Proposed ethics code limits gifts to Wichita officials for the first time in history
If the Wichita City Council passes a new ethics policy this spring, it will be the first overhaul of the city’s ethics policy for elected officials in 63 years. But it won’t be the first time Wichita’s city government has tried to reform in the wake of scandal.
Wichita City Council members and other members of city boards and commissions have been accused of using public office for personal gain off-and-on for more than 100 years. How the city responded has largely shaped how the city government functions.
Wichita’s proposed reform comes on the heels of several local officials being swept out of office following ethical breaches. Mayor Brandon Whipple said the city needs a new ethics code to protect the elected officials who remain in office from allegations of impropriety and to hold them accountable.
The City Council has spent more than a year drafting the code of ethics and brought in representatives from the National League of Cities to review the proposal. The council is expected to hold a workshop on the ordinance on April 27 and vote on it in May.
Among the proposed changes — a ban on gifts of more than $150 a year, whistleblower protections, an ethics advisory board and penalties for violations.
Controversy has dogged Wichita government for the past several years, throwing a cloud of suspicion over nearly every major decision the city makes. From backdoor deals to smear campaigns to botched bidding processes and accusations of favoritism — a barrage of unethical behavior has provided fodder for outside groups looking to block the city’s plans.
“I’ve been having trouble convincing the Council that until we fix our ethics, and restore trust, it’s going to be a constant fight,” Whipple said. “People are going to be suspicious of everything we do until we pass an ethics policy that has real teeth.
“Now the council is on board with making things better, and I think we’re going to have stronger policy because of it,” Whipple said.
Familiar cycle
It’s a familiar cycle, in Wichita and cities across the country: elected officials get in some sort of trouble and then the governing body adopts new rules in an attempt to restore trust in local government.
In Wichita, such changes have been sporadic and drastic, Eagle research found.
At one point in the early 1900s, five out of 12 members of the City Council or their family members held contracts with the city. Unnecessary and overpriced city projects were pushed through without much fuss while city staff looked the other way, the Wichita Beacon reported at the time.
Instead of outlawing city officials from holding contracts with the city, Wichita voters changed the city’s entire form of government — twice, moving from a mayor-council form to a City Commission and then hiring a professional city manager to run the day-to-day operations.
The changes were aimed at divorcing local government — and its essential services such as public safety, water, sewer and road construction — from politics and special interests. The city manager would stand in the way of self-dealing by council members, proponents argued.
It took another 50 years for Wichita’s elected officials to formally ban board members from doing business with the city and voting on contracts with any business associates, family members or friends. The move came as the city’s elected officials positioned themselves to have a more active role in approving city contracts. But they never defined friends.
The proposed overhaul of that ethics code would, for the first time, cap the value of gifts Wichita’s mayor and City Council members can receive from people doing or planning to do business with the city at $150 a year and require disclosure of gifts worth $50 or more.
A friend would be defined as “an individual that has a close connection with an official formed by frequent social interaction,” but that definition is subject to change.
It would establish a whistleblower hotline and protections for those who want to report a violation. An Ethics Advisory Board to be appointed by the mayor and council would handle complaints against the mayor, council members and any members of city boards or commissions.
Violations of the ethics code would result in a fine between $100 and $1,000 for each violation.
What about memes?
Whipple, who promised ethics reform during his 2019 campaign, has been met with resistance by some City Council members who see his crusade for ethics reform as a political maneuver or a politically motivated attack against council members themselves.
Whipple’s own ethics have been called into question over his wife’s Political Action Committee that was set up to allow donors — including Evergy, construction firm McCownGordon, the city’s police and fire labor unions, developers Jeff Lange and billionaire Phil Ruffin, and Brandon Steven-owned Eddy’s Toyota — to pour thousands of dollars into Whipple’s inauguration gala, donations that exceeded what the donors could have given directly to a candidate’s campaign account.
