now called Nocix).

The city would continue to own the fiber network, but DataShack would run the operation under the name KC Fiber. They split revenue and expenses 50/50, and the city could not be responsible for more than $150,000 per year.

As part of that deal, DataShack said it would provide free gigabit internet service to all residents who signed up and paid a $300 installation fee. Businesses still pay a monthly bill, which generates some revenue for the city.

Now, North Kansas City residents like Jill Toyoshiba get online without that pesky monthly bill.

She enrolled in the program before the transition to DataShack, and she hasn’t looked back.

“It’s a real asset,” she said. “If you call up, there’s somebody to pick up the phone and answer … A municipal service that is attentive to residents is really appealing.”

But at the same time, not all residents have been able to get free internet.

Some apartment complexes in North Kansas City have effectively prohibited their tenants from signing up for KC Fiber because they have exclusive deals with providers like AT&T or Spectrum.

It can also be expensive to wire a large apartment building for a new internet provider. When landlords don’t have to pay the internet bill — or in some cases, when they get a cut of their tenants’ bills in exchange for exclusivity — they don’t have much incentive to install KC Fiber.

“It’s easier to do those things when you’re building from the ground up,” Nakahodo said.

North Kansas City is instead trying to get developers of new apartments to agree to install KC Fiber if they’re receiving tax incentives like property tax breaks.

Why cities are pursuing their own broadband networks

North Kansas City is one of 57 city-owned broadband networks across the country.

They have a variety of models. Some of them, like KC Fiber, own the network and contract with a private business to operate it. Others own and operate the utility themselves, similar to how KC Water provides services in Kansas City, Missouri.

But they share a common philosophy: that internet service is no longer an amenity. Much like how tax dollars build roads and bridges, these local governments build broadband to keep their residents connected to telehealth, emergency notifications and city services.

Aaron Deacon, the managing director of KC Digital Drive, said that initiatives like municipal broadband are especially beneficial in filling a market gap where private businesses don’t smell profits in providing internet. KC Digital Drive pushes for broadband equity and digital innovation in Kansas City.

In filling a market gap, they can play a role in closing the digital divide between households with reliable internet and those without.

But it’s not always the right tool in the toolbox.

Municipal broadband is cost-effective in small, dense communities like North Kansas City, with a population just shy of 5,000 people and a land area of less than five square miles. Houses are closer together, so it’s cheaper to install a fiber connection for every resident.

But the places that desperately need broadband tend to be rural and sparsely populated. That’s where broadband is the most expensive to install and the least profitable for internet companies.

“You can find people who … find three examples and be like, ‘It’s done so much for these communities, and it’s amazing,’” Deacon said. “And you can have a paper that says, ‘Look at these three examples where it’s been a complete boondoggle.’”

Broadly speaking, Deacon said, municipal broadband is most effective in places without other internet providers. Recent examples include Utah’s Utopia network serving 20 cities in the Salt Lake area, or Burlington Telecom in Vermont.

The cities that are best equipped to start a city-owned broadband network already have public utility boards overseeing electricity. That puts Wyandotte County and Independence at the top of the list in the Kansas City area.

But from a business standpoint, Deacon said decision-makers should look at the causes of digital inequities — whether they’re cost issues, service issues or something else — before jumping to the conclusion that municipal broadband would actually fix those problems.

“If you’ve got another network provider that is providing quality service,” Deacon said, “I don’t know that it makes any sense for a city to get into that business.”

State laws restrict municipal broadband in 18 states, including Missouri

Meanwhile, state governments have made it more difficult for cities to get into the internet business.

In Missouri, cities are allowed to offer internet service, but they’re prohibited from including cable TV packages or telephone service. That’s the law that Time Warner used when it unsuccessfully tried to sue North Kansas City over its city-run fiber in 2006.

Another law proposed in 2022 would have prohibited cities from taking federal funding to provide broadband unless it’s an “underserved” area — and it would have given other internet companies the opportunity to challenge any proposal first.

Kansas does not keep cities from running their own broadband, but other states are more restrictive. Nebraska bans city-run internet completely. Nevada only allows it in its least populated cities or counties.

The United States Telecom Association opposes municipal broadband because it says cities don’t have the technical expertise to effectively run their own internet services.

“While government-provided broadband might appear ‘free’ to residents,” spokesperson Mariah Wollweber told The Beacon in an email, “the reality is that taxpayers ultimately foot the bill.”

A representative from AT&T said the company encourages local governments to work with private companies with a “proven track record” of efficient and effective internet services.

For what it’s worth, Toyoshiba is happy with the free internet she receives from KC Fiber.

She hasn’t had to pay for her internet since 2015, and she can’t remember the last time she had any outages lasting longer than a few minutes.

“I’ve mentioned it before (to friends), and it’s almost like bragging in a way,” she said. “It’s something I don’t have to think about.”

This article first appeared on Beacon: Kansas City and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Attorney General Andrew Bailey, right, testifies to the House Budget Committee on Feb. 6, 2024 (Rudi Keller/MIssouri Independent).

School districts in Jackson County saw home property assessments leap by nearly a third — and add more heft to their tax bases.

They set their property tax rates lower to reflect the beefier assessments — amid a furor from homeowners and politicians contending the numbers inflated the real value of properties in the county.

That tossed Jackson County into the center of a court challenge from the state that could test who can challenge assessments and how.

Meanwhile, those schools? And other entities that get tax money such as police, fire departments, libraries, mental health services?

School districts in the county claimed in court this week that a win for the homeowners would prove “catastrophic,” costing school districts nearly $1,500 per student.

“That’s not fair to the school districts, the fire protection districts, the libraries,” said Joe Hatley, an attorney representing the Lee’s Summit School District.

It looks most likely that those taxing districts won’t take a hit — a lawsuit demanding that  nearly all the new assessments be erased faces steep odds. Meanwhile, any rebate for homeowners wouldn’t arrive for months at the earliest.

The lawsuit filed by the Missouri State Tax Commission and Attorney General Andrew Bailey contends property owners didn’t get a fair shot to challenge such dramatic increases in their assessments.

The Missouri Supreme Court threw out a similar class-action lawsuit last year. In that case, the court concluded that homeowners couldn’t sue if they didn’t appeal their property assessments with the county first.

That earlier lawsuit sought to reverse all of the assessments that increased more than 15% or didn’t get a mailed notice of the change. But most of the cases had not gone through the usual appeals. Likewise this year, the state wants to throw out all the new assessments that increased any amount.

That means Bailey is testing the limits of a fresh precedent from the high court. Bailey’s case differs by arguing that there is no fair way for homeowners to challenge assessments. That case has its next court date on June 6.

The Missouri Supreme Court has said no before 

Bailey has used his office aggressively in pursuit of conservative causes with mixed success — pushing to ban gender-affirming care, abortion and federal student loan relief.

Now the Republican is stretching the scope of the attorney general’s office by stepping into an intra-county dispute between taxpayers and their local government.

Mike Ardis, a spokesman for the International Association of Assessing Officers, said he was unfamiliar with any case where a state has tried to void an entire county’s assessment increases.

“We’re not familiar … with a similar situation where a state has tried to void a county’s reassessment,” he said in an email.

Before going to court, property owners can challenge an assessment with the county’s Board of Equalization. If they strike out there, they can appeal to the State Tax Commission.

If their case fails with that state commission, they can sue.

What’s different with these lawsuits is that the attorney general is suing on behalf of all property owners whose assessments increased — even if they didn’t appeal.

Bailey argues that homeowners can go to court before taking a case to the State Tax Commission because the appeal process doesn’t give homeowners a fair shot.

Jackson County’s lawyers counter that if homeowners never tried to appeal, they don’t have the right to sue. Some homeowners have challenged through the county and the state, but the lawsuit calls for undoing all 247,500 property assessments that went up. That includes 190,000-plus that were never appealed.

Last June, a group of property owners filed a class-action lawsuit arguing that the county botched the assessment and appeal process.

The Missouri Supreme Court dismissed their lawsuit using the same reasoning the county’s lawyers push now — that the homeowners hadn’t finished appealing their assessments.

Most states, including Missouri, can order reassessments, Ardis said, “but that is usually because an assessment hasn’t been done rather than on questions about a reassessment.”

Jackson County argues the State Tax Commission can compel Jackson County to redo its assessments without going to court. The county was told by that same commission in 2018 to bring all of its 301,000 properties up to market value because it wasn’t complying with state law.

But the State Tax Commission hasn’t ordered the county to take action on the 2023 assessments. It could sue a county for not following such an order.

‘Catastrophic’: School districts stand to lose millions of dollars

If the attorney general’s lawsuit is successful, Jackson County’s taxing jurisdictions will be forced to refund millions of dollars to homeowners.

The Fort Osage, Oak Grove, Independence and Lee’s Summit school districts submitted an amicus brief on May 9 asking the judge to consider the “catastrophic financial harm” of tossing out the higher assessments. It estimated that would mean paying back $57 million in taxes across the four districts, or $1,468 per student.

Lee’s Summit would have to give up $32 million — almost a tenth of its revenue. But that money has already been spent on the 2023-24 school year.

“The school districts budget for the fact that there will be some successful challenges to the county’s assessments,” the brief says, “but not for an illegal rollback of assessments on virtually every property in the county.”

