For months, the county had failed to pay its electric bill.

Now, the power was going to be shut off.

Citizens coming to pay their taxes were being told they couldn’t, and they were asked to leave the building. For many, the incident revealed that something was amiss in Clay County government.

“It’s like when you break out in a rash,” said Clay County Collector Lydia McEvoy, one of the officials who worked with the power company to keep the lights on that day, even though her job does not include paying the electric bill. “It revealed something’s going on underneath, what we’d expected and suspected all along.

“This is not normal.”

Although county officials were eventually able to negotiate a way to keep the lights on, the incident caught the attention of Clay County resident Jason Withington, who wanted to know more. How does this happen? Was something bigger going on than a couple of missed invoices?

In a bipartisan, grassroots effort led by Withington, Clay County residents have been collecting signatures for a petition.

The goal: a state audit of Clay County government.

The idea was sparked by the electric bill issue but was sustained by a multitude of other incidents in the last year: a charge of tampering with a public record by a county employee, leading to allegations of department budget and staff cuts as retaliation; the hiring of multiple law firms for hundreds of thousands of dollars; invoices for $600 coffeepots; changes to the county’s sunshine request process; verbal in-fighting among its three commissioners; and, more recently, allegations of physical assault by county employees toward a petitioner.

Now, citizens are leading the charge to hold their local government accountable. The petition highlights not only a divide between citizens and their government but a divide among county officials themselves, with some signing it, like McEvoy, and others rebuking it.

“I hope it will restore faith and trust in our county government that’s been lacking for a long time,” Withington said.

According to the state auditor’s office, Clay County citizens need to submit at least 5,590 valid signatures for the audit to take place. They’ve already surpassed that by several thousand signatures.

Withington says he’s gotten pushback from some county officials, including what he calls an intimidation letter after he circulated emails about upcoming meetings about the petition.

The letter, from the county’s legal counsel, claims Withington’s emails too closely resembled official county meeting notices. The letter said that if Withington did not stop circulating the emails, the county would “evaluate all legal options.”

“They are fighting this audit very hard,” he said. “I don’t know what they’re worried about, but they’re fighting this.”

‘Political witch hunt’

This year, the Missouri State Auditor’s Office has received more than a dozen whistleblower contacts related to Clay County. If the petition is successful, the office can begin a performance audit that would not only look into the county’s financial records but also its processes and specific concerns brought forward by whistleblowers.

The county was last audited by the state in 1990 at the request of the County Commission.

But this time around, two of the three commissioners — the two who are not up for re-election this fall — are against it.

Commissioner Gene Owen, a Democrat, said he believes the petition is “all political. It’s a political witch hunt.”

“Some opponents out there, the ones who stir up controversy, try to bring up these issues that aren’t an issue, only in their own mind. And so they’re trying to bring up controversy for election purposes. That’s too bad. I mean, if it costs the county any money, it’s ridiculous.”

The audit is estimated to cost $100,000 to $150,000, according to State Auditor Nicole Galloway, and may take up to a year to complete.

Another commissioner, Luann Ridgeway, a Republican and former Missouri legislator, said she believes the audit is too costly for the county, which would pick up the tab.

“The people who are promoting the audit are long on rhetoric, they’re short when it comes time to say where they will make the cuts to pay for this,” Ridgeway said.

“If it costs an estimate of $100,000 to $150,000 for the auditor to ask the questions and distill information, the taxpayers have to understand that it’s only reasonable to assume that you can double that with regard to our cost to find the answers accurately and timely. So when we say that at a minimum it would cost the taxpayers of Clay County over $300,000 for this audit, that’s not a figment of anyone’s imagination. That’s a fact.”

Galloway says her estimates are based on the costs for audits done for other counties of similar size and scope.

Record tampering

In January 2017, County Clerk Megan Thompson was processing invoices when she noticed the signatures of another commissioner, Jerry Nolte, had been cut off of documents. At the time, she said, the invoices needed two of three commissioners to sign off on them.

Commissioner Jerry Nolte’s signature was cut off from a batch of Clay County invoices last year. The attorney general’s office investigated the tampering of public records by a county employee.

Jerry Nolte Courtesy

So Thompson immediately notified the Sheriff’s Department, which notified the Missouri Attorney General’s Office, which asked the criminal investigations unit of the Missouri Highway Patrol to look into the incident.

Those events led to the charge of tampering with public records by assistant county administrator Laurie Portwood, who later reached an agreement with the attorney general to defer prosecution for two years if she agrees to not tamper with other government documents in the future and complete 40 hours of community service.

Portwood is still employed by the county and makes $107,879 a year, according to the Clay County Transparency Portal.

After the signature ordeal, the County Commission voted 2-1 (Ridgeway and Owen against Nolte) to remove Thompson as custodian of records and give that title to the county administrator, Dean Brookshier.

“I was told that, when I was still custodian of records, that I was giving away information and I was not charging enough for it and I was making it too public, which seems like the exact opposite of what county government should do,” said Thompson, a Republican who is up for re-election this fall and who signed the petition.

“If there was a fee associated, like if there was time to gather the documents, I wouldn’t charge that. I’m an elected official, and I’m here to work for you. I don’t feel like you need to pay me additional money to do my job.”

Ridgeway contends that Thompson was removed as custodian for “politicizing the process and was being woefully inadequate in responding to sunshine requests that citizens needed to know.”

The door outside Thompson’s office at the Clay County Courthouse still says “Custodian of Records.” She hasn’t removed the words, she said, because she still hopes someday she’ll get that title back. Since she was removed as records custodian, the county has paid more than $57,000 to the law firm Spencer Fane to process all of its sunshine requests, according to county records provided to The Star.

Clay County Clerk Megan Thompson stands outside the door to her office in the Clay County Courthouse. The County Commission stripped her of the title of records custodian last year, giving it instead to the county administrator. But Thompson hasn’t removed the title from her door.

Kelsey Ryan The Kansas City Star

Then in November, when elected officials in the county were asked to vote on their own pay increases — including a more than 20 percent pay increase for the commissioners — Thompson voted no.

In December, her budget was cut by a third in another 2-1 vote by the commission, forcing her to fire two employees in the clerk’s office. Now, she said, her office doesn’t have enough funding to get through the rest of the year.

“It’s hard to come to any other conclusion that this isn’t some sort of retaliation for me doing my job,” Thompson said.

It wasn’t just Thompson’s budget that was cut. Nearly $1 million was cut from Sheriff Paul Vescovo’s department as well in budget meetings that Vescovo said he could “only describe as hostile.”

“The only two offices that were severely cut were the clerk and sheriff,” said Vescovo, who is in his fourth term as sheriff and who has signed the petition.

“I can’t help but feel that it was retaliation for the initial investigation and my doing my due diligence as chief law enforcement officer of Clay County. … I’ve seen different commissions come and go. There are always going to be disagreements, but never in the time I’ve spent here as sheriff have I seen it this bad.”

‘This is not right’

Nolte, a Republican who is up for re-election this fall, is used to being the odd man out: Not only is he usually the lone “No” vote on county agenda items, he’s also the only commissioner who has signed the petition.

“I recognized that it was a legitimate expression of the will of the people, and I wanted to be part of it,” he said. “My job is not to make things easy for the government. My duty is to make things right for the people, and this is not right.”

