O’Donnell drops out of Sedgwick County Commission race, says he’ll resign if he wins

In a last-ditch effort to save a seat on the Sedgwick County Commission for Republicans, embattled Commissioner Michael O’Donnell announced Saturday that he’ll resign his seat even if he wins Tuesday’s election.

The first-term Republican commissioner said that if he is elected he will not accept the position and will leave the Republican precinct committee members to choose his replacement.

He is running against Sarah Lopez, a Democratic candidate.

O’Donnell has faced pressure to resign since a secret recording surfaced earlier this month. The recording showed his involvement in the cover-up of a video that falsely accused Brandon Whipple of sexual harassment during the 2019 Wichita mayoral race.

O’Donnell initially declined to resign his seat after the other county commissioners voted unanimously to censure him and ask for his resignation on Wednesday.

Dalton Glasscock, the Sedgwick County Republican Party chairman, who O’Donnell, state Rep. Michael Capps and Wichita City Council member James Clendenin sought to frame for the false anti-Whipple video, said he welcomed the news.

“The past year has caused a lot of hurt and pain,” Glasscock said. “We (Republican leadership) continue to urge Michael Capps and James Clendenin to also take responsibility as well and to let this end today.”

O’Donnell said he’s stepping down in the hope that people will still vote for him and keep his seat in Republican hands.

Of the five County Commission members, four are Republicans.

“After much prayer and consideration I’ve realized my candidacy is too much of a distraction and have arrived at the difficult decision to announce that I will not accept a 2nd term as county commissioner, if elected,” O’Donnell wrote on a Saturday afternoon Facebook post.

“This seat is more important than any one person. Our community deserves a commissioner committed to conservative values and policies that reflect our district.

“It was an honor to serve the citizens of Sedgwick County. I look forward to see the next steps the Lord has for me,” he said in the post.

Commission Chairman Pete Meitzner said he would have resigned if it had been him.

“If I would have been involved with something like that, to that extent, from what I know of the facts, I would have resigned,” Meitzner said. “I talked to him personally about that. But I still had to respect his decision (not to resign immediately).”

Meitzner said people wanting to vote for a Republican can now feel more comfortable voting for O’Donnell.

“Those that were questioning voting for Michael (O’Donnell) they now ... can vote and know that the Republican Party down in that precinct will replace him with a good leader. I would hope.”

Commissioner David Dennis said, “I think he’s doing the right thing.”

“That’s what we asked him to do and I think his heart is in the right place,” Dennis said.

Of keeping the seat Republican, Dennis said: “I think that would be wonderful if we could. I just hope it’s not too late right now.”

O’Donnell’s announcement came within a couple hours of the closure of 17 advance voting stations for Tuesday’s election.

Voters will have only two more chances to weigh in and cast ballots: From 8 a.m. to noon Monday at the county election office in the downtown Historic Courthouse and at the polls on Tuesday, Election Day.

O’Donnell’s announcement came too late for four members of the Barrett family of Wichita, all registered Republicans and among the last voters to cast ballots at the “mega” early voting site at Intrust Bank Arena.

Julie Barrett said she had voted for O’Donnell in the past, but didn’t this time around.

“With the recent things, I’m not pleased,” she said.

Her son, Andrew, a student at Kansas State University, came home to vote with the family.

He said he was “surprised he stepped down, especially right now, right before the election.”

Mike Barrett said he wished he’d known about O’Donnell’s decision before he cast his ballot.

“I didn’t vote for him,” he said. But if he’d known O’Donnell would be stepping aside for another Republican, “That may have made a difference to me.”

Along with the four county commissioners, the Sedgwick County Republican Party and Republican U.S. Rep. Ron Estes called on the three officials to resign. But none of the trio of Wichita Republican officeholders has stepped down.

O’Donnell, Clendenin and Capps are currently embroiled in a civil defamation lawsuit brought by Whipple. They are also under investigation by District Attorney Marc Bennett, who will decide whether their actions constitute grounds for legal action seeking to oust them from office.

O’Donnell admitted to participating in the cover-up and to raising money for the ad. But his attorney is arguing in court that the bogus video was not defamatory because Whipple won the election. He denies participating in “the creation, production, script or initiation” of the video.