For Lee’s Summit, that amount is nearly a third of its reserve. It would take years to recover, and in the meantime, the district would be in a precarious position.

“It would require an immense juggling act on the part of the district’s business staff to figure out what to do,” Hatley said. “You’re not going to dig out of that hole anytime soon.”

Housing costs are continuing to rise

The 30% spike in property values that Jackson County residents saw last year appears consistent with the rise in home sale prices. Tech real estate company Zillow says home values in Jackson County have increased by 45% since March 2020.

“There are parts of the county that we’re still trying to get to value … but I would say the majority of what is driving up these values right now is simply an increase in value,” Jackson County’s director of assessment Gail McCann Beatty told The Beacon in April 2023.

At the time, she said that home values have been increasing 14% to 15% every year since the housing market recovered from the pandemic.

Remote work has made the Midwest more appealing for people who previously needed to live in high-cost cities like New York City or Los Angeles. Since 2020, those workers have been able to relocate to Kansas City.

Additionally, corporations have been buying up Kansas City homes to add to their investment portfolios and renting them out. That has shrunk the number of homes for sale and made the market more expensive.

If a judge tells Jackson County to throw out all assessment increases, that will temporarily reduce property values for the 2023 tax year. But unless the county can get the housing market under control, market value will continue to increase and property owners will see their assessments spike once again in 2025.

So even if taxpayers get a property tax refund for 2023, that relief could be short-lived.

This article first appeared on The Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The Missouri Capitol in Jefferson City (Jason Hancock/Missouri Independent).

If Kansas City had its way, the local minimum wage would run $17 per hour, grocery stores would only use paper bags and you’d need to pass a background check to buy a gun in town.

But politicians and businesses that see these policy ideas as threats to their authority or their bottom lines, shut off all those policies by using their power to block them.

So instead of playing whack-a-mole at hundreds of city council meetings, lobbyists set up camp in the state Capitol to make it impossible for any town to pass certain laws that reflect local sentiments.

For more than a decade, red states like Missouri have stripped cities of their ability to craft local policies on pesticides, tobacco taxes, workplace protections and affordable housing. The rise of “preemption laws” comes from corporations and politicians who want to keep these decisions under their control.

“Cities are on the frontlines of multiple … crises these days,” said Katie Belanger, the lead consultant at the Local Solutions Support Center, which pushes for local control in cities and counties across the country. “Abuse of preemption today is cutting off local elected officials at the knees.”

This year, Missouri lawmakers are considering new preemption laws that would stop cities from banning landlords from discriminating against tenants who rely on government housing subsidies (like the one Kansas City Council passed in January) and from adopting any regulation of Missouri’s pet stores and puppy mills.

A state reaction to local policies

Missouri lawmakers can block your local city council from taking action on a number of fronts.

For years, Missouri’s larger cities with higher costs of living campaigned to raise the state’s $12.30 an hour minimum wage.

In 2015, St. Louis passed an ordinance setting the city’s minimum wage higher than the state’s.

Court challenges meant workers waited two years to see that raise. Then the Missouri General Assembly and Gov. Eric Greitens barred cities from setting their own minimum wage rules.

“A lot of these things happen because the community wants some kind of regulation,” said Richard Sheets, the executive director of the Missouri Municipal League. “Different communities have different problems and different goals.”

Earlier this year, Kansas City followed the lead of St. Louis by banning  discrimination against tenants with government rental subsidies.

Now, the Republican majority that controls the legislature wants to undo those local ordinances.

“Discrimination against housing choice vouchers is already a huge problem that is not prohibited federally,” said Mallory Rusch, the executive director of the anti-poverty organization Empower Missouri. “The only line of protection that those folks have right now are local ordinances.”

Rusch pointed to the Republican effort to raise the threshold for initiative petitions to pass. The process has been used to amend the Missouri Constitution to pass policies that are popular with voters but unpopular with conservative lawmakers, like marijuana legalization or Medicaid expansion.

“There is no other way to explain (raising the threshold),” Rusch said, “except for to take more power away from the cities.”

Legislature = One-stop lobbying

States and the federal government have passed laws and issued court rulings restricting local officials since the country’s founding. They’ve been used on the federal level to set minimum standards for how states should operate, and states traditionally have used them the same way to limit local officials.

For example, the U.S. Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kraemer ruled in 1948 that state courts cannot enforce racist covenants that ban Black people from owning houses in certain cities or neighborhoods.

In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled that state segregation laws were unconstitutional.

Illinois last year passed a law barring cities or school districts from banning books.

Missouri has a preemption law that requires all beer kegs to be tagged with an identification number and recycling information. Another preemption law requires all Missouri massage therapists to have the same licenses across the state.

In states, preemption helps prevent a patchwork of local policies that could create confusion and chaos for state officials or agencies — or for businesses that would otherwise have to meet a dozen different local standards.

But the use of those laws is shifting into new territory, as states pass more restrictions that limit what local governments can do, said Lydia Bean, a senior political reform fellow at progressive think tank New America. The shift creates policy vacuums, where businesses can sometimes operate completely unregulated.

In the past decade, state legislatures have set ceilings rather than floors — limiting how far local politics can trump state law.

“(These states decide,) ‘We’re not going to solve this problem at all,’” she said. “But we’re also not going to let any local cities or counties solve the problem.’”

With a single statewide law, well-heeled interest groups can keep every city and county in a state from making any policy decisions that could hurt their business or water down their culture war wins.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) often pens model legislation on behalf of those groups and sends model bills to state lawmakers to carry in their respective capitals.

It shows up in every state. At least 45 states have laws barring local governments from passing firearm regulations. Another 43 states have laws banning local pesticide regulation, while 41 states preempt local regulations on rideshare apps like Uber and Lyft. Another couple dozen states bar local governments from passing laws on youth access to tobacco products like flavored vapes.

“We’ve always had preemption bills because special interests have always tried to preempt local governments regulating over their industry,” Sheets said. “It’s been a fact of life.”

It’s harder for ordinary people to influence state legislatures than to win over their city council members.

A Kansas City resident can testify pretty easily at a City Council meeting. But if somebody wanted to testify in-person in Jefferson City, they’d probably need to take off work and drive two-plus hours each way.

Constituents in a sprawling state legislative district can live more than 150 miles from their state senator or representative.

It’s pretty easy to run into your city council member in church. It’s tougher to bump into your state senator who lives on the opposite end of the district.

“Citizens aren’t stupid,” Sheets said. “They’re going to make their voice heard at the local level — at the grocery store, at church, on the street. If something that is not popular is presented, it typically doesn’t get passed or stay on the books for long.”

Preemption laws pick up steam in red states across the country

Corporate interest groups have found a powerful ally in the Republican Party, which has been gradually consolidating power in statehouses across the country since 2010.

Every year since the 2010 elections, Republicans have controlled a trifecta (the governor’s office and majorities in the state senate and house) in more than 20 states. Neither party has held that much control over state governments for at least three decades.

And those states — which include Missouri since 2017 — use that power to limit local governments in their typically left-leaning larger cities.

A 2017 national analysis of preemption laws from Boise State University found that most often, preemption laws are used in Republican-led states that have cities with more liberal viewpoints.

“Preemption is a key tool to stifle local innovation and maintain state power,” the report found. “In other words, as states are being pushed by local governments, they are responding by curtailing local authorities in the hopes that it will stop (or at least slow) adoption of progressive policies.”

Local governments can be an important place for politicians to experiment with different policy ideas because they have more flexibility, Sheets said.

A state legislature, on the other hand, might meet for only five months out of the year. And with the Missouri Freedom Caucus disrupting the legislature’s ability to pass bills — even Republican-sponsored ones — those roadblocks make it all the more difficult to remake laws.

“City councils can pass ordinances and laws that don’t work and need to be fixed,” Sheets said. “(Those laws) can be fixed really quickly. But at the state level, when they pass legislation into law that’s wrong, it takes probably eight years to fix it.”

Advocates for local control see state limits on local power as an attack on the most diverse areas of the state, like Kansas City and St. Louis, where city councils and boards are more likely to take actions they see as moves toward racial justice, workers’ rights and affordable housing.

“It’s part of a broader effort to target specific communities and erode our democracy,” Belanger said. “We see abuse of preemption as part and parcel with gerrymandering, court-stacking, eroding voting rights and limiting direct democracy with citizen-led ballot initiatives.”

This article first appeared on The Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

A rendering of the Royals proposed downtown ballpark (image submitted).

The Royals and the Chiefs had everything.

Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce — fresh off of a Super Bowl victory — endorsed a “yes” vote in ads airing on TV and on YouTube. Endorsements rolled in from the city’s top political players: Mayor Quinton Lucas (belatedly), U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver and nearly every union in town.

All in all, the teams spent $3 million trying to convince voters a 40-year sales tax for a downtown ballpark would mean a win for everybody.

From a thorny stadium location and murky financial details to a community benefits agreement that drew criticism from workers groups and economists, the weeks leading up to the vote brought gaffe after gaffe, all in the public eye.

Jackson County voters couldn’t be convinced. With turnout higher than a typical April election and an unprecedented level of early voting, they shot the sales tax down by a 16-point margin.

