The Star’s front page was almost consumed Sunday with two great enterprise stories — both of which rendered a tremendous public service in showing politicians at their worst.
At the top of the page was a story by Steve Vockrodt, one of the paper’s standout reporters, about two Clay County politicians’ brazen and successful effort to make it difficult and expensive for citizens, reporters and others to get records through open records requests.
The turds in Clay County’s punch bowl are County Commissioners Luann Ridgeway and Gene Owen, who consistently outvote the third commissioner, Jerry Nolte, who, at least in regard to Sunshine Law, seems to be on the correct side.
The three-member commission has been in a state of upheaval for at least the last two years, and it seems to me the ultimate resolution is for a citizens group to take the leadership in pushing for expanding the county commission to at least five members so that political power is more widely dispersed.
The second story, by Jeff City correspondents Edward McKinley and Jason Hancock, details the all-out effort by a self-dealing lobbyist and his wife, an administrative commissioner who hears Title IX appeals cases, to tip the balance of federal Title IX provisions away from the accusers and to the accused.
But in an April 23 story, McKinley revealed that the couple’s primary motivation was to try to protect their son, who was in the process of being accused and finally expelled from Washington University in St. Louis for Title IX violations. The House and Senate bills died after that story.
One of the most disturbing elements of the latter story is that Richard and Audrey McIntosh were aided and abetted by two outstate, Republican legislators — Rep. Dean Dohrman from Pettis County (Sedalia area) and Sen. Gary Romine, who represents a district mostly in St. Francois County, about 70 miles south of St. Louis.
Maddeningly, Dohrman and Romine functioned as shills for the McIntoshes, sponsoring the bills the couple drafted and apparently never questioning their motivation and keen interest in Title IX changes.
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Let’s back up and take a closer look at the Clay County and Jeff City situations The Star homed in on.
In 2016, the County Commission hired a Kansas City attorney named Joe Hatley, with the Spencer Fane firm, to represent the county in open records matters. Hatley agreed to work for the county at an hourly rate of $373.50, a discount of his usual $415 an hour fee. (What a deal!)
Up to that time, County Clerk Megan Thompson had been handling open records. She did not charge for her time, and when she needed another staff member’s help, the county charged $12 an hour.
But sometime in 2017, on a 2-1 vote — with Owen and Ridgeway voting “yes” and Nolte voting “no” — the Commission shifted open records responsibilities from Thompson to Hatley. And the county began passing on Hatley’s fee to people who submitted requests.
Capping the outrage, the Commission hired Hatley at a closed meeting on June 6, 2016, and no minutes or other records of the meeting appear to exist.
Earlier this year, Hatley asked The Star to pay $4,200 to provide it with records pertaining to Spencer Fane’s legal bills to the county. The paper ultimately got the records elsewhere.
I’ve bemoaned in this blog how cheap The Star has become with its reluctance to file lawsuits pertaining to Sunshine Law violations, but, thank God, this time The Star is fighting back. Last month, the paper filed suit alleging that the June 6, 2016, meeting and the vote to hire Hatley were illegal.
…I said above that the long-term answer to Clay County’s problems is expanding the County Commission. In the shorter term, voters should oust commissioners Ridgeway and Owen in November 2020. What is going on at the Clay County Courthouse is insulting to county residents and should not be tolerated a day longer than necessary.
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On the Title IX story, while the McIntoshes’ meddling and machinations are appalling, the bigger concern is the lap-dog attitude of the two legislators who sponsored Title IX bills in the House and Senate. They essentially slapped their names on the bills and let Richard McIntosh draft them and attempt to orchestrate their passage.
Explaining his hands-off approach to the bill, Dohrman told The Star: “When I get a bill that’s extremely complicated, I kind of let the person work it out…I just kind of let it (the Title IX bill) work out to see where it went.”
That is total abdication of legislative responsibility. Yes, those legislators see a lot of bills, and some bills are complicated. But that’s what legislators sign up for when they run for office: To do their homework and propose and carefully evaluate proposed legislation, with the goal of improving life for the residents of Missouri.
State Sen. Gary Romine
Fortunately, Dohrman will be term limited when his current two-year term expires in 2020, and Pettis County residents will be able to elect a new rep.
As for Romine, he was even more co-opted than Dohrman. He let McIntosh send out emails under his — Romine’s — name promoting the Senate version of the Title IX bill. In addition, the day after a committee hearing on the bill, McIntosh wrote out a long list of questions to be sent to each Missouri Title IX administrator. At the bottom of the list, McIntosh wrote, “Sincerely, Gary Romine.”
What a sell-out…Mercifully, again, term limits will put an end Romine’s service in the General Assembly in 2020.
…The biggest problem with Missouri government, obviously, is there are too many hick legislators. We residents of urban areas — Kansas City, Springfield, Columbia and St. Louis — are at a distinct disadvantage because the hicks significantly outnumber the urban legislators. There are way too many Dohrmans and Romines, and that’s not going to change anytime soon; we’re at those dopes’ mercy.
Today, let’s be grateful The KC Star, stripped the last decade or so of many of its senior reporters and editors, is still able to expose some of the shenanigans.
That’s Jerry Nolte in that photo, not Gene Owen.
Thanks, Mike. With your history covering the Northland, you know the players…I’ve subbed out the erroneous photo.
More than a decade since I worked in the now-defunct Northland bureau but the players, just like cockroaches, never go away.
So it has come to this: The Star actually doing its job as a newspaper has become a news story worthy of comment and congratulation. What a joke. Circling the drain ….