There are a lot of things happening in Clay County government, he said, and as an elected official, he should know about them. But there’s been a veil of secrecy over how some things have been handled in the county, he said, particularly since the commission (in a 2-1 vote) ceded power to the unelected county administrator last year.

Now Nolte said he has to file sunshine requests to an outside law firm in order to get information from the government he was elected to run. He’s paid about $100 for the records. But it’s not the amount, he said. It’s the principle.

“I asked that I would like the charges waived in the course of doing my duties as presiding commissioner, and it was denied,” he said. He wanted to take up the issue in a commission meeting but said that was effectively denied as well since the county administrator now has the sole authority to decide what’s on the agenda.

“We can ask. We cannot demand,” he said.

Another issue Nolte asked to be put on the agenda? Details about why the county didn’t pay the annex electric bill last year. That didn’t happen either.

Another power ceded by the commission to the county administrator was the creation of “official actions” for the county administrator. Those actions would have as much force as a resolution the commission votes on, except they can be executed by the county administrator without notification or approval of the commission.

“There were a lot of questions being asked about a lot of the actions that were taken by the commission on a lot of those 2-1 votes,” Nolte said. “Those questions are no longer asked because those votes are no longer taken.”

Fighting audits

The county hasn’t just pushed back on citizen-initiated audits.

In January, Sen. Bob Dixon of Greene County introduced a bill in the Missouri General Assembly that would allow law enforcement agencies and prosecutors to request an audit by the state auditor.

It passed a Senate committee on Feb. 1. Within a week, Clay County hired lobbyists from Husch Blackwell, according to Missouri Ethics Commission documents, to lobby against the bill. The first name in their group of lobbyists is Andy Blunt, son of U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt.

According to county records provided to The Star, the county paid Husch Blackwell a total of $128,115.99 between February and April of this year, although it’s unclear how much of that went to the lobbyists or the county’s legal counsel.

Either way, it got its money’s worth. The bill didn’t get picked up again in the Senate until April 5, when it passed unanimously, but stalled out in the House with only weeks left in the session.

Since 2016, the county has spent more than $555,000 on outside legal fees with at least 13 law firms, according to county records provided to The Star.

“The number of legal entities we have has increased pretty dramatically,” Nolte said.

And at least one of the firms, Nolte said, helped represent the county employee charged with record tampering on the county’s dime.

“I thought it was bad policy and bad practice for the county to pay for criminal defense of people accused of crimes against the county,” Nolte said. “That seemed like we’re paying both sides. … We committed the county to pay those legal fees, and I objected to it. I think it’s a bad practice.”

More recently, documents provided to The Star show that two other county employees allegedly involved in a physical altercation with a petitioner at the Liberty Lowe’s in May will also have their legal bills paid by the county at a going rate of $400 an hour. Liberty Police say the investigation is ongoing.

‘We have to investigate’

At the end of this month, Withington, the chief petitioner, said he plans to hand a stack of all the gathered petitions to the state auditor. The signatures would then have to be validated by the county clerk’s office.

Galloway said the reports she’s gotten from whistleblowers about Clay County have been concerning, but they “don’t presume to know the facts regarding this information. If your job is to get to the bottom of the issue and to the truth, we have to investigate.”

If they do find fraud or criminal activity, or if the county does not cooperate once the audit is underway, Galloway said her office is prepared to use all legal mechanisms, including subpoenas.

“We don’t know what we’ll find until we actually do the audit.”

On a Tuesday night in July, Antonio Garcia Jr. was shot to death while sitting in the driver’s seat of his vehicle in front of his Leavenworth home.

The shooter: a Leavenworth police officer. Beyond that, the man’s family doesn’t know much. Four months later, they still haven’t been told the officer’s name or been allowed to see body camera footage they were told exists.

“There are no answers in this,” said Gina Mays, who had raised Garcia like a son since he moved to the area from California when he was 14. “The answers we are getting, it’s like, ‘This is all we are going to let you know.’ ”

In Kansas it can take years for grieving families to get answers. Weak transparency laws and hazy practices often allow law enforcement to avoid public scrutiny, unlike many other states, a Star investigation has found.

The state has one of the most restrictive laws on police body cameras in the country. Footage is classified as an investigative record and not subject to mandatory disclosure under the Kansas Open Records Act. While family members may eventually see what was captured on camera, the public may never have that opportunity.

The Star also found that some of the largest police departments in the state do not release the names of officers involved in shootings, despite a call across the country for more openness following high-profile incidents in Cleveland, Minneapolis and St. Louis.

In 2014, Kansas became the last state in the nation to open criminal affidavits, yet in some counties judges still seal those documents for long periods. And the state can keep records in unsolved cases closed to the public indefinitely. One family has spent nearly 30 years trying to see records authorities have on the disappearance of their son in 1988.

“I don’t trust a government that wants to let us know what we can and cannot know,” said attorney Cheryl Pilate, who recently helped win the release of a Kansas City, Kan., man who was wrongly convicted of a 1994 double murder. Pilate works in both Kansas and Missouri, and said obtaining investigative records is far easier in Missouri.

Antonio Garcia Jr.

Submitted photo

In the months since Garcia’s death, Tracy Ludeman, who is Mays’ sister, has organized several protests outside the Leavenworth Justice Center demanding answers.

His family insists that Garcia’s vehicle was in reverse and he was trying to leave. The only thing law enforcement officials have said publicly is that a police officer responded to a report of a stolen vehicle. At the location, an altercation occurred and the officer shot Garcia.

Ludeman pleaded with the city commission in August to identify the officer and provide more information.

She vows not to stop seeking answers.

“If it was a regular citizen who shot him, the person’s name would have been splashed across the papers immediately,” Ludeman said. “Right now, all we have is speculation and rumors. It’s horrible.

“Why has there been nothing told to our family? … The body camera doesn’t lie, let us see it.”

A try for transparency fails

Even when Kansas lawmakers have pushed for openness in law enforcement, it’s been a hard sell.

More than two years ago, Sen. David Haley, a Kansas City, Kan., Democrat, proposed a bill to implement body cameras across the state.

“I’m a strong believer that body cameras work both ways — they protect law enforcement and the general public,” Haley said. “We wanted to have full transparency and accountability.”

It didn’t work out that way.

Many legislators were hesitant. They worried that officers could be threatened or harmed if their faces and names became public after an incident. And they worried about the budget strain of departments having to pay for the cameras and data storage.

That bill fizzled.

The next year, the issue came up again. In the end, lawmakers compromised and passed another bill dealing strictly with the release of body camera footage.

On July 1, 2016, the measure took effect. Footage now is classified as criminal investigation records, exempt from mandatory disclosure under the Kansas Open Records Act.

But authorities do have the discretion to release footage in certain situations.

When a Topeka officer helped a young boy with autism who fell into a pond, video from the officer’s body camera was seen across the country. Officer Aaron Bulmer was hailed as a hero.

Yet the same department declined to release body camera footage from an officer-involved shooting in September. Topeka police, as well as Lawrence police, who are handling the investigation, cited state law in keeping the records closed.

The city of Topeka later said it would allow the dead man’s children, ages 3 through 13, to view the video but not the man’s parents.

Lawmakers have let Kansas residents down, said Doug Bonney, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas. Any citizen can see a police stop, capture it on video and share it, Bonney said.

“I have a First Amendment right to do that and do whatever with it that I wish,” Bonney said. “At the same time, officers may be wearing body cam technology and that footage is exempt from disclosure. … It was a compromise, but the wrong compromise.”