The theories on what cursed the pitch to voters will pile up like Royals losses this summer, but some reasons already stick out.

‘No’ votes are easier than ‘yes’ votes

Any number of opposition groups will claim that the sales tax failed because of one key reason or another.

But a lot has to go wrong for a referendum to lose by such a wide margin.

In many ways, the stadium sales tax question was so complicated that it was doomed from the start, said Debra Leiter, a political science professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

“It wasn’t just a three-eighths cent sales tax,” she said. “It came with a load of baggage.”

If a voter supported funding the Chiefs but not the Royals, they were a “no” vote. If they wanted a downtown ballpark but not in the Crossroads, they were a “no” vote. If they wanted a downtown ballpark in the Crossroads but with a stronger community benefits agreement, they were a “no” vote.

That made it easy to convince voters that the stadium tax was a bad deal.

“The coalition with a small but clear message and less funding ended up winning,” Leiter said. “It’s a good reminder that it’s not just how much you spend. The message that you’re selling really can influence what voters are going to end up doing.”

KC Tenants, the citywide tenants union, managed to hone its message in a way that resonated with voters. The group expanded its reach into eastern Jackson County ahead of Tuesday’s vote.

“People out here have a real bullshit detector,” said Keith Sadler, a leader with KC Tenants who lives in Blue Springs. “People can really hear when the message keeps changing.”

Big price tag, shrinking team leverage for a stadium tax

Part of the problem for some voters rested in the price tag and an awareness that taxpayers have become increasingly weary of subsidizing the stadiums of big-money sports teams.

For a referendum like Question 1, the teams would only want to win by a narrow margin, said Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economics professor at Smith College. Winning by a big margin, he said, would signal that they could have squeezed more tax dollars out of a deal.

“​​If they were to win 60%,” he said, “it means that they haven’t asked for as much as they could have asked for.”

At the same time, teams are losing the sway they once enjoyed with voters and the leverage to score better terms with taxpayers.

Patrick Tuohey, a senior fellow at the anti-tax Show-Me Institute, said teams will need to reevaluate their approach going forward. Public sentiment is shifting, he said, and that will require a new approach from sports teams nationwide seeking public stadium subsidies.

He pointed to Virginia, where the Democratic-controlled legislature last month declined to include any state dollars for an arena that would bring the region’s hockey and basketball teams from Washington, D.C., into Virginia. The package was a top priority of the state’s Republican governor.

It will be difficult for teams looking to make a move to find a friendly destination that’s willing to pay, Zimbalist said.

“(Teams) claim they’re going to be wonderful economic engines — they’re not,” Zimbalist said. “More and more cities are realizing that.”

In Jackson County, anger about 2023’s property tax assessments is still swirling, said Mark Jones, the chairman of the county GOP.

“We’re just not through with the 2023 property tax debacle,” Jones said. “People are still in their appeal process. People have absolutely no appetite for anything to increase taxes.”

A fear-based approach — that the Royals might leave Kansas City for a place like Salt Lake City that’s trying to seduce teams with big subsidies — won’t work for Republicans in Jackson County, Jones said.

“Don’t patronize us with threats,” he said.

What the teams will have to do differently next time to pass a stadium tax

Team owners Clark Hunt and John Sherman will have to go back to the drawing board, Tuohey said.

“The Chiefs and Royals can come back and demonstrate that they’ve listened, they’ve learned a lesson,” he said. “Jackson County doesn’t want the teams to leave. I don’t think the teams will want to leave.”

The cost of moving a team from city to city is high. When Rams owner Stan Kroenke decided to move the football team from St. Louis to Los Angeles, he ultimately had to agree to a settlement of $790 million. That’s real money even for an NFL owner.

When teams inevitably ask for tax money again, they’ll need a better rollout. And elected officials will need to get on the same page, Leiter said, pointing to Jackson County Executive Frank White’s opposition to the measure and Mayor Lucas’ eleventh-hour endorsement.

Tuohey said the Royals and Chiefs may need to revisit the economic argument for stadium subsidies.

“(Teams have) been able to make claims of economic benefit in the past,” he said. “They’ve been able to threaten to leave. That has worked in the past. I think that may not work anymore.”

Translating this momentum into future political movements

The vote saw left-leaning KC Tenants campaigning on the same side as the libertarian Show-Me Institute and some Republicans in eastern Jackson County.

But for other issues, it’s unlikely that Kansas City will see these groups work together again, Leiter said.

Many Jackson County voters, left and right, share a common sentiment: it’s not the time to foot the bill for those who don’t really need the help.

“It’s a unique movement that’s anti-elite,” Leiter said. “There is a lot of skepticism and people are skeptical of how the government is spending money.”

That’s what organizers and political parties are hoping to translate into future elections.

“I know we’re not going to get the entire coalition,” Jones said. “But as much of this coalition as we can that backs this populism, let’s translate that into the fall. … We’re tired of paying the entire bill.”

The KC Tenants group senses that momentum, as well, and is looking at expanding its reach into other parts of eastern Jackson County by propping up a new union in Independence.

The way voters rallied in opposition points to the importance of participating in local politics, Tuohey said.

“You don’t have to be a liberal or conservative to know that the potholes are making you crazy or that you want your trash to be picked up,” he said. “Municipal politics is the least beholden to these broad, vague national things. It’s really just that people want a return on their investment.”

This article first appeared on The Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

A rendering of the Royals proposed downtown ballpark (image submitted).

The proposed extension of Jackson County’s sales tax won’t be enough to pay for a new downtown Kansas City Royals stadium.

So the team is in conversation with city officials and Missouri Gov. Mike Parson to fill a $700 million funding gap with taxpayer dollars from Kansas City and the state.

On April 2, Jackson County voters will be asked to commit upward of $1 billion to a proposed baseball stadium in the Crossroads Arts District. Dozens of absentee ballots have already been cast, but the financial details of the project remain unclear.

Voters had that kind of detail in 2006 when Jackson County last cast ballots on a sales tax to subsidize the Chiefs and Royals. But this time, those details won’t be made public until after the vote is complete.

“We don’t have the same level of detail as we had in 2006,” Jackson County Administrator Troy Schulte told The Beacon.

Royals will likely ask for another $700 million after the sales tax vote

If approved, the 3/8-cent sales tax extension would generate more than $2 billion over 40 years. The Chiefs and Royals would split the money 50-50, giving each team $27 million a year.

The Chiefs money will pay for debt obligations, maintenance and repairs for Arrowhead Stadium. The proposed renovation of that existing stadium will be paid for with $300 million from the team, as well as $500 million split between Missouri tax dollars and, possibly, other public sources.

As for the Royals, the $1 billion in sales tax money would go toward the new stadium. The team would be on its own to raise money for its surrounding ballpark district.

But that $1 billion will only cover a third of the stadium’s costs.

Before the Royals can use the county sales tax money, the county must still pay off nearly $200 million in debt on the Truman Sports Complex. Plus, because the Royals plan to take out a loan to finance construction costs up front, much of the sales tax revenue will have to pay for interest.

That leaves somewhere between $250 million and $350 million that can actually be used to cover stadium expenses — and leaves more than two-thirds of the stadium’s cost unaccounted for.

Who will pay for the new Royals stadium?

The last time that Jackson County voters OK’d a sales tax to fund the Chiefs and Royals in 2006, local officials had a financial document called a “sources and uses statement.”

That financial plan outlined how much money would come from the teams and how much would come from the state, the city and the county.

A spokesperson for Kansas City said that the city manager and finance director do not have a copy of a comparable document for the 2024 measure. Neither do Mayor Quinton Lucas, Jackson County Executive Frank White Jr., county legislators or the Jackson County Sports Complex Authority.

That, Schulte told The Beacon, marks one of the main reasons why White does not support the 2024 sales tax measure.

Schulte said the Royals plan to fill that gap with money from Kansas City and Missouri, but without this document, the specifics remain unclear.

When the Royals were considering a stadium north of the Missouri River, their sources and uses statement listed an expected $350 million contribution from North Kansas City, $580 million from Clay County and $350 million from Missouri.

Parson said in a statement that Missouri will not finalize any financial commitment until after the April 2 vote.

The team confirmed to The Beacon that conversations with Kansas City officials are ongoing.

When asked how much money the city was planning to contribute and how it would be funded in the budget, a representative from Lucas’ office said the city hadn’t received any requests from the Royals.

This article first appeared on The Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The Kansas City Council voted to form the Alternatives to Incarceration Commission to explore alternatives that can spare more people from the criminal justice system and steer them toward social services (Darrin Klimek/Getty Images).

Editor’s note: A previous version of this story inaccurately reflected the kind of assault cases that appear before the municipal court. The story was updated on Sept. 27 to reflect that violent charges can include cases where a person intentionally inflicted harm on someone else.

Kansas City Municipal Judge Courtney Wachal sent a letter to The Beacon on Sept. 27 about the framing of the story and requested a correction. The letter can be read here.

One of the most effective ways to make sure someone shows up at their trial is to send them a text reminder with their court date.

But instead of texting criminal defendants, Kansas City spends money every year to hold people in jail while they await trial.

