In something of a Jedi mind trick, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas sounded victorious talking about his defeat at the hands of Missouri voters Tuesday who decided to set a minimum funding level for the KCPD.
After Lucas and a council majority tried to illegally claw back $42 million in police funding in 2021, the Legislature voted to require the city to fuel the police department with 25% of general fund revenues rather than the previous 20%. A constitutional amendment passed by voters on Tuesday authorizes that.
It’s the second time voters have voted that way, after the first vote in 2022 was thrown out by the Missouri Supreme Court over ballot language. The Kansas City Star has reported Mayor Quinton Lucas, who personally sued to overturn the first election, spent $2.3 million in taxpayer funds on legal fees in his “losing battle over police control.”
Because of rampant local corruption in the city’s history, KCPD is governed by a commission largely appointed by the governor. And that irks Lucas, even though commission members are required to be residents of Kansas City.
In an interview with KCMO radio host Pete Mundo on Thursday, Lucas – who opposed the amendment – nonetheless sounded triumphant at its 51-49 passage.
“This was in every way a local control election,” Lucas said. “And with no campaign, no effort … 49% of Missourians actually voted the way that I think was the appropriate way, the right one and the one that speaks for local control.”
The mayor’s statement ignores the fact that there’s no evidence in state records that supporters of the amendment campaigned either.
But more importantly, has he done the math on the election results?
Indeed, if the election was about “local control” of the police department, as he claims, then most Kansas Citians are actually against it.
Election results from the Missouri Secretary of State’s office show that in the KC Metro (Cass, Jackson, Clay, Platte, and Kansas City) Amendment 4 actually passed 53%-47% – a bigger margin than in the rest of the state.
In addition, if you take out the most liberal part of the metro – the KC portion of Jackson County – it passed 59%-41% in the area.
Lucas’ math appeared equally faulty after his side lost in the 2022 election. At the time, he claimed Kansas Citians had rejected the amendment (while it passed handily statewide). He seems to have cited only Kansas City residents who voted in Jackson County when, in truth, the split among all KC voters was closer to 50-50.
This week, contrary to the mayor’s assertion, the amendment actually fared better than that in the region than in 2022.
If that was a vote on city council control of KCPD’s budget, it certainly appears to have failed.