Garcia’s family says police officials told them that they’ll eventually get to see the footage. But that was months ago, said Darnell Warfield, Garcia’s brother. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation still has the case.

“They told me they can’t tell me anything until the KBI is done with their investigation,” Warfield said.

The night his brother died, Warfield expected to see him. But Garcia first needed to stop off at his home to pick up some things. He and his wife had been arguing throughout the day, family members said.

When Garcia left the Leavenworth house, relatives said at the time that he encountered the police officer as he tried to get into his vehicle and drive away. Relatives said the officer tried to stop Garcia from leaving, and the two struggled over the door of the vehicle.

Garcia tried to drive away, relatives said, and the officer fired several shots, hitting Garcia in the head and chest.

Warfield had gone to his brother’s home looking for him. He says when he pulled up near the location, he saw police lights. At one point, Warfield said an officer approached him and put her hands in the air.

“She said, ‘I didn’t do it,’ ” Warfield said. “I was like, ‘Didn’t do what?’ ”

Now Warfield wants Leavenworth police to walk him through what happened to his brother.

Leavenworth Police Chief Pat Kitchens said the KBI is still investigating and he could not comment on the case.

“I certainly understand the frustration of the family, but the most important thing to me, and I think to everyone involved, is that there is a thorough investigation and that everything is gathered appropriately,” Kitchens said. “The most important thing is to get it right.”

The waiting, though, only brings more suspicion and frustration, family members say.

“My fear is they are waiting for us to be apathetic enough for us to sweep it under the carpet,” Ludeman said. “And that’s not going to happen.”

Officer Jane Doe

Hours after a Minneapolis police officer shot and killed Justine Damond in July, the officer’s name, how long he’d been on the job and some details from his personnel file were released.

That same month, two Plant City, Fla., police officers shot and killed Jesus Cervantes. Their names were released days later.

Yet for more than a year, Santiago Quintero didn’t know the name of the Wichita officer who shot and killed his son, John Paul, on a snowy January evening in 2015. Wichita police wouldn’t tell him.

John Paul Quintero

Photo courtesy of Santiago Quintero

“The only way to get it is to file a lawsuit,” said James Orr, a Texas-based attorney who represented the Quintero family in a civil suit against the department for excessive force.

The Star filed open records requests with a dozen law enforcement departments and agencies asking for information regarding all officer-involved shootings since 1980. Four of the five largest departments, which have the bulk of these incidents, used the Kansas Open Records Act as the reason for not disclosing the names of officers who have shot civilians. Topeka was the exception, releasing the names.

Wichita, Overland Park, Olathe and Kansas City, Kan., predominantly cited two discretionary exemptions to the state sunshine law: personnel records and records that would “endanger the life or physical safety of any person.”

“It’s a safety issue for the officers and their families,” Overland Park Police Chief Frank Donchez said. “There’s a climate of anti-law enforcement sentiment in this country.”

Yet, other Kansas departments, such as Hays, Dodge City, Garden City, Manhattan and Salina, have released the information.

Hays Police Chief Don Scheibler said each case is weighed on individual circumstances.

“Law enforcement agencies have an obligation to be open and transparent with their communities, especially in cases of lethal force,” Scheibler said. “But they also have an obligation not to identify officers if it endangers the officer or their families.”

Some cities in other states — Denver, Oklahoma City — release the names after waiting at least a day.

“The longer the law enforcement agency withholds this information, the greater the appearance that the agency is protecting its own personnel at the expense of transparency within the community,” according to a report from the International Association of Chiefs of Police. “At the same time, release of an officer’s name in this time of heightened police scrutiny and public dissent has also become a matter of greater concern for officer safety.”

For the family of John Paul Quintero, not knowing the name of the officer who killed him only worsened the pain.

John Paul was celebrating the New Year and his 23rd birthday the day he died nearly three years ago. He had moved to Wichita from San Antonio just four or five months before, his father said.

Although his son had been involved in gangs and “other trouble” in California and Texas, Santiago Quintero said John Paul was trying to start over in Wichita.

On Jan. 3, 2015, police responded to a 911 call from Quintero’s relatives saying he was armed with a knife, was intoxicated and was threatening others. Santiago Quintero said the situation had cooled down by the time police arrived.

Witnesses said John Paul was holding his hands in the air when he was tased, just before an officer fired a military-style rifle at him from behind, striking him twice in the midsection.

Santiago Quintero said the first thing the officer said was that she thought John Paul was reaching for his waistband after being tased. He said he believes his son was reaching toward his waist to pull up his baggy pants. Police did not recover a weapon on Quintero.

The family did not find out the name of the officer until March 2016, when the city had to give it to them as part of the lawsuit.

The Sedgwick County District Attorney issued a 30-page report finding the shooting justified. Jamie Thompson, who was initially identified as “Officer Jane Doe” in the lawsuit, is still employed by the police department, according to the city human resources department.

The family eventually settled its suit with the city of Wichita. Quintero’s parents each received about $59,000 after attorneys fees and hospital bills, according to city records.

“I don’t need the money,” said John Paul’s father, who doesn’t think families should have to file a lawsuit to find out who killed their loved ones. “It doesn’t bring my son back. It does nothing for me.”

Santiago Quintero was surrounded by family members when he raised his hands declaring, “hands up, don’t shoot,” during a vigil for his 23-year-old son John Paul Quintero, who was killed by Wichita police in 2015.

Bo Rader The Wichita Eagle

A right to scrutinize

When it came to the transparency of criminal affidavits, Kansas stood alone. In the dark.

That’s what former Rep. John Rubin discovered when he tried to determine how many other states were like Kansas in keeping those documents closed to the public.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Rubin, a Shawnee Republican. “We were the only state in the country that absolutely sealed affidavits. … When you’re the only state in the union that does something, or doesn’t do something, it makes you wonder what the other 49 states know that we don’t.”

Arrest affidavits describe why someone has been charged with a crime. The documents are readily available in many states.

A retired federal administrative law judge, Rubin said he was prompted to do something after a Leawood couple couldn’t find out why authorities conducted a SWAT-style raid of their home in 2012. Robert and Adlynn Harte were targets after they were suspected of cultivating marijuana.

No drugs were found, and the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office refused to release the search affidavit explaining the rationale for the raid. The Hartes sued to get the information and paid more than $20,000 in attorney fees.

Ron Keefover, president of the Kansas Sunshine Coalition, likened the incident to something out of a dictatorship.

“How’s it any different than North Korea whisking tourists off the streets and saying they’re spies without any indication for why they’re charged?” he said. “I don’t think that’s an exaggeration.”

Again, only a lawsuit led to answers. Tea leaves in the Hartes’ trash and a visit to a garden store had elicited authorities’ suspicion of a drug operation.

“I was shocked at what happened with the Hartes,” Rubin said. “It’s a right of all Kansas citizens to know how government operates.”

In 2014, legislators passed a law, sponsored by Rubin, that opened the documents. Yet because of pushback from prosecutors and some judges, compromises were made.

Instead of making the affidavits routinely open like they are in Missouri, prosecutors, defendants and their attorneys have up to five days to make a motion to seal the documents. Kansas law allows judges to seal the documents if they determine disclosure would interfere with an investigation or prosecution.

In Wyandotte County District Court, for example, there have been 46 requests for arrest affidavits since the new law took effect in summer 2014. Of those, more than three-fourths were denied, according to Chief Judge Wayne Lampson.