Like nearly all other American cities, Kansas City holds people in jail for violating city codes — whether they’re convicted for violating a domestic violence probation or if they’re simply awaiting trial for a low-level charge.

Following a state Supreme Court rule that took effect in 2017, defendants can only be sent to jail before trial if a judge decides they pose a threat to public safety or if there is reason to believe they may not appear in court. Kansas City says it complies with this rule.

“People lose jobs, and they lose their homes and apartments and their vehicles by spending time in jail,” said Amaia Cook, who serves on the commission looking to lower the number of people locked up on minor criminal charges. “Our community members have needs, and we know that locking people up is not a way to meet those needs.”

A Kansas City commission argues for more creative solutions to reduce crime — like those court date-reminder texts — that could save taxpayers money without jailing defendants and putting people’s housing and jobs at risk by locking them up.

For someone living under a bridge or in the midst of a severe psychotic episode, people arguing for change say that jail does nothing to resolve the underlying issues. At worst, it can make the problem more severe and launch a relentless cycle of jail sentence after jail sentence. That, they say, ends up increasing crime, not reducing it.

In June, the Kansas City Council voted to form the Alternatives to Incarceration Commission to explore alternatives that can spare more people from the criminal justice system and steer them toward social services. The commission formed with support from Decarcerate KC, a group that advocates to end the city’s reliance on incarceration and policing.

Who is locked up on Kansas City jail charges?

National prison policy experts say that municipal jails are the easiest places to reform because the charges tend to stem from lower-stakes and nonviolent crime.

Kansas City has not had its own jail since 2009. Instead, the city rented out beds in the Jackson County Jail until its contract expired in 2019. Since then, people facing municipal charges or serving short jail sentences have gone to the Vernon and Johnson county jails in Missouri. The city has access to 105 beds between the two jails.

The city’s jail population is disproportionately Black — more than two-thirds of people held before and after conviction are Black, despite Black residents only making up about 27% of the city’s population.

A majority of people booked by Kansas City’s municipal court are nonviolent offenders — only 1 in 3 inmates is booked on a violent charge, often related to domestic violence.

Courtney Wachal, a Kansas City municipal judge who presides over the domestic violence docket, said those cases usually involve someone facing a new domestic violence charge while on probation. Wachal serves on the Alternatives to Incarceration Commission.

Union Station and downtown Kansas City (Getty Images).

Every year, Kansas City residents spend nearly 5% of their income on electricity, ranking the city among the most energy-cost-burdened in the nation. And the cost doesn’t only affect the wallet — energy consumption within buildings and homes causes nearly two-thirds of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions.

For years, Kansas City has focused on reducing energy consumption among the largest contributors. But it is struggling to get building owners to cooperate.

A city ordinance passed by the Kansas City Council in 2015 requires operators of large buildings to report their annual energy and water consumption. The intent is to educate owners on how to upgrade their insulation, heating and cooling systems and lighting to use less energy.

Eight years later, only 45% of buildings are reporting their usage. And although the city has the legal power to impose fines of up to $2,000 for failure to follow reporting requirements, officials have chosen not to do so.

Noncompliant properties include a number of commercial office buildings as well as some local landmarks such as the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the J.E. Dunn construction group’s downtown headquarters.

Advocates for climate action say that the city’s data is necessary to locate and address inefficiencies in the energy grid, as well as to create enforceable energy performance standards for the heaviest energy users. But without enforcement, building owners have little reason to comply.

Large buildings are required to report energy use

The Energy Empowerment Ordinance requires the owners of all Kansas City buildings larger than 50,000 square feet to report their annual energy and water consumption, as well as an optional rating from Energy Star, a federal program that gives buildings an energy performance score.

Of the 1,229 Kansas City properties that fall under the guidelines, only 558 submitted the required data before the May 1, 2023, deadline.

To improve the compliance rate, Kansas City has contracted with the Metropolitan Energy Center (MEC), a local nonprofit with expertise in energy efficiency and environmental health.

“If you want to make improvements to your building, if you want to start saving energy, start saving money on your utilities, you have to know where you’re beginning,” said Brittanie Giroux, the senior program coordinator of building performance.

The buildings that fall under this ordinance include big-box stores, commercial and industrial properties and large multifamily residential buildings.

Mary English, the program manager at MEC, said that tracking energy efficiency can help businesses save on energy bills by highlighting weaknesses in their energy efficiency. For multifamily residences, she said, tracking energy usage can also call property managers’ attention to the welfare of their tenants.

“The landlord might be an out-of-town property management firm, and the tenants are paying their own utility bills,” English said. “They may or may not be benign, but either way, they’re out of the loop and don’t know about the high energy bills.”

In more extreme cases, improper insulation can cause mold infestations, even in new buildings, and heavy use of space heaters can result in deadly apartment fires.

Guiding building owners through energy reporting

Every January, the Kansas City Department of Environmental Quality sends letters to qualifying properties notifying them that they need to comply with the ordinance and report their usage.

From there, building owners work with staff at the MEC, who show the owners how to access their Evergy and KC Water data and upload it to an Energy Star program.

Giroux and the customer service team make hundreds of calls to property owners. At times, they might struggle to track down the property managers of buildings owned by obscure LLCs.

“That’s where we come in, and we’re just trying to hold their hands and let them know that this process is not as hard as it seems,” Giroux said. “We’re here to help the city reach its climate goals and help you save some money on your utilities.”

The deadline for owners to report their data is May 1 each year. At that point, the ordinance gives Kansas City the power to impose a fine between $50 and $500, which accumulates every day it’s not resolved until it reaches a maximum of $2,000.

However, the city chooses not to impose these fines, leaving building owners with no penalty for noncompliance.

The Beacon emailed the Department of Environmental Quality asking, among other things, why the city does not fine building owners for noncompliance. A city spokesperson responded with some information, but did not address the question of sanctions.

Fewer than half of Kansas City building owners comply 

Without any enforcement, MEC can only gently encourage property owners to observe the ordinance.

Some cities, such as New York, have similar energy reporting requirements, and building owners who don’t comply can face fines up to $2,500. The city also requires building owners to post their energy efficiency rating on store windows.

“In Minneapolis, you’ll get a notice from the Health Department,” Giroux said. “That scares a lot of people (more than) the environmental office. If it’s coming from the Health Department, you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I need to fix this right away.’”

Other programs focus on rewarding compliance, rather than penalties. For example, some cities offer property tax incentives to encourage property owners to participate in some sustainability programs.

But as Kansas City chooses neither option, the MEC has a difficult job convincing building owners to voluntarily publish their energy usage.

“The city right now just does not prioritize it, so the pressure’s on us to raise that compliance rate, just through creativity and pleading,” English said.

Setting a benchmark for future energy use standards

Although tracking energy use is the first step, the eventual goal is to use this data to develop building performance standards that are realistic and tailored to the city’s current needs.

“Sharing this information is a minimum,” said Billy Davies, the conservation program coordinator for the Sierra Club’s Missouri chapter. “Getting that information is the first crucial step to developing sound policies to increase compliance with these important metrics.”

Although tracking energy usage is an important foundational step, English said the city doesn’t need to wait for a higher compliance rate to take action. Other cities, including St. Louis, have already implemented minimum energy performance standards, including a minimum Energy Star rating.

“We need to increase the compliance, but I don’t think that the city, in my humble opinion, should wait until there’s perfect 100% compliance,” English said. “We know what an efficient building score is.”

From an equity standpoint, Davies said that not only does the climate crisis disproportionately affect people of color and those living in lower-income neighborhoods, but energy inefficiency also places a financial burden on marginalized communities.

“Kansas City faces one of the highest energy burdens of major cities in the country, and there’s a huge disparity across race and socioeconomic status,” Davies said. “It’s going to take private stakeholders, particularly the large ones that have benefited enormously from policy and, in this case, from a lack of enforcement of key environmental safeguards, to get on board.”

This article first appeared on The Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

A Kansas City, Missouri, police officer walks back to his motorcycle in front of the East Patrol Division Station (Zachary Linhares/The Beacon).

This story was originally published by the Kansas City Beacon. 

Kansas City is the only major city that lacks control over its own police department. The oft-stated rationale for state control is to prevent local partisan politics from interfering with the workings of the department. Champions of the unusual setup often cite the political corruption under the Pendergast political machine in the 1930s as a rationale.

But the system of state control has not made the Kansas City Police Department (KCPD) immune to controversies — political or otherwise.

From a highly criticized police chief hiring process earlier this month, to complaints from Mayor Quinton Lucas regarding fiscal responsibility, a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into allegedly racist hiring practices and perennial brutality lawsuits, many Kansas City advocates, politicians and voters have been outspoken about the department’s lack of accountability.

And although the police department’s official history webpage points to the Pendergast corruption in the early 1900s as the origin of the state-controlled system, the more-than-150-year history of the governor-appointed Board of Police Commissioners tells a more complicated story.

‘A war measure’

Up until 2012, police departments in both Kansas City and St. Louis were governed by state-appointed police boards. St. Louis gained local control of its police department after a 2012 statewide referendum. Kansas City, under Mayor Sly James at the time, opted not to join in the ballot measure.

State control of Missouri’s two largest police forces began in the latter half of the 1800s and was rooted in pro-slavery Civil War machinations.