The fight over ethics has at times gotten nasty. A January council meeting on the ethics ordinance ended with Whipple tossing a stack of printed-out internet memes at City Council member Jeff Blubaugh, who had accused Whipple’s wife of paying for memes out of the Wichita’s Future PAC account.
Blubaugh has been the most vocal council member in his criticism of the ethics proposal, questioning Whipple’s motivation for reform and whether it will create a climate of fear on the council and city boards. He has been pushing for a cyberbullying amendment to the ordinance aimed at punishing Whipple, a Democrat, for memes posted and shared by the mayor’s friends and political supporters making fun of local Republicans.
Blubaugh, who owns a real-estate company, also questions whether it’s a conflict of interest for Whipple, who lectures at Wichita State University, and Vice Mayor Brandon Johnson, whose wife works at Wichita State and whose consulting company has been paid by the university to provide diversity training, to vote on matters involving Wichita State.
City Manager Robert Layton is also an adjunct instructor at Wichita State. City Council member Bryan Frye works full time as senior director of investor relations “expanding new and existing investor relationships” for the Kansas Chamber, a Topeka-based business group that exists primarily to lobby for pro-business legislation at the statehouse.
Other council members have said they support the ethics policy. The first week of April, council members took the proposed ordinance to their District Advisory Boards for feedback.
Frye, seen by some as a leading challenger in the 2023 mayoral election, told his advisory board that he supports a new ethics ordinance.
“It’s certainly needed, it’s time for it,” Frye said.
The proposed ordinance says officials of the city shall “avoid the appearance of improper influence and refrain from ever receiving, soliciting or accepting gifts, gratuities, hospitality, favors or anything of value for the official, or their family, valued over ONE HUNDRED FIFTY DOLLARS ($150.00) from a specific donor within a 12-month period, which is intended or has the appearance or effect of influencing the performance of the official duties of an official.”
All gifts valued at $50 or more must be reported once a year to what would be a newly created ethics advisory board.
At the city’s Social Media Town Hall on ethics last month, some expressed concern that disclosures should be timely so the public can have access to that information when council members vote on different items.
Others said the City Council should focus on campaign finance and making sure members don’t approve contracts or give favorable treatment to their campaign donors.
A 2015 City Council decision allowed limited liability companies and political action committees to give directly to candidates. Some of the city’s developers and business owners have taken advantage of the law change, giving thousands of dollars to council member campaigns using dozens of LLCs.
Frye, who voted against allowing LLCs to give to candidates in 2015, said he is interested in looking at campaign finance reform.
“Campaign ethics reform is a different beast and has to be dealt with separately,” Frye said.
Whipple acknowledged that ethics reform is a first step in a multi-prong effort to build trust in Wichita’s elected officials.
“After we get ethics reform, we can start looking at other areas we need to improve, like campaign finance,” he said. “But without gift limits and whistleblower protections, campaign finance reform would be almost entirely meaningless.”
Put another way, Whipple said, “What’s the point of regulating campaign finance when a donor can circumvent that by giving gifts straight to council members, completely off the books?”
A ‘civic tailspin’
Wichita’s elected officials passed their first code of ethics in 1958 to stamp out accusations of self-dealing and cronyism and restore public confidence in City Hall.
The five-member City Commission — often operating in secret, closed-door meetings — voted to halt work on city streets, put the brakes on a master traffic plan and refused to approve bonds for the city’s sewer system.
Conflicts of interest on city boards and commissions had grown to astounding levels. More than half of all appointees were doing business directly with the city, working for a company doing business with the city, or living outside the city limits. After passing a code of ethics that would have removed more than 100 appointees, the City Commission did not enforce the restrictions and allowed most to stay.
Commissioners used the secret meetings to plot how to fire top city officials, cut entire departments and air grievances against one another without press coverage, The Eagle reported at the time.
Wichita government had become a regional spectacle, with the Kansas City Star reporting the Air Capital of the World was in a “civic tailspin.”