Most were denied because “the police department was still investigating the case,” Lampson said by email.

Doug Anstaett, the executive director of the Kansas Press Association, said he is disappointed by the interpretation of the new affidavit law, questioning why, in some courts, some affidavits are released when others are not.

“I think that raises suspicions for the public: Are you playing favorites? Is there a racial profiling (aspect)? Is it that rich people get protected and poor people don’t?” he asked.

The public has a right to scrutinize law enforcement, he added, “and the way you do that is you get out as much information as you can that doesn’t hurt an investigation but also tells the public why a person is in jail.”

Kansas prosecutors Todd Thompson of Leavenworth County and Marc Bennett of Sedgwick County say there are valid reasons for keeping the records private. Thompson said arrest affidavits, when made public, could taint a jury’s perception of a defendant.

Hearing that affidavits in some jurisdictions remain sealed is disappointing, Rubin said. But not surprising.

“Not given the blowback we heard back then,” when the proposal was first introduced, Rubin said. “Some judges never agreed with the transparency spirit behind the bill.”

What happened to Randy?

Even in less incendiary cases, law enforcement agencies are reluctant to share information.

It’s been nearly 30 years since Harold and Alberta Leach last saw their son Randy, who disappeared one April night when he was just 17 and was never found.

The Linwood, Kan., couple have long questioned the investigation that followed. They’ve asked for the law enforcement records that detail what authorities did to search for their son. Seeing those records would bring them a degree of closure, they say.

Randy Leach

Photo courtesy of the family.

But they can’t get them. Kansas is one of several states where criminal investigation records in ongoing cases can be closed to the public indefinitely.

“If we had lived 25 miles away in Missouri, we would’ve already had our records,” Alberta Leach said. “That’s pretty bad. So why? That’s what we’re asking: Why?”

The Leaches filed a lawsuit in Leavenworth County, naming the county and the Leavenworth County Sheriff’s Office as defendants and demanding the release of records in the case. A Nov. 21 court date is set.

Max Kautsch, the couple’s attorney, switches between incredulity and anger when speaking about why the Leaches still feel forsaken by law enforcement after three decades.

“The purpose of open records is not just to find what’s in the records,” he said, “but to hold government accountable and determine whether they conducted the investigation in the manner in which they said they did.”

After Randy Leach’s disappearance in mid-April of 1988, the Leavenworth County Sheriff’s Office began the initial investigation. A few months later, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation began assisting with the case.

Today, the KBI continues to investigate when new leads arise.

KBI spokeswoman Melissa Underwood said new locations have been searched in the past year, “including a couple locations of specific concern to the Leach family.” On one search, “the Leaches were invited and were present.”

She said the KBI has “sincerely tried to accommodate the Leaches’ desire to know what happened to their missing son.”

But the Leaches say it hasn’t been enough. That’s why, this past spring, they attended a Senate committee hearing in Topeka. Sen. Tom Holland, a Baldwin City Democrat, proposed an amendment that would have compelled the release of some of the Randy Leach records to the parents. Though the amendment passed the Senate, it died in the House.

Kirk Thompson, the KBI director, staunchly opposed Holland’s amendment. His primary concern was that releasing such records had the potential to compromise a future prosecution in the Leach case, as well as hinder detectives’ ability to gain the trust of witnesses in other cases.

“Knowledge that information shared privately and in confidence with an investigator could later be disclosed to the media or general public would have a chilling effect on the cooperation of both victims and witnesses, therefore inhibiting successful resolution of criminal cases,” Thompson wrote.

The Kansas Association of Chiefs of Police, the Kansas Sheriffs Association and the Kansas Peace Officers Association all joined the KBI in opposing the amendment.

In their lawsuit, the Leaches are seeking all records created prior to 1993. To win, they must prove the records are in the public interest, Leavenworth County Judge David King said at a recent court appearance.

“I can see in certain situations where we can’t have all this information out, but not necessarily for 30 years. That’s a bunch of garbage,” Harold Leach said.

“Unless there’s something really bad out there to make them look bad, then that’s why they’re doing it. That’s the only thing I can think of.”

When two Lenexa siblings, 17 and 11 years old, were stopped for speeding at Metcalf Avenue and Interstate 435 in Overland Park, both were questioned by police.

Then they were put in handcuffs, their mother said.

“They searched my 11 year old as if he were a grown man,” she wrote in a complaint to the state. “The only reason my children were treated as so is because WE ARE BLACK!!”

Her racial profiling complaint was one of 592 made to Kansas law enforcement agencies and the Kansas Attorney General’s office in the past five years.

But like most of the other cases, the complaint was not substantiated — a result that critics say is not only hard to believe, but raises questions about the state’s nearly 20-year effort to combat racial profiling.

Despite the passage of two laws to address the issue, The Star found that Kansas’ system of tracking racial profiling complaints is ineffective, opaque and deeply flawed — from incomplete data collection to redacted records to agencies simply not participating.

“In terms of actually creating transparency and accountability, you would be hard-pressed to create a more useless system,” said Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Kansas.

A recent investigation by The Star showed that secrecy is pervasive in the Sunflower State. The state’s handling of racial profiling complaints is another example.

Even though the Kansas attorney general collects data from almost every law enforcement agency in the state, his office does not analyze the reports and no longer investigates complaints. The reports posted on the attorney general’s website do not offer any narrative detail of complaints, nor do they list the names of officers involved or the residents who complained.

Rep. J.R. Claeys, a conservative Republican legislator from Salina and chairman of the transportation and public safety committee, said the attorney general’s office should analyze the reports and make those results available to the public.

“So many things in Kansas government are not databased and they become transparency issues. … That is a common complaint across many agencies in the state,” Claeys said.

“It seems we go out of our way to make things difficult.”

Ramon Gonzalez has a unique perspective on law enforcement and racial profiling. He is a retired Republican legislator who served from 2010 to 2016, and has been chief of police in Perry, a small town between Topeka and Lawrence, since the 1980s.

He was surprised to hear that Kansas police had not agreed with any citizen who had complained of unfair treatment over the past five years, according to the reports filed with the state. Six percent of the cases were listed as “open.”

“The odds,” he said. “If you have a citizen that complains … the responsibility of the department is to investigate and determine an outcome based on facts, which includes interviewing the complainant, the officer and reviewing video.”

The current report is pretty basic, Gonzalez said, and would be more beneficial to both law enforcement and the public if it included more information, like a narrative of the event, as long as it doesn’t become too cumbersome for officers.

That no complaints have been confirmed is a “huge red flag” that the system doesn’t work, said Ngozi Ndulue, senior director of criminal justice programs for the NAACP headquarters.

“The message that people get when they see that is there’s almost no likelihood their complaint will be sustained — that this is not a process that works, that law enforcement is not concerned with protecting them from racial profiling, and it’s a waste of their time and effort to go through this process.”

Legislation faulted

Lawmakers began debating the need to do something about racial profiling in 2000 and passed a law in 2006 that made the practice illegal. Five years later, the Legislature passed another law that was intended to strengthen the previous measure.

Instead, it weakened it, said Sen. David Haley, a Kansas City, Kan., Democrat who introduced both pieces of legislation.

“I’m disheartened that we have meaningless legislation on the books that actually does not advance the cause of social transparency and equal representation under law,” said Haley, an African American who said he has experienced biased policing firsthand.

According to the NAACP, 30 states, including Kansas, have at least one anti-racial profiling law.