The Kansas City Police Department was established in 1874. St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department was created on the eve of the Civil War.

At the time, Missouri was contemplating whether it would secede from the Union with the other border states. Then-Gov. Claiborne Fox Jackson was in favor of joining the Confederacy, and he established the state-controlled police system in anticipation of the upcoming war.

He appointed four secessionists to the St. Louis police board in March 1861, including Basil W. Duke, who was a commander in a white supremacist militia called the Minutemen. Duke would later become a Confederate general.

Two months later, Jackson’s secessionist plan was put in motion.

Jackson had conspired with Duke and the Confederate President Jefferson Davis to take control of the weapons stored in the St. Louis Arsenal, which was the largest arsenal in the slave states, in order to distribute them to the Confederate army. This event is known as the Camp Jackson affair. They were ultimately unsuccessful after the militia was captured by the U.S. military.

“The police bill was in reality a war measure, adopted to enable our people to control St. Louis,” Duke later said, as reported in Lion of the Valley by James Neal Primm. “I knew the meaning of the measure … and tried to carry it into action.”

The failure of the Camp Jackson affair is credited as the reason Missouri never officially joined the Confederacy.

Kansas City’s police bill

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Missouri legislature passed a bill to take control of KCPD. The bill was supported by Democrats, who sought to limit civil rights gains during the Reconstruction era. Opponents included representatives from St. Louis, a Radical Republican abolitionist from northern Missouri, and several other Republicans from across the state, including one from Jackson County.

Police departments at this time across the country were often established to control freed slaves and prevent unionization efforts among workers.

In the decades following the Civil War, the Black population in Kansas City had grown exponentially, from only 190 people in 1860 to 8,100 in 1880. This growth could have played a role in the state’s decision to remove the police department from city voters’ control, as Democrats at the time were attempting to limit Black voters’ power at the ballot box, including in Missouri.

Kansas City Republicans expressed strong opposition to the bill when it was proposed.

At a Republican convention, the Kansas City Daily Journal of Commerce reported at the time, “denunciations of the law was scathing and forcible and was enthusiastically applauded.”

“It is a step toward the old tyranny that led to the disruption of the colonies and the mother country a hundred years ago,” said Benjamin McLean, a speaker at the convention.

The editorial board of the Daily Journal of Commerce vehemently opposed the police bill. The Kansas City Times was in support.

The bill would ultimately pass. Once created, the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners appointed its first chief of police, Thomas Speers.

Political corruption 

One of the first conflicts between city leadership and the state-controlled police board arose at the end of the 19th century, when Gov. Bill Stone engineered the ouster of Speers, who by then had served for 21 years and was beloved by city leaders.

When the police board initially refused to fire Speers in line with Stone’s wishes, Stone removed the board members and replaced them with commissioners who would comply.

The reason, Stone had alleged, was because he said Speers was ineffective at preventing crime. This was loudly refuted at the time by city leaders.

After Speers was removed, his replacement L.E. Irwin fired 16 police officers, all of whom were Republicans. The department cited a lack of available funding.

This ignited an intense argument during a police board meeting where then-Mayor James Jones accused the police commissioners of turning the police department into a “political machine.”

“Mayor Jones brought his fist down upon the table with such force that all of the reporters jumped,” a Kansas City Star reporter wrote at the time. “‘I charge,’ he said, ‘that it is not your purpose to keep down expenses but to remove Republicans from the force.’”

During the heated debate, Jones told a police commissioner, “If I lived to be as old as you are and didn’t know any more I’d think I was a failure.”

Following the firing of Speers, The Star wrote that illegal gambling began to operate more openly in Kansas City, with the full knowledge of the police force.

Local control in the 1930s

State control of the police department continued until 1932, when a court challenge placed the department in the hands of the city government.

The court’s reasoning was similar to a central argument for local control being made today: “It is unconstitutional to give any one municipal body the power of unlimited spending of funds the responsibility of raising which rests upon another body.”

In the decades leading up to this court decision, Kansas City boss Tom Pendergast had already been building political power through bribery and voter fraud.

Once the court granted local control, then-City Manager and Pendergast ally Henry McElroy placed the department under his direct supervision, allowing Pendergast influence over the police department.

By 1939, police-controlled elections were beginning to infiltrate state politics. The state government, under segregationist Gov. Lloyd Crow Stark, proposed state control of KCPD once again.

The Kansas City Star at the time was in support of state control of the police department, but only as an emergency solution to political corruption. The newspaper viewed local control as necessary in the long run.

Pendergast died in 1945, and more than 75 years later, KCPD remains under state control.

Recent efforts to regain local control 

Proposals for local control of the police department floated in and out of political discussion in the decades that followed.

It wouldn’t be until the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the ensuing riots during which police officers killed five Black men in Kansas City that local police control regained traction.

Shortly after the riots, the Mayor’s Commission on Civil Disorders recommended returning the department to local control, saying that a local police board would have “greater awareness and sensitivity to local problems than has been shown under state control.”

“There would seem little reason why Kansas Citians could not better understand their local needs than can state legislators and officials, and have control over the policing of their own community,” the commission said, according to a Kansas City Star story from Aug. 18, 1968.

No immediate steps toward local control were taken. Mayor Charles Wheeler in the 1970s supported local control of the police department, then opposed it in 1978.
Since the George Floyd protests in 2020, calls for local control have picked up steam. There is currently a lawsuit filed against the Board of Police Commissioners by Gwen Grant, the president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City. Advocates believe that the courts are the most promising route to secure local control, with a ballot initiative being too expensive and state legislation highly unlikely.

The Kansas City Beacon is an online news outlet focused on local, in-depth journalism in the public interest.

In their campaigns, Theresa Cass Galvin has focused on Frank White’s performance, and White has focused on his accomplishments as Jackson County executive (Bill Pugliano/Getty Images).

This story was originally published by the Kansas City Beacon. 

Over the past seven years, Jackson County has seen three different county executives. After then-County Executive Mike Sanders resigned at the end of 2015 — and went to prison in 2018 for corruption — Fred Arbanas served for one week as interim executive until Frank White  Jr. was appointed to the role in January 2016.

Now, after being elected in November 2016 and again in 2018, White has served as Jackson County executive for six years, and he is up for reelection on Nov. 8 against current 6th District County Legislator Theresa Cass Galvin. In their campaigns, Galvin has focused on White’s performance, and White has focused on his accomplishments as Jackson County executive.

After White’s campaign declined a telephone interview, The Beacon emailed questions to each campaign. Galvin provided responses, but White’s campaign manager took issue with the questions that The Beacon sent and declined to participate. White’s campaign thought the questions focused too much on problems that arose during his time in office, the manager said.

Frank White Jr.

Over the past six years, White has overseen dramatic change in Jackson County, including the COVID-19 pandemic response, a state audit of the budget that gave the county a “poor” rating and the property assessment debacle of 2019, when nearly 24,000 property owners saw their assessments double or more, with low-income neighborhoods hit especially hard.

White has drawn praise from some for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which the Jackson County government extended public health measures at the same time the opposite was happening in some other cities and counties in the Midwest. In the same month when Sedgwick County, Kansas, rejected a mask mandate, Jackson County issued its own, in accordance with CDC recommendations.

But White’s handling of the assessments in 2019 left many residents angry, with many criticizing his administration’s lack of countywide action to correct assessment errors. Instead, property owners were left to appeal their assessments on their own.

White was also county executive when state Auditor Nicole Galloway released an audit that showed Jackson County had not selected contractors through a competitive process, as required by the county’s charter. These so-called “no-bid contracts” totaled $2.7 million, according to the report.

The Beacon asked whether White had made any changes to the county’s financial processes following this audit, but he did not respond.

Neither White’s personal campaign website nor his official county website lists an email address or phone number for his constituents to contact, unlike all other elected members of the county government. White’s campaign said that this was a decision made by the county and did not provide any further explanation prior to publication.

During the primary election, White did not show up to a primary forum hosted by the League of Women Voters, during which he would have discussed his candidacy opposite Stacy Lake, his competitor for the Democratic primary. White’s campaign manager told The Beacon that this was because he did not have the time and said the primary election was not competitive. White defeated Lake on Aug. 2 by a margin of 4,170 votes out of 63,844.

Theresa Cass Galvin

Galvin is the current legislator for the 6th District, which includes Lee’s Summit and unincorporated areas in the southeastern corner of Jackson County. She has served as the chairperson of the legislature and the budget committee.

Her campaign website highlights property assessment as one of the key issues she’s focusing on for this election. In her response to emailed questions, she told The Beacon that if she had been Jackson County executive during the 2019 assessment problems, she would have handled it differently.

“If I had been county executive in 2019, I would have worked on a plan to address the assessment errors, whether it be a five-year or 10-year plan,” she said. “I would have held public meetings with the residents of Jackson County throughout the county to discuss the situation we were in. I would not have blindly increased assessed values instantly.”

Since 2019, she said she has advocated for in-person assessments for properties that increased more than 15% in value, in accordance with state statute, and she has advocated for an updated software system.

Following Galloway’s 2020 audit, Galvin said she has ensured that the county holds public hearings whenever it receives transfers from undesignated fund balances or unanticipated additional funds, in line with Galloway’s recommendations. She also said she would request a state audit once every five years.

