The Kansas City Council is set to decide the city manager’s fate Thursday after the city lost a million-dollar lawsuit over his remark that it’s OK to lie to the public.
Brian Platt was put on paid leave March 6 after a jury the day before awarded former city communications director Chris Hernandez over $900,000. Hernandez said Platt exhorted staff to lie to the media, and demoted him when he wouldn’t go along.
Hernandez, who’d worked for the city nine years after a local TV broadcast career, later retired at age 58 from what he felt was a dead-end job.
The jury awarded Hernandez a total of $928,829, though the city will also likely be on the hook for hundreds of thousands in legal fees. The Bulldog news outlet in Austin, Texas, where Platt was briefly considered for hiring as city manager last year, reports the attorneys fees could add another $700,000 to $1 million to the jury’s $928,829 award.
Mayor Quinton Lucas, who actually supported Platt’s decision to demote Hernandez, announced Platt’s suspension March 6. The city council is expected to rule on Platt’s suspension and tenure at its meeting Thursday.
Hernandez testified Platt encouraged communications staff to exaggerate the city government’s performance with inflated statistics on such things as the number of miles of road paving it has accomplished.
Platt was accused of saying at a Jan. 3. 2022 meeting with Hernandez and three other communications employees, “Why can’t we just lie to the media?”
Platt testified he was joking, but Hernandez maintained he was “100% serious.” In addition, another staff member testified her takeaway from that meeting was that Platt was saying, “Go ahead and make up numbers for the media.”
The lawsuit alleged Hernandez was retaliated against when he wouldn’t agree to lie to the media. Despite good performance reviews, Platt was removed from his position in August 2022 and assigned to the city’s Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity Department.
“This is a victory for the truth and transparency that Kansas City residents deserve,” Hernandez wrote in a statement after the eight-day trial.
Platt became city manager in late 2020. After his flirtation with the job in Austin last year, the city council this year made him the highest-paid city employee at $308,000, KMBC reports.
Last year the former head of the city’s civil rights department sued Platt and the city for race and age discrimination. Andrea Dorch claimed she was forced to resign after warning the city it was violating rules on the hiring of women and minority contractors in Meta’s data center project.
KCUR reported in 2023 that the city paid a private investigator nearly $11,000 to surveil Dorch. The city claimed it was looking into whether she was violating the residency requirement for city employees.