For years, proponents have been trying to get past the first hurdle of addressing biased-based policing in Kansas: Meaningful data collection.

“If a complaint is found in favor of the person who complains, our police departments would have to say racial profiling exists,” said Sen. Oletha Faust-Goudeau, a Wichita Democrat.

“Without that data collection, you can’t prove that you don’t stop people of color more.”

The goal was to establish a racial profiling law modeled after Missouri’s, which has collected traffic stop demographic data since 2000 and has proven that African Americans in Missouri are stopped by police disproportionately.

But the 2011 Kansas bill was watered down, proponents say — weakened by provisions supported by law enforcement, who said the data collection would be too cumbersome. The law requires agencies to fill out an annual report of racial profiling complaints and submit it to the attorney general’s office.

Rep. Gail Finney, a Wichita Democrat, said racial profiling is hard for someone to believe if they haven’t experienced it themselves.

“I would like to see the statute strengthened, with more analysis and with traffic stop demographics,” she said. “It would be nice if there was some type of database or place where citizens can view that information, a narrative with all of the complaints. Otherwise what’s the point of collecting it?

“Without a strong statute, without accountability, we’ll have the same problems over and over again.”

Reports not filed

Despite requirements by state law, not all of the roughly 435 agencies that are supposed to submit annual police bias reports to the state do it; nearly 75 didn’t in 2017. Even if there are no bias complaints, agencies are still supposed to file annual reports.

But there’s no penalty if they don’t — 361 agencies submitted a report in 2017, 45 fewer than the year before.

That’s a problem, said Kubic with the ACLU of Kansas.

“It’s very challenging to say anyone takes it seriously when there are no repercussions for not filing the report,” Kubic said.

And the report itself, even when filed, is “one of the least useful reports I’ve ever seen,” Kubic said.

“All it says is if there was a complaint and the disposition. If there were 20 complaints about the same individual, you wouldn’t know. There’s no race of the person, race of the officer and no way to discern a pattern from the report itself. … You would have to consciously design something to make it more useless than what we have right now.”

The reports also do not contain any narrative or summary of events.

“The fact that we don’t know anything about the complaint creates an environment of suspiciousness,” Kubic said.

“This comes at a time when there is a sense in the country that police community relations are at a low, and the way to fix that is not to keep things secret. The way to fix that is through greater acts of transparency and direct engagement with those communities. The entire system that exists right now runs completely contrary to those values.”

Gonzalez, the Perry police chief and former legislator, suggested that the Kansas Commission on Peace Officers’ Standards and Training (CPOST) work with the attorney general’s office to do random samplings on cases. And that law enforcement groups like the Kansas Association of Chiefs of Police look at the issue.

He likes the idea of a central point for complaint collection — if it’s done right.

“If you have an agency with excessive amounts of complaints and zero are validated, you might want to look at what’s going on,” Gonzalez said.

But can law enforcement agencies fairly evaluate their own officers?

“I really believe that independent organizations would do a much better job of overseeing law enforcement on issues like this,” said Finney, the Wichita lawmaker. “It’s unfortunate that we can’t get more transparency on it. …

“As an African American female, mother of sons, they have experienced it, I have experienced it, my husband has experienced it, a lot of people I know. Usually it’s our word against theirs.”

But Gary Steed, executive director of CPOST, said that oftentimes local agencies are in a better position to investigate their cases.

“They know the officers, have direct access to their records and their performance, they know their own policies and procedures and if an officer has violated those,” Steed said.

“It’s a difficult complaint to prove. Often you have to prove what is in the officer’s mind or his intent and that’s difficult to do.”

Redacted reports

When a man in Wichita pulled over by police asked why, he said he was told that it was under the Patriot Act to make sure he was “not with terrorism.”

And when a black man driving on U.S. 83 through southwest Kansas was stopped by a Kansas Highway Patrol trooper for speeding, he was forced to wake up his 4-year-old white stepdaughter in the backseat. The officer wanted to question her about whether the man was really her stepdad.

“I just want justice served,” the man wrote.

But you’ll never know who these men are since the attorney general’s office routinely redacts the names of people who complain directly to its office about police bias, as well as their contact information and the police officer’s name. The Star only was able to obtain some narrative information from the reports through an open records request.

“Release of such personal information is not of legitimate concern to the public,” wrote Cheryl Whelan, assistant attorney general and director of Open Government Training and Compliance for the office.

Ndulue, with the NAACP, disagrees. There are simple ways to balance privacy and the public interest, she said, like adding a checkbox to the report so a complainant can keep their name from being publicly available.

“That would protect individual privacy but allow for follow-up and more transparency,” she said.

Officers’ names should not be redacted, she said.

“Privacy on the part of the public servant while supposedly serving the public? No,” Ndulue said. “This is not a personnel record. This is a statement about the way they were doing their public-facing job.”

The attorney general’s office defended the system, saying in effect that a little bit of information is better than none.

“While these reports are limited in the scope of information the law requires them to collect, making them publicly available places information about racial and other biased-based policing into the public realm,” wrote Attorney General Derek Schmidt in a prepared statement.

“That information can form the basis for discussion and further inquiry by government organizations, lawmakers, law enforcement leaders, members of the public, advocacy groups, private citizens, or media organizations.”

When the Legislature enacted the Racial and Other Bias-Based Policing statute in 2011, it did not provide any funding for the office to carry out its new statutory duties, said Jennifer Montgomery, public information officer for the attorney general’s office. So the office applied for and received a federal grant to fund an investigator position.

Federal funding eventually ran out. So in May, the attorney general’s office decided to change procedures. It now reviews the reports, but does not investigate before forwarding them to CPOST.

In 2012, two bills were introduced in the Legislature that would have expanded the attorney general’s responsibility to collect and analyze the data, but neither of those proposals advanced out of committee, Montgomery said.

“The way that the AG decides not to compile it, without any analysis, is surprising and really seems a lot less transparent than a lot of states with these reporting requirements,” Ndulue said.

Ultimately, if an agency or state chooses to collect data, it has a responsibility to analyze it and make it useful, said Samuel Walker, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska-Omaha who studies police accountability.

“If you’re in the business of handling citizen complaints, you have to handle it right: Get detailed information and have staff that investigate and have proper procedures. If it’s lip service that they will accept complaints, but they’re not doing it right, what’s the point?”

The 800-acre forest — roughly the size of New York’s Central Park — sits in sharp contrast to bustling downtown Kansas City, just a few miles to the south.

But not for long.

These woods, which prehistoric native tribes once called home, are the future home to new Park Hill schools, first a new elementary school and later a high school. The first phase of development has already started with the burning of several acres of trees.

North of the 272 acres the district bought last year for $3 million, hundreds more acres — in the fastest-growing county in Missouri — are owned by real estate developers.

District officials say they’ve been trying to find land to fit the growing number of students since 2011, when voters first approved a bond issue.

Now, some Platte County residents fear the development, including a new four-lane parkway, will begin a domino effect of more development as property values rise, and the peaceful forest will disappear forever — along with the secrets it has held for generations.

“This is a wild, undeveloped natural property. It doesn’t feel like KC,” said Julie Stutterheim, who lives next to the Line Creek Trail and started the group Save the Last KC Forest, which has collected thousands of signatures in support.

The group wants the school district to reconsider the location for the proposed high school by making it closer to the elementary school, which would reduce the impact on the forest, and to not build a road through the middle of the land. They’re also asking the district to create a conservation plan for the rest of the forest, instead of labeling the land as future development up for possible sale.