Galvin was chairperson of the legislature when COVID-19 first emerged, and during the pandemic she sponsored legislation twice to end the county’s mask mandate early, against the recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control.

“I am not opposed to masks or vaccines, rather I’m opposed to taking away the voice of the people we are elected to represent,” she said. “In an effort to keep all safe, we should work with the people we represent, not against.”

She opposed an ordinance that would have codified the Jackson County Health Department’s ability to investigate disease outbreaks and implement mitigation protocols such as quarantines and isolations. This ordinance was proposed during the omicron wave in January but it would have applied to other diseases such as tuberculosis or Ebola.

Galvin is a Republican running to represent a largely Democratic county as its executive, but she said she doesn’t believe that elected county officials should behave in a partisan manner.

“Issues such as abortion rights, gun laws or right to work are decided at the state level,” she said. “For the last eight years I have honestly represented all the people of Jackson County and I will always represent the needs of my constituents as a whole.”

Unlike many other Republicans across the country — including one of her opponents during the primary, who participated in the Jan. 6 riots — Galvin believes that Joe Biden is the elected president of the United States.

“The 2020 election has been decided and Joe Biden is our president. If investigators determine otherwise, that will be handled by the federal government,” she said. “I have full confidence in the integrity of both our Kansas City and Jackson County election boards.”

The Kansas City Beacon is an online news outlet focused on local, in-depth journalism in the public interest.

Over a million Ukrainians have been displaced by war, but it's too soon to know how many of these refugees will arrive in Kansas City, according to Della Lamb (Graphic/The Beacon).

This story was originally published by The Beacon. 

It wasn’t long after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, sending more than a million civilians scrambling for safety, that resettlement organizations around the Kansas City area began receiving offers of refugee support.

The messages were almost universally well-meaning. People offered financial donations and even volunteered to open their homes to Ukrainian families in need.

But for people working to resettle refugees here, the latest inquiries have been met with a mixed response. Staffers are grateful for people’s compassion for Ukrainian refugees, just as they were for the outpouring of concern for refugees displaced from Afghanistan last year. But they caution against singling out one group of refugees for help, when people from multiple countries are being displaced around the world, and their needs are acute and ongoing.

“The circumstances are always harrowing,” Cori Wallace, the engagement director for Della Lamb Community Services, wrote in a recent email newsletter to volunteers. “(Your support) might be meeting the needs of someone from Rwanda, the Sudan, etc., and we want you to embrace that possibility.”

Though Della Lamb and other refugee organizations welcome one-time and earmarked donations and any support that donors can offer, staffers emphasize that they are in need of year-round support in order to aid refugee families throughout the years-long process of resettlement.

Kansas City refugee support

Ryan Hudnall, executive director of Della Lamb, said he sees waves of support in response to  news coverage that moves quickly from crisis to crisis.

“If we always remain in a state of urgency, then everything becomes urgent,” Hudnall said. “And in order to really pursue true health as a city, or as an agency, we need to make sure that we honor those that we’ve (already) received as well.”

With media coverage focused on the war in Ukraine or the withdrawal of U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, he said, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that, at the end of 2020, the United Nations had estimated that 82.4 million people around the globe had been forcibly displaced by conflict, violence, persecution and human rights violations.

“When you hear conversations regarding potential nuclear war, of course, that’s going to drive coverage,” Hudnall said. “There are 80 million people displaced across the globe. How are our hearts breaking for them, too?”

Conditional support based on race

Sofia Khan, founder of KC for Refugees, also cautioned against valuing one group of refugees over others.

Khan’s nonprofit is often the first contact for Kansas City residents who want to support refugees who are settling in the area. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she has received emails offering support and donations.

She felt grateful at first, excited that some people were even offering to host families in spare bedrooms. But her optimism soured when some volunteers specified that their assistance was limited to Ukrainian families.

“It was heartwarming to see people felt their pain at the beginning, but then suddenly it hit us: Why are you using the words ‘only Ukrainian’?” she said. “Where were these people when we needed help for others?”

Khan, a physician who founded her nonprofit to supplement the work of other resettlement groups while the Syrian civil war was displacing people, said this is the first time she has encountered offers limited to a select group. She suspects that, consciously or subconsciously, some people believe that white refugees are more worthy of help than refugees of color.

“These are people who are specifically only feeling the pain because these people are white,” she said. “Why did I reach out now? And why did I not reach out before? And why am I hurting now and I did not hurt before? You need to ask your own conscience.”

Khan is not alone in raising this issue. Last month, Black students fleeing Ukraine said they were turned away at the Polish border. The New York Times recently reported on a medical student from Sudan who was beaten while trying to enter Poland, while white Ukrainian residents were greeted with hugs and hot food.

Closer to home, thousands of Haitian asylum-seekers to the United States were met with expletives and deported by the Biden administration. A U.S. news reporter issued an apology for his word choice implying that Ukraine is a more “civilized” nation than Iraq or Afghanistan.

Khan said she has encountered many refugees of color in Kansas City who have experienced racial discrimination along the journey out of their country.

While not downplaying the suffering of the Ukrainian refugees, Khan urged people to have compassion for refugees of all backgrounds.

“You should think from the lens of a humanitarian, and not only help people if they are like you,” she said. “If your heart opened up to them, ask yourself why your heart did not open up when other people were suffering, and why you did not pay attention to those people.”

Refugee support and volunteering

Since August, Della Lamb and the region’s two other resettlement agencies, Jewish Vocational Service and Catholic Charities of Northeast Kansas, have welcomed 800 to 1,000 Afghan evacuees. They join refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Sudan, Syria, Somalia and multiple other nations who are using Kansas City as a portal to a new start in the United States.

While donations of money and some items are always appreciated, Khan and Hudnall said their most pressing need now is for volunteers.

“We’ve seen so many people who have given furniture and donations in support of those who are coming,” Hudnall said. “It’s wonderful. But if it remains transactional, you’ll miss the joy of it.”

Della Lamb, Jewish Vocational Service and Catholic Charities of Northeast Kansas all have a variety of volunteer opportunities.These include tutoring in English once a week, taking families grocery shopping, or transportation to medical appointments and other essential errands.

Working directly with refugees pushes people out of their comfort zone, so volunteers are sometimes hesitant to build relationships with refugee families, Hudnall said.

“If it stays transactional, there will no doubt be impact,” he said. “If it’s relational, it will be life-giving both for the client and for the person who is coming to the table.”

Khan recommends that volunteers start with cultural sensitivity training before working directly with refugee families, a service offered by KC for Refugees. But once volunteers are ready, they will find plenty of opportunities to form relationships with people of other cultures, she said.

“We do cultural orientation for our mentors, and it’s such an amazing learning experience for them,” Khan said. “Other cultures and foods, you have it right here in your own city. Their language, their culture, their food, they are out there with their friendship.”

The Kansas City Beacon is an online news outlet focused on local, in-depth journalism in the public interest.

Robert Richardson stands on the front porch of his trailer in Kansas City, Kansas. After struggling to find a sanitary and safe apartment in Kansas City, he bought the trailer from his friend and moved in (Zach Bauman/The Beacon).

This story was originally published by The Kansas City Beacon.

After serving time in prison, Christine McDonald found herself living on the streets of Kansas City and in a pay-by-the-week motel. Robert Richardson, who also has a felony record, settled for a bug-infested apartment with an open hole in the front.

They are far from alone in the struggle to find adequate, affordable housing as an ex-offender.  Many people with felony convictions search for years and even decades to find a stable, sanitary place to live.

Some people returning from prison are fortunate to have family members who can provide housing or rent apartments for them. Others find temporary shelter at halfway houses. But ex-offenders who are on their own often submit hundreds of applications for apartments, only to receive just a couple of responses. And the apartments they do find often have bug infestations or nonfunctional utilities.

An ordinance passed by the Kansas City Council in 2018 makes it illegal for prospective landlords or employers to ask applicants if they have a felony conviction. But advocates say the law hasn’t removed the obstacles, especially for ex-felons whose past crimes are readily found on the internet.

With 13,214 people released from prison last year in Missouri, and 4,179 in Kansas, the enduring discrimination leaves hundreds of people desperate for shelter in a housing market where rising rents are displacing tenants with jobs and clean records.

A 2018 study by the Prison Policy Initiative found that formerly incarcerated people are about 10 times more likely to experience homelessness than the general population.

The difficulties are especially acute for people of color. In Missouri, for instance, Black people are almost five times as likely to be incarcerated than white people. The rate of homelessness is also higher for formerly incarcerated Black people than for formerly incarcerated white people, according to the same 2018 study.

Search for housing with a felony record

Richardson was incarcerated for nine years in Kansas and Missouri prisons. Upon his release six years ago, he realized that his conviction would follow him for the rest of his life.

At first, Richardson was able to find an apartment through a family connection. He still feels fortunate to have found temporary housing, even if it was in rural Missouri, far from his partner and children in Kansas City. He lived there for two years, while he submitted dozens of apartment applications in Kansas City.

All but one were rejected when landlords learned that he was formerly incarcerated and did not yet have a job in the city.

