Wichita City Council member James Clendenin resigns amid investigation, controversy

Under investigation for potential abuse of CARES Act funds and facing ouster proceedings for participating in a political scandal during the 2019 Wichita mayoral race, Wichita City Council member James Clendenin plans to resign by the end of the year, he announced Tuesday.

“It would be extremely selfish and unproductive for me to continue in my council position if other events in any way diverted attention from the important city work that must go on,” Clendenin said Tuesday from the City Council bench as he read from a prepared statement.

Clendenin is the longest serving member on the City Council and faced the possibility of being the first council member ousted in the city’s 150-year history. His resignation is effective Dec. 31.

Clendenin is one of three Wichita Republican officeholders behind the “Protect Wichita Girls” video, a political advertisement that falsely accused Mayor Brandon Whipple of sexual harassment, and a plot to blame former Sedgwick County GOP Chairman Dalton Glasscock for the bogus ad.

The video was meant to help former Mayor Jeff Longwell, one of Clendenin’s closest allies on the council.

The two other Republicans involved — state Rep. Michael Capps and former Sedgwick County Commissioner Michael O’Donnell — were both voted out of office this year.

Following the November election, O’Donnell resigned after being informed that Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett planned to oust him based on an investigation into the video and subsequent cover-up.

Bennett later filed a petition in district court seeking to remove Clendenin from his seat on the council. Clendenin has not responded to Bennett’s filing in court and was granted an extension until Dec. 30, court records show. Clendenin’s decision to resign would render the move to oust him moot.

The ouster effort arose after Clendenin, Capps and O’Donnell were secretly recorded by Matthew Colborn, the young video entrepreneur hired to produce the false ad targeting Whipple. That recording captured the three politicians plotting to lay blame for the false ad on Glasscock, a close friend of O’Donnell and his former campaign manager.

Bennett’s petition to remove Clendenin said he had engaged in criminal and unethical conduct that made him unfit to hold public office.

Bennett said Clendenin broke multiple laws:

▪ Aiding and abetting criminal false communications — After the video smearing Whipple published, Clendenin knew it was false but denied any knowledge or involvement in interviews with reporters. He waited 18 days to tell the video producer to take down the video.

▪ Criminal false communications — Clendenin advised Capps to lie on a radio program to shift the blame onto Glasscock.

▪ Soliciting illegal donations — Clendenin and O’Donnell asked donors to write checks to the Fourth and Long Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity founded and controlled by Capps, for the purpose of a political campaign, which is illegal. The money was funneled through the charity to pay Colborn for producing the Whipple attack ad.

▪ Violating the City Council’s Code of Ethics — Clendenin’s role in attacking Whipple and Glasscock with false allegations broke the city’s code of ethics, showing he “willfully neglect(ed) to perform any duty enjoined upon (him) by law.”

Earlier this month, Bennett confirmed an investigation into Clendenin and Capps. Nearly a half a million dollars in coronavirus relief aid that went to entities under their control, the same companies and nonprofit charity used to fund and launch the attack ad in 2019.

Clendenin has not responded to questions about his role in the CARES Act awards. He did not discuss any specifics on Tuesday.

“This is neither the time nor the place for discussing or debating the specifics of allegations being made against me or why I’m choosing today and this forum to make this announcement,” Clendenin said. “Let it be enough, for now, that I recognize that I have become a distraction from the critically important work of this council and from this city that I love and have served for nearly a decade. I cannot in good conscience allow that to continue.”

Era of uncertainty

Clendenin’s resignation brings an end to a ten-year stint on the City Council book-ended by economic turmoil.

In 2011, Clendenin ran on a platform of job creation as an outsider with no political experience.

He was endorsed by then-Mayor Carl Brewer, the Wichita Area Builders Association, Wichita Independent Business Association and the Wichita Eagle editorial board at the time. His candidacy received an eleventh-hour boost when his opponent, anti-abortion activist Mark Gietzen, was arrested for traffic charges three weeks before the election.

He leaves office as the longest tenured City Council member in the term-limit era. He won re-election in 2013 and 2017 and would have been prohibited from seeking another consecutive term on the council. His resignation follows months of calls by members of his own party to step down.

Throughout the pandemic, he voted against the city taking an active role in the fight against the coronavirus, sparring with Whipple on a temporary mask ordinance in July. Then last month he voted against allowing the county to enforce its public health order in city limits.

Clendenin was first elected to the Wichita City Council as the city grappled with aviation layoffs in the aftermath of the Great Recession. He replaced Jim Skelton, whose term ended early when he was elected to the Sedgwick County Commission.

In an election that put five of seven seats on the council up for grabs, Clendenin, O’Donnell and Pete Meitzner joined the council as newcomers. Brewer and Longwell kept their seats.

Clendenin’s major projects on the council included helping save the Starlight Drive-In outdoor movie theater in southeast Wichita and closing Clapp Golf Course to replace it with a mixture of commercial development and green space. The course closed in 2019, and no plan for its redevelopment has been approved.