“It’s a really, really nice tract of forest, and it’s not something we have a lot of anymore. That’s its value,” said Wendy Sangster, a community forester with the Missouri Department of Conservation.

It’s not just the flora at stake. More than 130 bird species have been spotted in or near the forest, from the common robin to the vulnerable Rusty Blackbird and chatty Scarlet Tanager, according to the Burroughs Audubon Society of Greater Kansas City.

“It’s beautiful and a wonderful asset for migratory birds,” Sangster said. “They need areas like that to stop on their migration route, and without them, they don’t have anywhere to stop.”

One species spotted in the forest, the Acadian Flycatcher, was the subject of a recent University of Missouri study that found the songbird is at risk of near-extinction within the century if the climate continues to warm, although habitat restoration may not be enough to save them.

Native past

From arrowheads in the woods to traces of burial mounds on bluffs, roughly 550 archaeological sites have been identified in Platte County, according to the state historic preservation office.

The area was home to the westernmost settlements of the Hopewell people from about 100 B.C. to 400 A.D., according to Mary Adair, senior curator of archaeology at the University of Kansas. Hopewell villages were typically built on lower terrain, on terraces of creeks and rivers, and they would place burial mounds up higher on the bluffs.

The Hopewell had an expansive trade route across a lot of what is now the U.S., which is evidenced in marine shells from the Gulf Coast and Pacific Coast excavated far from those waters, Adair said. They used waterways to travel faster and farther.

“It’s not a mystery that these sites are located along navigable waters,” Adair said. “The Missouri River is a prime location, and the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers gives access to all points north, east and west.”

Local archaeologists say there are a number of recorded Hopewell sites along Line Creek specifically, and there is little chance that the entire 800 acres of the Line Creek Forest has been surveyed for archaeological importance.

There is at least one documented prehistoric site on the school district’s property, the district confirmed. It’s a “lithic scatter,” or the grouping of artifacts that result from the making of stone tools, and it’s not on the area the district plans to build on.

But it’s too late to know about the part of the forest that has already been cleared and burned for the future Hopewell Elementary, named after the native people who once lived here.

Assistant Superintendent Paul Kelly said the district did not conduct an archaeological survey of that part of the land. Under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, archaeological surveys are typically required if there is federal involvement in a project through land, funding or permits. The Hopewell project is not federally funded — it will be paid for through local bonds passed by taxpayers.

“Once a site is plowed out, it’s gone,” Adair said. “That’s true even with excavation. Once done, even properly, it’s gone, but the retained information and material are available.”

Although the district did not survey the Hopewell Elementary site, it is now evaluating the rest of the property, Kelly said.

“There were not any referenced historical documents that suggested a new survey was appropriate,” Kelly said. “Then there’s the expense of doing a start-from-scratch monthlong survey of property that has no known references to Hopewell.”

While the high concentration of known prehistoric sites is more to the south of where the proposed schools are, “the odds of finding something anywhere around there are probably 100 times higher than anywhere else,” said Gary Brenner, who led one of the many excavations at a site south of the Line Creek Forest in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Just because there isn’t a recorded site doesn’t mean a site doesn’t exist, said Ann Raab, an archaeologist who teaches anthropology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and two area community colleges.

“Overwhelmingly, the majority of sites out there have never been recorded,” Raab said. “When doing projects like this, one of the things they need to do is consider the potential impact, not just the known impact. … There needs to be due diligence if sites out here haven’t been recorded yet.”

She said a lot of developers try to avoid Section 106 as much as possible because they assume that if they find something, that means they can’t do their project.

“That’s not what the laws are for. They’re not to prevent development but to allow the opportunity to preserve sites in some way, which sometimes means to excavate to get as much information from the site as possible. We’re focused more on the information, not the stuff.”

‘Nobody here to listen to us’

Kelly said the district is not opposed to the idea of conservation areas surrounding the schools, but the priority now is to finish what’s been started. He said the district may be interested in eventually selling the property adjacent to where the schools will be built, or holding on to it for future use.

“It’s early in the process. We’ve had the property for a little over a year. To think that we would take $2 million worth of property and donate it?”

The main fight for the district, he said, is against “unknowns,” the threat of development.

“We don’t have a crystal ball. We can only do and plan what we know of and need,” he said.

“What we’re doing does not constitute the eradication of the forest. The idea that in 20 years portions of that will be demolished for homes is in other people’s hands — we don’t own it. The risk or unknown is not changed or mitigated by these plans.”

In early July, the Park Hill School District held an informational meeting for citizens to see proposals for the new schools. But people weren’t happy.

More than a hundred people showed up at Plaza Middle School, and angry murmurs filled the gymnasium. Instead of a sit-down meeting with a microphone, it was a series of posters displayed on easels with architects standing around to answer questions.

“If I had known they were doing this, I would have voted ‘no’ on the bond issue,” one resident said.

“I voted on the concept of new schools, not this travesty,” said another.

Upset citizens surrounded Park Hill Superintendent Jeanette Cowherd (second from right) at a community meeting at the Plaza Middle School gymnasium in July. They had concerns about the district’s plans to build new schools, which include destroying parts of the Line Creek Forest.

Kelsey Ryan The Kansas City Star

The attendees brought up the recent burning of the trees, which occurred on at least one Ozone Alert Day. Kelly, with the district, told The Star that the contractor burned the trees because it was the cheapest option and that they were told not to burn on Ozone Alert Days again.

Amy Brizendine, who has lived next to the forest for nearly 20 years, enjoys the wildlife and walks through the woods.

“They want to put a baseball field in my backyard,” she said. “It’s very disturbing to me. They say they want to be good neighbors, but they never reached out.”

Within minutes, attendees surrounded Superintendent Jeanette Cowherd, demanding answers. She eventually told the crowd the district would hold another meeting. It’s now scheduled for Tuesday — an election day — in the evening.

Construction on the high school is slated to begin in January.

“We’re not trying to be radicals. … What we’re asking for, it isn’t out of the realm of possibility,” said Stutterheim with Save the Last KC Forest.

“This is in no way a done deal.”

There’s a pervasive “good ol’ boy” environment in the statehouse, said one female college student, a former statehouse intern.

“It’s a regular occurrence, hearing comments,” said the woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she continues to see legislators to advocate for bills. “It’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, why would you say that? It’s super inappropriate and you’d never say that to a male intern.’ It becomes normal after a while. As time goes by, you just kind of accept it.”

“But you’re also like, ‘OK, I really like this internship and it’s a good opportunity,’ so you’re willing to ignore things that were said, which sucks because you shouldn’t have to.”

Women at statehouses from California to Rhode Island have been speaking out on sexual harassment in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, which sparked a national conversation.

In Kansas, legislative leaders have sought input from the Women’s Foundation, a Kansas City-based group that advised Missouri on reforms when its culture of harassment was uncovered by The Star two years ago.

And Democratic candidates for governor released plans for new training and reporting standards in the wake of former staffers and others speaking out last week about inappropriate behavior by Kansas Democrats, including a reliance of female interns as designated drivers after lobbyist-hosted cocktail hours.

But the issue is not confined to one political party. Two former interns recounted harassment they received from Republican lawmakers after The Star reported on allegations of harassment last week.

About two years ago, the first woman, a student at a small Kansas university, was talking to a House Republican at an event, telling him why he should vote a certain way on a bill.