“I thought things would be over, and I would be able to start rebuilding when I got out,” Richardson said. “And, frankly, I’ve just been kind of stagnant … I don’t know how to get from where I am back to anything that resembles a normal life. I can’t see a path forward, even six years later.”

Eventually, he found a “fairly notorious slumlord” who was willing to overlook his record and rent a small apartment in the city.

This apartment was not ideal — there were bedbugs and cockroaches, and someone had crashed a car into the front of the building, leaving a giant hole patched up with plywood. But it was near his family, so he moved in and worked on finding a job.

He now lives in a trailer in Kansas City, Kansas, which he bought from a friend.

Additional barriers

McDonald also struggled to find employment upon her release from prison in 2004. She is a victim of sexual abuse and entered the criminal justice system at a young age. Following her release from prison, she was unhoused and had no choice but to live on the streets of Kansas City.

McDonald only received a seventh grade education prior to her imprisonment. She couldn’t read, so she had someone else fill out job applications for her and eventually found a job for minimum wage at a fast food restaurant.

But after suffering from pregnancy complications that left her unable to see, she was no longer able to work and had few options left for employment.

“If I was just a felon, I would get one of the typical jobs a felon gets, which is fast food or warehouse. Those are more apt to hire you than somebody else,” McDonald said. “But if you have a disability, fast food or warehouse jobs are automatically off the table.”

Her son’s father was still able to work, so he paid rent at a pay-by-the-week hotel while she worked on her education. McDonald has earned her a GED and now works as an author, a community organizer and advocate for survivors, like herself, who were coerced into sexual exploitation.

“We just want jobs and to pay taxes and to live in reasonably habitable, sanitary housing like everybody else,” she said. “It’s awful. It’s absolutely discriminatory against people with felony convictions.”

Legal housing protections

In 2018, Kansas City passed a municipal measure called “Ban the Box,” which prevents prospective employers and landlords from asking applicants directly if they have a felony record, or from rejecting applicants solely for that reason.

But advocates say that the ordinance, while an important statement, is not enforced. Felony convictions almost always come up in a background check, and there is little to stop landlords from rejecting an applicant if they discover one.

“The city doesn’t have in place the mechanisms necessary to hold that landlord accountable or to investigate the situation,” said Gina Chiala, the executive director of the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom. “So right now, it’s basically a public policy, but not an enforceable law.”

The Heartland Center is a nonprofit organization that helps workers maximize their job opportunities in order to create economic freedom for people of all backgrounds. The center provides legal advice and representation to tenants and employees.

Richardson said he discloses his felony record on most applications in order to preempt a criminal background check.

“Ban the Box gets people to where they can at least have the conversations and hear that denial directly, rather than always wondering if they even read it,” he said. “It’s a nice thought, but it only goes a tiny distance.”

Channeling anger into action

Before his felony conviction, Richardson worked as a biologist for a state health department. He collected chemical samples of endangered species for analysis.

During the nine years he was in prison, new technologies were developed and he quickly fell behind on the current scientific research, Richardson said. On top of that, scientific organizations often need employees who can be on a “secure list” with security clearance, which excludes most people with a felony record.

When he realized his job search would be difficult, he sought help from Second Chance Risk Reduction Center in Kansas City, an organization that contracts with the Missouri Department of Corrections to find housing and employment for the formerly incarcerated.

Lead resource specialist Brittany Peterson said that Second Chance’s aim is to reduce recidivism and help those with a felony record rebuild their lives outside of prison.

“[Employment] is one of the largest needs in helping someone to reestablish themselves back in the community, and to be able to provide for their family, whether it’s family reunification, providing for their children, or just providing for themselves,” she said.

She said that having reliable income is essential before the formerly incarcerated can find permanent housing.

Richardson said he eventually decided that, with the costs required for medical care related to an HIV diagnosis and post-traumatic stress disorder, his best financial path is to limit his work hours and rely on disability assistance.

Now, he finds a purpose in political activism. After spending so much time in a criminal justice system that treated him “like an animal who can’t behave otherwise,” he found compassion in groups like KC Tenants, a union that advocates for the rights of renters.

Connecting with this group gave him a path forward, Richardson said.

“Get active with the groups of change,” he said. “The thing that really turned it around for me is when I started fighting back. Actively fighting alongside these groups that change things for the better makes a big difference.”

After restrictions on abortion left Missouri with one in-state abortion clinic in St. Louis, residents turned to neighboring states for abortion services (Photo by Astrid Riecken/Getty Images).

This story was originally published by The Kansas City Beacon.

Patients who arrive at an abortion clinic in Overland Park, Kansas, have often traveled long distances. Many began their journeys in Missouri, sometimes driving hours to their appointment.

“We’ve heard these stories from Missourians and other people in our region for years,” said Emily Wales, interim president of Planned Parenthood Great Plains. “They ask about how long they have to be there. ‘Can I make it back to pick up my kids tonight?’”

Many patients have to book hotel rooms to spend the night before traveling home.

Data shows that patients are coming in increasing numbers to Kansas from states including Missouri, Texas and Oklahoma for abortions as their home states restrict access.

But in August 2022, voters could change that with a constitutional amendment. If approved, it would add language to the Kansas Constitution to explicitly state there is no right to abortion and that the state legislature can regulate it.

Across the state line, recorded abortion procedures in Missouri have been decreasing for more than a decade. In 2020, 167 abortions were performed in the state, according to data from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services. That’s a decrease of 97% over the past 10 years.

Nationally, the number of abortions has steadily decreased for many years, but at rates much lower than the decrease in Missouri.

According to data from Kansas, 3,201 Missouri residents received abortions there in 2020.

Based on those numbers, fewer than 5% of abortions received by Missouri residents happened in the state. But the percentage is likely lower, as the Health Department has not finished gathering data on the number of abortions performed in other states for Missouri residents. Some Missouri patients travel to Illinois, which has fewer restrictions on abortions and where Planned Parenthood constructed a clinic in large part to meet demand from Missourians.

In Kansas, Missourians account for nearly half of all abortions performed since 2007. In some years, more Missourians received abortions in Kansas than Kansans.

The reason has to do with legislation in the two states. The Missouri General Assembly has passed a series of laws in recent years placing burdens on abortion providers and patients. Only one clinic, in St. Louis, currently performs abortions in Missouri — and its caseloads have sharply declined.

Although Kansas places some restrictions on abortion patients and providers, the fundamental right to abortion is currently protected by a 2019 state Supreme Court ruling where the court found the Kansas Constitution protects abortion, even in the absence of the federal Roe v. Wade.

Out of state

More patients sought abortion in Kansas in 2020 than in any year since 2011, after the greatest year-over-year increase in procedures since at least 2007. Out-of-state patients account for 84% of the increase. Providers attribute the jump to restrictive new laws in other states — particularly Texas and Oklahoma.

But even with more patients traveling from those states, Missouri still provides the largest out-of-state caseload at Kansas abortion clinics. For the past 13 years, 46% of abortions in Kansas were for patients who live in Missouri. In 2011 and 2012, more Missourians than Kansans received abortions in Kansas clinics.

“The Senate Bill 8 law passed in Texas this year has really led to a regional crisis,” Wales said, referring to the Texas law that essentially bans all abortions roughly a month after conception.

“People think, for the most part, that this is the first time people are traveling hundreds of miles and hours away to get care. But we’ve been living with that reality, especially in Missouri, for years now.”

Columbia and Kansas City clinics

When Wales started work at Planned Parenthood of the Great Plains in 2017, three clinics in Missouri provided abortions — in St. Louis, Columbia and Kansas City. Today, only the St. Louis clinic offers the service.

The Columbia clinic stopped performing abortions in 2015, when lawmakers passed a requirement for “local admitting privileges.” Essentially, if a procedure were to go wrong, the doctor who performed the abortion needed to be able to admit that patient to a local hospital. In Columbia, local hospitals would not grant admitting privileges.

Planned Parenthood’s Kansas City clinic stopped providing surgical abortions in 2016 because of building requirements about the width of doors and the spacing of smoke detectors and fire alarms. The Kansas City clinic could not comply, so after those restrictions went into effect, it provided only medication abortions.

But in Missouri, any patient receiving an abortion — including medication abortions — must see the same doctor twice within 72 hours to have that doctor read state-provided information about pregnancy and abortion. It was difficult for doctors — many of whom lived outside Kansas City — to be present for both appointments, Wales said, so the Kansas City clinic stopped providing abortion care altogether in 2018.

Wales said the 72-hour requirement is one of the biggest barriers to receiving an abortion in Missouri.

Kansas abortion amendment 

Though Kansas currently places some restrictions on abortion, including a 24-hour waiting period and the reading of certain state-mandated information before the procedure, more stringent restrictions are limited by the state’s constitution.

A 2019 state Supreme Court ruling says that the Kansas Constitution protects the right of women to “decide whether to continue a pregnancy.”

The ruling called into question more than a dozen abortion restrictions already passed by the Kansas Legislature.

But a ballot measure in August 2022 will challenge the 2019 ruling. Voters will decide whether to add a clause to the constitution stating explicitly that abortion is not a constitutional right in Kansas.