Clendenin said Tuesday that he’s also proud of helping shape a new South Central Community Master Plan and opening a new branch library in southeast Wichita.

Clendenin often sided with Longwell on the city’s biggest and most controversial decisions of the past decade.

He joined Longwell in a 5-2 vote against re-opening a contested bid on the new terminal at Eisenhower Airport in 2012 after the city awarded the contract to the higher of two bidders, a team that poured thousands of dollars into Longwell’s campaign account around the time the council was considering a challenge to the bid.

He also sided with Longwell in a 4-3 vote to change the selection criteria in the bidding process for the Northwest Water Treatment Facility in 2018 after Jacobs Engineering beat out Wichita Water Partners, a team of contractors that had given Longwell gifts in the form of golfing rounds. Jacobs later dropped out and Wichita Water Partners was awarded the contract as the sole bidder on the largest capital project in the city’s history.

Both Clendenin and Longwell in a 4-2 vote approved city incentives for a River Vista Apartments project on the west bank of the Arkansas River near First Street and McLean despite accusations that backdoor dealings had spoiled the Request For Proposal process. The same developers have leveraged their experience on the west bank to get millions more in city subsidies for a planned development near Riverfront Stadium.

Clendenin cast what was ultimately the swing vote to allow corporations and PACs to contribute to candidates in city elections in 2016.

Clendenin, along with the rest of the City Council, also supported tearing down Lawrence-Dumont Stadium and building a new $75 million ballpark to attract a Triple-A baseball team to Wichita. After construction on the new stadium had started, details of a secret deal surfaced that showed the team would not commit unless the city sold the team owners prime riverfront land for $1 an acre.

Clendenin said in March 2019 that a Triple-A ballpark was just “one piece of the puzzle” in increasing Wichita’s national profile and that it would help serve as an anchor for other development downtown and around the stadium that would require millions in public and private investment. “It’s time that we put on our big boy pants and be big boys and girls and drive this community forward with bold action,” he said at the time.

Clendenin’s changing story

Clendenin has kept a low profile on the council recently, casting votes without speaking for several weeks, and largely avoided answering questions from reporters since Whipple filed a defamation lawsuit against him in October.

Bennett’s ouster petition quotes extensively from a recent interview with Clendenin and text messages obtained by investigators, providing a new level of detail to Clendenin’s role.

Clendenin’s version of events surrounding the smear video campaign has continued to shift as new evidence surfaces.

When the video first posted online last October, he denied any involvement or knowledge of who made the video.

The District Attorney’s filing shows Clendenin knew the attack ad was coming before it posted online and later tried to delete text messages to hide his involvement.

The day before the video posted, Clendenin asked Colborn to watch one of Whipple’s campaign ads, saying Whipple was “Totally making himself look like a community family man ... he knows it’s coming,” according to the ouster petition.

Clendenin also noted that Whipple’s wife was attempting to look like a “happy little supportive wife” but it was “all about to be blown up,” the filing says.

The day after the attack ad published, Clendenin was asked by an Eagle reporter if he knew about the video or had any role in it. He said: “All I can say is I had nothing to do with the video. I’ve tried to do everything I can to stay out of this mayoral election other than the questions I’m getting about our ethics. ... I had nothing to do with this video and, honestly, it’s a pretty intense video.”

That same afternoon, after Eagle reporting showed the allegations in the video were false, Clendenin sent another text message to Colborn saying, “I seriously need to find out who burned me.”

A week later, on Oct. 25, 2019, Clendenin again said to a reporter that he had no prior knowledge of the video campaign and hadn’t participated. He also denied knowing that Colborn had produced the video.

“No, no, no, no,” Clendenin said. “That, to me, seems awfully out of character for Matt.”

In the summer, after allegations surfaced in Whipple’s lawsuit, Clendenin admitted to raising money through Capps’ charity, but he said he thought it would be used on billboard advertisements.

Clendenin told Bennett this fall that he knew Capps paid Colborn $5,000 from the Fourth and Long Foundation in October 2019 and said it was Capps’ idea to raise money through a charity.

“It was Capps’ idea to run the money raise(d) for the defamatory ad through the 51C3 (sic), which is illegal,” Clendenin told investigators, according to Bennett’s ouster petition. “Um, I, first of all don’t know that it is illegal.”

What’s next?

To replace Clendenin, the mayor must announce the vacancy at the Jan. 5, 2021 City Council meeting and set a petition deadline for selecting a replacement.

Candidate petitions must have a minimum of 100 valid signatures of qualified voters in District 3 to be filed with the City Clerk’s Office within three weeks of the announcement. District 3 includes parts of southeast and south central Wichita.

From there, the District 3 Advisory Board must hold an open and public forum to screen all candidates who have filed a petition for candidacy.

At the end of the meeting, the DAB must vote to nominate up to five candidates.

The City Council will choose a winner out of that pool of candidates. That winner would serve until the winner of the next city election is sworn into office in January 2022.

This story was originally published December 22, 2020 at 9:53 AM.