“He completely disregarded what I was saying and asked, ‘How hard would you slap me if I tried to kiss you?’ I was just out of high school and he knew that,” she said.

At one point, she said, the legislator told her that he’d had sex with two other young women she knew and didn’t understand why she wouldn’t have sex with him. She later told the other women what he’d said and they told her it wasn’t true.

“He’s so gross. He just makes my skin crawl and he made other people feel that way, too,” the woman said. “If your comment has anything to do with a woman’s body or clothing or it’s not work-related, you probably shouldn’t say it.”

That lawmaker is no longer in the Legislature.

“(The statehouse) can be a very sexually objectifying environment,” the woman said.

But she thinks it’s much better than it used to be. Part of the reason? More women serving in the Legislature, she said. A total of five women have been added to the statehouse since 2015.

“There definitely were times when the Legislature was more hostile toward female interns,” she said. “Two years ago was a lot rougher, when there were not as many female legislators. There was a legislator that tried to introduce a female dress code in the Capitol. It felt way different, not as welcoming. This session felt more comfortable, and I would have felt comfortable talking if anything happened to me.

“We need even more women in the Legislature. The environment would drastically improve with more women elected, and the female interns really look up to them.”

KU intern’s experience

Another woman, who requested anonymity, recently described to The Star an experience she had as a legislative intern through the University of Kansas’ intern program in 2009.

She remembers being on the Senate floor near the windows in the chamber when a male Republican senator approached her.

“He just came up,” she said. “And it wasn’t … it was just like a very passing comment, like he looked at me, he smiled, he said, ‘Hey, do your panties match your outfit?’ and then winked, and then walked on by.”

She remembers worrying about what she was wearing, even though she said her outfit wasn’t flashy. She wondered if she needed to wear baggier pants or a turtleneck.

“I just kind of really faded out because I just didn’t want to be around. I just got a really bad taste for it,” she said. “I thought it was my fault.”

She shied away from social events involving the Legislature because she “felt weird vibes from other senators.”

Asked if she had received any training or guidance from KU on making a sexual harassment complaint or about boundaries with lawmakers, she said, “Absolutely not.”

“I didn’t know what sexual harassment was,” she added. “I had no idea.”

Burdett Loomis, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Kansas, has run KU’s legislative intern program in Topeka for more than 30 years and has said he’s never received a complaint about harassment. The program has roughly 15 to 20 students every session.

After recent revelations, Loomis said he wasn’t surprised to hear about the panties comment made to one of his former students.

“If you’d asked me 10 or 15 years ago, I might be more surprised,” Loomis said. “All I’m saying is, I’m talking to you in the context of 2017.”

Loomis said KU does not provide any specific sexual harassment training for students going through the legislative program, including on how to report harassment.

“The Legislature itself might do some,” he said. “We have never done anything explicitly. We talk to them about being in office and, to an extent, about being in social situations as well, but no, we haven’t.”

Loomis added that either through the Legislature or KU, some kind of training will be incorporated into the program for the next session.

KU students do receive broader sexual harassment training through the university each year, according to Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, a spokeswoman for the University of Kansas.

She called the description of the exchange between a student and a former lawmaker “unacceptable and troubling.”

“At KU, we would encourage any intern who has experienced harassment to contact legislative leaders, law enforcement, the internship program director, or our Office of Institutional Opportunity & Access,” she said in an email.

Barcomb-Peterson said that both “the Legislature and the university — if notified — would investigate the complaint.”

Senate President Susan Wagle, a Wichita Republican, said the remark described by the former KU intern was “absolutely unacceptable behavior.”

The title of representative or senator doesn’t given anyone the right to abuse his or her power, Wagle said.

“The problem we run into with these incidents is, people are unwilling to name the perpetrator,” she said. “And we really need, when it comes to sexual harassment, for women to name the perpetrator. Because once one person is named, usually a number of people come out with the same complaint. But it takes one brave woman to name someone.”

Wagle said she’s willing to talk to any person who wants to report harassment at the statehouse. “If people want to name names, we’ll investigate,” she said.

House Speaker Ron Ryckman, an Olathe Republican, said Monday that his office has had to deal with sexual harassment during his tenure as speaker, which began this year, and that it followed the procedures laid out in the Legislature’s official policies.

“That’s what we’ve done in the past and we’ll continue to do that,” he said, without providing any specific details on individual cases.

Internships from the various universities are overseen by the House speaker pro tem’s office, which is currently held by Rep. Scott Schwab, an Olathe Republican.

Schwab’s office would not say how many total interns work in the Capitol each year, but said in a statement that all interns take part in an orientation program where they are informed about conduct, sexual harassment and proper reporting channels.

“In addition, all interns are instructed to remain in contact with their assigned caucus coordinators and are encouraged to immediately report to their caucus coordinators and/or assigned legislator anything they find inappropriate or that makes them feel uncomfortable or threatened,” the statement said.

Kansas State University spokeswoman Cindy Hollingsworth said in an email that roughly 10 K-State students hold internships at the Capitol each session, “but the university does not manage any part of the program.”

Natalie Parker, who worked as an intern during the 2015 session, said she was never sexually harassed during her time at the Legislature. However, she said she observed a culture of disrespect for women.

“Some of what I observed or experienced is, just in general, older gentlemen being less formal and so I think what that kind of lends itself to is older men sometimes not understanding where they need to create boundaries,” she said.

Christina Ostmeyer, a Lawrence resident who served as an intern in 2016, also said she was never harassed and considered her time at the Capitol to be a great experience.

But she said she did recall one occasion when she overheard a male lawmaker comment on a female legislative staffer’s body.

Designated drivers

The treatment of interns at the Capitol became a focal point in Kansas politics after Abbie Hodgson, a former Democratic staffer, revealed to The Star and other news outlets that during the 2016 session, female interns had been asked to serve as designated drivers for male lawmakers who had been drinking.

Hodgson alleged that Democratic leaders had been reluctant to deal with the situation after she raised concerns.

House Minority Leader Jim Ward, a Wichita Democrat and a candidate for governor, was not in leadership at the time but was in the Legislature.

After leaving a meeting Monday afternoon at which legislative leaders discussed sexual harassment, Ward refused to answer questions about whether he had ever relied on interns as drivers.

“I have given all the statements I’m giving on sexual harassment,” he said. “I have given two.”

When pressed about the designated drivers, Ward tried to change the topic.

“I am talking about schools today,” he said. “That’s it.”

Hodgson said in an email Monday night that Ward and a group of lawmakers with whom he shares a house in Topeka were the most frequent passengers of interns.

“There is a group of legislators, of whom Jim Ward is one, that live in what they proudly refer to as the ‘frat house.’ The men that lived in the ‘frat house’ were the primary culprits when it came to using interns as designated drivers,” Hodgson said.

When read Hodgson’s comments Tuesday, Ward refused to answer the question about designated drivers and instead demanded to know whether Hodgson had accused him of harassment.

“You wrote stories that suggest that all of this is sexual harassment,” Ward said in a phone call. “So you’re asking me a question about Abbie Hodgson, here’s my answer: I never sexually harassed Abbie Hodgson. Period.”

He said he had never harassed any intern.

In a second phone call Tuesday, Ward was clearer on the issue and said that he had ridden in cars with both male and female interns.

“I remember at least one time an intern was driving. Nothing inappropriate happened,” he said.