According to Danielle Underwood, communications director for Kansans for Life, which opposes abortions, regulations currently “presumed unconstitutional” include a ban at 22 weeks of gestation, as well as a requirement for consent from both parents for abortions performed on minors. In cases of incest, the mother of the minor would still have to consent.

Underwood said that under the 2019 ruling, abortion in Kansas could be “unlimited” and “unrestricted.” Wales disagreed with that characterization and said abortion providers in Kansas must follow a number of regulations.

Disproportionate impact 

Zach Gingrich-Gaylord, interim director of communications for Trust Women, an abortion provider with clinics in Wichita, Kansas, and Oklahoma City, said Kansas currently regulates abortion, but these regulations have to be for the medical benefit of patients, as opposed to regulation for moral reasons. In practice, however, many of the regulations are arbitrary, he said.

“It’s not the case that this practice of health care is wildly unregulated,” Gingrich-Gaylord said.  “In fact, it’s rife with arbitrary regulations and constraints that have no benefit medically to it.”

He gave the example of the state-provided materials that must be read to patients, which he said include medically inaccurate information connecting abortion to breast cancer. If Kansas voters pass the amendment next August, Gingrich-Gaylord said, Kansas legislators could go the way of Missouri and Texas and also severely limit abortion.

Many potential restrictions — for example, a longer waiting period — would have a disproportionate impact on out-of-state patients traveling to Kansas, he said.

‘Abortion tourists’ or ‘medical refugees’?

Underwood, with Kansans for Life, said a situation where patients travel to Kansas for abortion care is not in the best interests of Kansans.

“We don’t want to see Kansas become a destination state for abortion,” she said. “We don’t want to be a tourist attraction that they would be marketing to women from all these surrounding states and trying to bring them across our border to perform abortions here.”

But abortion providers reject the description of these trips as “tourism.” Wales describes them as refuge from draconian restrictions elsewhere.

“It makes (these patients) functionally medical refugees … the idea that you have to be on the run from your own state restrictions is pretty horrifying,” she said. “Especially the patients we’re seeing from Texas, I think that’s how they feel.”

Many patients from other states arrive in Kansas fearful of legal trouble for seeking an abortion out of state, Wales said. She mentioned one patient who was pulled over by a police officer on the drive from Texas to Kansas. The woman was terrified that the officer would forbid her to cross the state line, Wales said. In reality, Texas patients cannot be prosecuted for seeking an abortion outside Texas.

For the time being, Missouri has not restricted residents’ access to abortion in other states. One proposed bill, SB 603, would have claimed legal jurisdiction for any pregnancy that was conceived within state lines or in which the parents were Missouri residents at the time of conception. This bill was introduced in the last legislative session, but it never went to a vote.

Meanwhile, faced with increasing numbers of out-of-state patients, Planned Parenthood clinics in Kansas are trying to schedule as many appointments as they can, but the need outweighs their capacity. Wait times for an abortion can be up to four weeks, which can be too late if patients don’t know they are pregnant until the second trimester.

Solomon Kasongo on the campus at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri on Oct. 10, 2021 (Chase Castor/The Beacon).

This story was originally published by The Kansas City Beacon.

As a young man in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Solomon Kasongo attended university and had plans to launch a meaningful career, possibly in business. War disrupted those hopes. Kasongo fled his home country and spent more than a decade in a refugee camp in Zambia.

When he arrived in Kansas City, Missouri, in 2014, he had not been in a classroom for at least 14 years. But he hadn’t been idle, either. At the camp, he started a microloan campaign to help other refugees start small businesses and make ends meet.

Now that he was resettled in the U.S., along with his wife and two daughters, he needed a job. Because he spoke limited English, his choices were slim. Jewish Vocational Service, a refugee resettlement agency in Kansas City, helped Kasongo and a group of other refugees find work at a manufacturing plant producing car dashboards. Nonetheless, he was ready to start working in his new home after so many years in a refugee camp.

“We just felt so excited,” Kasongo said. “It’s your first job. You want just to learn something new in your new country.”

Finding jobs is easier than finding transportation

After years of declining numbers of refugee arrivals in Missouri, from more than 2,000 in 2016 to just over 200 in 2020, refugee resettlement agencies in Kansas City are anticipating a sharp increase over the next federal fiscal year.

President Joe Biden announced last month that the United States will be resettling 125,000 refugees over the next 12 months, which will include 1,200 Afghan refugees in Missouri alone. As a result, the refugee resettlement agencies in Kansas City are preparing to help significantly more refugees find work than in years past.

Once any refugee, such as Kasongo, has resettled in Kansas City, one of three refugee resettlement agencies will meet with them to help them find jobs. These three agencies are JVS and Della Lamb in Kansas City, Missouri, and Catholic Charities of Northeast Kansas in Overland Park, Kansas.

Jenni Kornfeld, employment services manager at Catholic Charities, said it’s usually relatively simple to find job opportunities for refugees like Kasongo.

In part because of labor shortages in many manufacturing jobs since the start of the pandemic, recruiters are approaching refugee resettlement agencies to find employees. Kornfeld said she received emails from 21 employers in September asking specifically to hire refugees.

Even without a labor shortage, refugees offer many advantages as employees, Kornfeld said. Not only do they offer unique skills like languages, but they also stay at jobs longer than the general population.

“They have a hunger to work and to serve their community and give back,” Kornfeld said. “They are appreciative of Americans giving them this opportunity to start over.”

Though resettlement agencies are well connected with companies eager to hire refugees and refugees are legally authorized to work immediately upon arrival, transportation is a major barrier. Many refugees don’t know how to drive, or if they do, they don’t have a driver’s license in the United States or access to a car. Kansas City’s limited public transportation system leaves refugees and resettlement agencies with many fewer options than they would like.

For every five job opportunities, Kornfeld said, only one might be on a bus line. Refugee agencies and local nonprofits like KC for Refugees try to set up carpools and have volunteers provide transportation.

Jobs that don’t require English

Initially, agencies are looking for “survival jobs” to help refugees become self-sufficient.

Most of the first jobs are repetitive and menial because of the lack of English proficiency, said Ashok Sanadi, executive director of KC for Refugees, which seeks to help refugees adjust to life in the United States.

Many refugees had worked in specialized jobs in their countries of origin, Sanadi said. KC for Refugees has worked with people who were doctors, information analysts and business owners in their previous homes.

But because new arrivals don’t speak English fluently, they require jobs with minimal instruction. So they take positions in meat processing plants, distribution centers or factories.

Kornfeld said Catholic Charities tries to send refugees from similar cultures to work together so they don’t feel alone and can communicate with coworkers or managers. For every group of three refugees, she makes sure at least one of them speaks English and can help translate for the group.

These jobs tend to be low-paying. Kornfeld estimates that the typical wage is around $12 per hour, but she said wages have increased over the past year to $15 to $16 per hour. Even still, advocates say refugees sometimes have families of more than six people, and this wage often barely covers living expenses for large households. In these cases, families must turn to agencies or welfare programs for assistance.

Pursue other careers

When Kasongo worked at the auto parts factory in Riverside, Missouri, he sometimes had access to a car, but he often needed to take the public bus. He usually worked the overnight shift, starting work around 10 p.m. and not getting home until after 6 a.m.

The routine was exhausting. With appointments, errands and work, Kasongo had little time to spend with his children or even to sleep. He said he only saw his daughters a couple hours during the day, and sometimes only when he would walk them to the school bus stop in the morning.

Kasongo, who is now 42, decided to go back to school in 2016. After taking English as a second language classes, he went on to obtain an associate degree at Metropolitan Community College.

This fall, he enrolled at Rockhurst University but found out he could not schedule classes around his work hours. He now plans to attend the University of Kansas, where class schedules are more flexible and can accommodate his complicated schedule as a working father.

Many other refugees have the same idea, Sanadi said. One woman he worked with, who was formerly a high school math teacher, pursued a career teaching in Kansas City. Several years after she arrived, she started tutoring at a local community college, later earning a master’s degree in mathematics. Now, she is a mathematics faculty member at the same community college.

Kasongo’s goal for his future was shaped by his past in the refugee camp. He eventually wants to run a nonprofit organization where he can provide microloans to people in similar situations, in order to support their goals.

For refugees with education, skills and dreams, the early years in the United States can be frustrating and exhausting, advocates said, particularly for those who aren’t yet fluent in English.

“It’s hard to take time off to go and learn English, it takes a lot of energy to do that, and many people just can’t manage. … Not that they don’t want to,” Sanadi said. “It’s hard to get back into your work, because you’ve been out of it for eight to 10 years. There are, unfortunately, hurdles for someone who doesn’t speak the language, and who’s not white, who comes from a different culture, different country.”

Many former doctors choose a different profession entirely because the recertification process is so long, complicated and expensive, said Kornfeld at Catholic Charities.

Kasongo said his more youthful plans were derailed by circumstances out of his control. He tries to remember that this is not a reflection of his worth.

“It takes many years out of your life,” Kasongo said. “Focusing on school, trying to get your degree, have a better job — the war takes all of that out.”

Instead of dwelling on the frustrations, he chooses to embrace his new start with his wife and children and hopes that someday soon he’ll be able to help others begin new lives in the United States, as he has.

The Kansas City Beacon is an online news outlet focused on local, in-depth journalism in the public interest.