JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

I remember when Frank White ran for County Legislature in 2014, and my friend Pat O’Neill of O’Neill Events & Marketing was running his campaign. Pat said something to the effect that it was the easiest campaign he ever took on: All he had to do was order up hundreds of yard signs bearing White’s name and the image of a baseball and…voila…he had a winner.

Like many people, I imagine, my reaction to White running for the Legislature was, “What the hell harm can this do, even if it doesn’t work out?”

But, oh my! How we all now rue the day Frank White got elected to the Legislature!

Along with the moral disintegration of former County Executive Mike Sanders, that November 2014 election sent Jackson County spinning into a downward spiral like we have never seen since the advent of Home Rule, county government in 1973.

Like me, White’s fellow legislators must have thought, How bad can this be? when they selected White to succeed Sanders on Jan. 11, 2016.

In November of that year, he was elected to serve the final two years of Sanders’ term, and then came the capper: Last November — just four months ago — he was elected to a new, four-year term in an election so dominant there was no Republican nominee.

…And so it came to be that we are stuck, absolutely stuck, with one of the most incompetent elected and administrative officials who has ever held office in our region.

In our defense, this kind of crept up on us. In 2017, it became apparent that despite personal income of more than $250,000 a year ($145,000 a year as county executive and more than $100,000 a year from his MLB pension), White could not manage his personal finances and was in debt.

And then the news about the jail started coming, first as a trickle and then as a flood.

Throughout, however, White has never come clean about the jail. Instead, he has done everything he could to conceal its degradation.

The latest jaw-dropping expose came in today’s Kansas City Star, offered up by ace reporter Mike Hendricks, who, fortunately for the public, passed on a McClatchy buyout offer last month.

With The Star’s financial and journalistic backing, Hendricks obtained 1,700 pages of grand jury testimony about the jail and thousands of pages of supporting documents. (I’ve criticized The Star in the past for failing to be aggressive on the legal front, but it deserves full credit for going after these explosive documents. The Star spent at least $13,000 pressing its case, and a judge has ordered the county to reimburse the paper for that expense.)

The most shocking aspect of this new information is the cavalier attitude White adopted in testimony before the grand jury.

Consider some of these quotes…

:: On his lack of urgency in addressing the jail debacle: “When you talk to the people in the community, they’re saying, well, we don’t want a bigger jail because jails are for poor people. Jails are for locking up more black people.”

:: When asked why it took so long for problems to be addressed, such as toilets caked with feces, White said: “I don’t have an answer for that one. I don’t know if there was a lag or I don’t know whether it was an oversight at this — at this one time. Again, I can’t speak to that. I’m sorry.” (Jail staff members had told the grand jury they thought the discoloration was calcium deposits.)

:: White was so disengaged regarding the jail that although he took regular tours of the jail, he never ventured into inmate housing units to see conditions first hand: “I’ll leave it up to them (subordinates) to tell me where I need to go and where — where they feel comfortable for me going and that type of thing. They’re the experts.”

:: Despite the complaints about filth and mold, White donned his best pair of rose-colored glasses and told the grand jury, “Everything seems to be clean to me.”

**

In retrospect, how far off base we were when we voted White onto the County Legislature five years ago. And how far astray were his fellow legislators when they elevated him to succeed Sanders.

On that fateful day — Jan. 11, 2016 — then legislative chairwoman Crystal Williams said of White:

“One of the reasons I am so thrilled he has agreed to take on this rather hefty job is because Frank has said — since the very beginning when he got elected to the Legislature — that his priorities were for constituents to have an operating and transparent county government…”

What Williams — and we — didn’t realize was that Frank’s version of transparency was not the same as everyone else’s. Where everyone else saw shit on the jail toilets, Frank saw calcium deposits. And where the grand jury saw a dire need for corrective action, White saw a chance to twiddle his thumbs.

Oh, my…four years.