“I have ridden in cars with Republicans, Democrats, staff members, including interns. And we would be going to lunch events, legislative events immediately after work. And these would be receptions … and that was the activity. Sometimes dinner was involved,” Ward said.

He confirmed that alcohol was available at some of the events.

Rep. John Carmichael, a Wichita Democrat who lives in the same building as Ward, said that it’s nicknamed the “frat house” because the building once belonged to a now-defunct law fraternity at Washburn University.

The roster of residents changes somewhat from session to session, but the house is primarily used by male Democratic lawmakers, who have their own apartments in the building.

Carmichael said that he could only remember interns serving as drivers on two occasions and that nothing inappropriate happened either time. He said that that the only time he rode with a female intern, lawmakers went to the Blue Moose Bar and Grill in Topeka and returned home after dinner and drinks.

Rep. Brandon Whipple, a Wichita Democrat who also lives in the building, said in an email that he only recalled being driven by a male intern to an event with other lawmakers, staffers and interns.

Tom Day, director of Legislative Administrative Services, the agency that handles the Legislature’s human resources, said lawmakers are informed about the institution’s zero tolerance policy on sexual harassment.

He said the information is given out during a legislative orientation, which is primarily for new lawmakers.

“I can’t tell you that an actual document is given to them with all the policies, but they are informed,” he said.

Executive branch employees have to go through an online course on sexual harassment to “keep them aware on an annual or a biannual basis of the sexual harassment policies of the state of Kansas,” Day said.

But lawmakers themselves are not required to go through similar training on a regular basis, Day confirmed.

State Sen. Barbara Bollier, a Mission Hills Republican, said lawmakers and other people who work in the Capitol should undergo regular training on the issue.

“It’s 2017 and we should have specific training … I was always surprised that we didn’t,” Bollier said, noting that major corporations nearly universally provide such training to their employees. “We need that and I hope they put that in place.”

Michelle Coleman has never owned a home.

Ideally, she’d like a small house with a yard for gardening and room for her children and grandchildren to visit.

She lives in a four-plex in Kansas City for $600 a month, and hers is the only one that doesn’t have a working air conditioner — a big problem in July. She doesn’t want to spend her own money to fix the air conditioner, and of course her landlord still expects her to pay her rent even though it has not been fixed.

“I’m just tired of renting,” Coleman said.

“Any extra I get, I want to put into a home, not lining someone else’s pockets.”

She’s one of a growing number of African-Americans in Kansas City — and the nation — who don’t own a home.

Across the U.S., homeownership rates appear to be stabilizing as people rebound from the 2007 recession that left millions unemployed and home values underwater, according to a report by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

But the report found African-Americans aren’t sharing in the recovery, even as whites, Asian-Americans and Latinos slowly see gains in home-buying. The center said the disparity between whites and blacks is at its highest in 70-plus years of data.

Experts say reasons for the lower homeownership rate range from historic underemployment and low wages to a recession-related foreclosure crisis that hit black communities particularly hard.

Homeownership rates among African-Americans in the Kansas City metro area slipped from an estimated 45.7 percent to an estimated 37.7 percent from 2005 to 2015, according to American Community Survey data analyzed by the Associated Press.

The data show that Kansas City is among the metros with the largest decreases in African-American homeownership percentages nationwide in areas with more than 25,000 African-American households.

In 2004, the pinnacle of U.S. homeownership, three-quarters of whites and nearly half of blacks in the country owned homes, according to the Harvard report.

By 2016, the national African-American homeowner rate had fallen to 42.2 percent and lagged 29.7 percentage points behind whites, nearly a percentage point higher than in 2015.

Now, a lack of affordable housing and stricter lending are making it harder for first-time buyers to obtain what traditionally has been considered an essential part of the American dream and a way to build wealth.

“It has always been historically and systemically harder for blacks, and we were seeing there a little bit of progress, and now we’re back at square one,” said Alanna McCargo, co-director of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute, a think tank focused on urban issues that published a similar report.

Low inventory is adding to the problem. The Star reported earlier this year that the country is seeing the biggest housing inventory crunch in 20 years, according to data gathered by Trulia, a real estate listing site. Kansas City had 55.4 percent fewer homes available from 2012 to 2017.

Darryl McKenzie said he’s always rented, but he would like to own a house.

“To me, a house is the best thing to have,” he said. “But there just don’t seem to be any houses available … and a lot of people just don’t have money to buy.”

Local housing experts point to after effects of the housing market crash that helped trigger the Great Recession in 2008, which left some racial minorities with poor credit and others wary of buying a house because of adjustable rate mortgages and other risky subprime loan products.

“A lot of minorities got into loans that were not good,” said Patricia Gilmore-Wilkins, executive director of the Greater Kansas City Housing Information Center. “They had bad loans, so a lot of them are still upside down.”

According to data from RealtyTrac, a real estate information company, pre-recession foreclosure rates were highest in the more diverse neighborhoods of Kansas City, but were still not as bad as during the recession. In 2010, the foreclosure rates in those diverse areas increased even higher, data show.

“The older I get, I keep thinking about leaving something behind for my kids,” said 46-year-old Willie Hill, an African-American Kansas Citian who said he’s always rented.

But putting together a downpayment for a house is difficult, he said.

Some experts say potential African-American buyers have reservations about entering the housing market because of questions and doubts about the process.

Research by the Federal National Mortgage Association, the government-sponsored mortgage securitization company better known as Freddie Mac, indicates few potential homebuyers know about pre-qualification education programs.

“One of the whys is education. Being educated on real estate: how to buy a home, how to take care of a home, what you need for credit, what counts for credit,” said Victor Frederick, president of the Kansas City chapter of the National Association of Black Real Estate Brokers. “The other thing is people were just scared off from trying to buy a home, and they can’t qualify. A lot of people couldn’t qualify after they raised the lending standards.

“Between the high unemployment, the skepticism and then the ruthless practices of some of the mortgage companies around here, those things combined cut down on the application levels, spoken from a realtor’s point of view.”

The total number of home loan applications in Kansas City fell between 2005 and 2015: by 80 percent for blacks, 52 percent for Hispanics, and 46 percent for whites, according to Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data.

“African-Americans don’t apply for mortgages at the same rates that whites do. Part of it is because of confidence, navigating the system, lack of information,” said Turner Pettway, president and chief executive of Neighborhood Housing Services of Kansas City Inc.

“If you don’t know a lot about the system, it’s very hard to learn by experience. It can be expensive.”

And when minorities do apply for home loans in Kansas City, there’s a history of being denied at higher rates than whites.

Income disparity among whites and minorities alone does not account for the gap between homeownership rates.

Data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act for Kansas City show that blacks who made 120 percent or more of the metro median income were still denied at rates twice that of whites.

Lenders say loans are not made solely on income, but also credit histories, debt burdens and net worth of applicants.

Cardelia Walker isn’t surprised to hear statistics describing lower homeownership rates among minorities. Walker, a licensed real estate agent in Kansas and Missouri, often works with clients in predominantly black communities.

She deals with clients who don’t often know the intricacies of applying for a mortgage. She stresses the merits of homebuyer education, while also acknowledging that the Great Recession has turned people off from the prospects of owning a home.

“It’s a lack of information, it’s a lack of knowledge, it’s a feeling that it’s so intimidating,” Walker said. “And it’s partly people who went through the crash who lost their homes. They’re the naysayers. They say you don’t want to go through that.”