The attack ad lifted accusations from a Kansas City Star/Wichita Eagle story about alleged sexual harassment of interns by Republican senators at the Kansas Capitol, and wrongly transferred those accusations to Whipple, a House Democrat.

The ad, launched from behind the shield of an anonymous New Mexico shell company, was quickly proven false by Eagle reporting and Whipple filed his civil lawsuit to find out who was behind it. O’Donnell and Clendenin have both told Eagle reporters they raised money for the smear campaign through a 501(c)3 youth sports charity owned and operated by Capps.

Commissioner Jim Howell said he is happy to hear O’Donnell will not accept a second term.

“This is an important first step in doing what is right for all of Sedgwick County,” Howell said in an email. “I look forward to seeing his official notification to the Republican Party, allowing the voters to vote for the seat knowing a qualified replacement will be selected by our precinct captains.”

A long-tenured and controversial public official

O’Donnell’s downfall comes after a 9-year career in political office that began with his election to the Wichita City Council in April of 2011.

Seen as a rising star in conservative Republican politics, he was tapped midway through his first council term in a statewide effort by then-Gov. Sam Brownback to wrest control of the Senate from moderate Republicans.

He defeated moderate incumbent Republican Jean Schodorf in the primary and easily disposed of Democratic candidate Tim Snow, whose campaign was crippled by revelations of a history of misdemeanor crimes and lawsuits.

In 2016, three years into his four-year Senate term, O’Donnell was facing a strong challenge from Wichita school board member Lynn Rogers, who is now lieutenant governor.

Rather than face Rogers in a re-election bid, O’Donnell opted to instead challenge incumbent County Commissioner Tim Norton, then the commission’s only Democrat.

O’Donnell edged Norton out in a close race, 51% to 49%, and took office as commissioner in 2017.

The 36-year-old official’s decision to step down after the election would bring an end to a scandal-ridden tenure on the commission for a man who has grown to be one of the state’s most controversial political figures.

O’Donnell has been in public eye since 2007, when he was disqualified and removed from the Wichita City Council ballot after it was discovered he actually lived at his parents’ house in Bel Aire, a suburban city northeast of Wichita.

In 2011, when O’Donnell was elected to the City Council, he was reportedly living rent-free in a parsonage owned by Grace Baptist Church, where his father was a pastor. He was later ordered to pay more than $2,000 in back property taxes because the house was not being used as a church parsonage and thus was not tax exempt.

Trouble followed O’Donnell from the City Council to the state Capitol and finally to the County Commission.

In 2016, Wichita police announced an investigation into whether O’Donnell, then 31, had provided alcohol to an underage woman at a Wichita State University fraternity party. The investigation was eventually dropped when a witness refused to talk to police.

In 2017, O’Donnell was part of a trip that took a van that belonged to Sunrise Christian Academy, where his mother worked, to Arrowhead Stadium to celebrate O’Donnell’s 33rd birthday. A photograph showed the church van had whiskey and a case of Busch Light beer in the back.

Over the next two years, 2018-19, a federal criminal case threatened to unseat O’Donnell. He was brought up on federal wire fraud and money laundering charges for writing $10,500 in checks from his Senate campaign account to friends who didn’t do much work for his campaign.

O’Donnell fought the charges in court and in 2019 was acquitted on most of the charges. But the jury was hung on two counts of wire fraud and three counts of money laundering. Prosecutors opted not to retry those charges.

At times, he seemed to gravitate towards controversy. He claimed to be the first Kansas officeholder to endorse Donald Trump for president. Late last year, he was the first and only local official to come out against a plan to raze Century II in downtown Wichita.

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, O’Donnell has lobbied for looser restrictions on businesses and individuals, with one exception. In March, he proposed closing Trust Women Wichita Clinic, a Wichita women’s health clinic that also provides abortion services.

County Commissioner Lacey Cruse, who has sparred with O’Donnell from the bench on multiple occasions, called O’Donnell’s decision “another manipulation tactic.”

“I am absolutely not fooled by this news today,” she said Saturday. “He knows that he’s losing, and on Tuesday the voters are going to show us, and they’re going to tell us who they want.”

Contributing: Michael Stavola with The Eagle

This story was originally published October 31, 2020 at 2:33 PM.