When the city officials got caught running Wichita in the shadows, the Commission held another closed-door meeting to find out who was leaking information to the newspapers. City staff was directed to check City Hall for “bugs” that might be recording the secret meetings.
The code of ethics was part of an ambitious, 24-page ordinance drafted by then-Mayor E.E. Baird setting out the rules and procedures for the City Commission aimed at restoring public confidence in city leaders.
The code prohibited commissioners and their appointees from benefiting financially from city contracts, directly or indirectly.
“In addition to the matters of pecuniary interest, commissioners shall refrain from making use of special knowledge or information before it is made available to the general public; shall refrain from making decisions involving business associates, customers, clients, friends and competitors; shall refrain from repeated and continued violations of Commission rules,” the ordinance said.
The City Attorney was put in charge of ruling on any violations, which could result in a censure by the City Commission or serve as grounds for recall or ouster from office.
The existing Wichita ethics ordinance has remained virtually unchanged since 1958.
Commissioner A.E. Howse, a friend of President Eisenhower, said at the time the code of ethics was so strong that it would “settle the matter of conflict of interest, once and for all.”
Rules not enforced
Those same rules were in place in 2019, when Eagle reporting showed how former Mayor Jeff Longwell steered a $500 million water plant contract to construction executives after they paid for his golf outings and meals while the project was open for bidding.
Longwell said the contractors were just friends. The contractors confirmed they were friends. Under the city’s code of ethics that prohibits voting on contracts involving friends, Longwell shouldn’t have been involved in the decision.
City Attorney Jennifer Magana declined to make any public ruling on Longwell’s behavior and would not comment on discussions she had with him, citing the attorney-client privilege.
The City Council — who paid an outside marketing firm $12,500 to provide interview coaching and write answers to questions put to council members about Longwell’s conduct — unanimously defended Longwell and stressed the value of relationships between city officials and contractors. Council members have avoided discussing the water plant decision during multiple workshops and City Council meetings about ethics reform.
Council members said at the time that the ethics code wasn’t clear in its definition of “friends” and largely rejected ideas proposed by Whipple, who was running for mayor at the time, and his calls for ethics reform at City Hall. They took no action to censure Longwell for violating the ethics code.
“If you start hammering down and trying to define that . . . then why are we building relationships? Because then everything can be questioned,” Council member Brandon Johnson told The Eagle during a joint meeting with then-council member James Clendenin in September 2019, after an interview-coaching session from the public relations firm Signal Theory.
Blubaugh and council members Becky Tuttle and Cindy Claycomb in 2019 declined a sit-down interview and sent identical answers to most questions posed about Longwell’s relationships and the city’s code of ethics.
“As elected officials, we are expected to build relationships in the community,” the council members wrote in separate emails.
Days later, to save Longwell’s flailing campaign, former state, county and city officials Michael Capps, Michael O’Donnell and Clendenin engineered an elaborate dark-money smear campaign against Whipple. Clendenin, a council member at the time, had been one of Longwell’s fiercest defenders and said he was “shocked and let down” by Whipple’s calls for reform.
Clendenin said the mayor’s race had been hard on him and his fellow council members, who he said had continued “working with integrity and honesty for the citizens of Wichita.”
In the background, Clendenin and former Sedgwick County Commissioner O’Donnell were raising funds for an attack campaign against Whipple that falsely accused him of sexual harassment.
The officials laundered campaign donations from Longwell-supporting developers and construction magnates through Capps’ Fourth and Long Foundation sports charity. The smear video was launched online under the auspices of an anonymous New Mexico shell company.
Secretly recorded audio released a year later showed Capps, O’Donnell and Clendenin also fabricated a cover-up story that sought to shift the blame on former Sedgwick County Republican Party Chairman Dalton Glasscock.
Whipple filed a defamation lawsuit against the three Republican officials — Capps, O’Donnell and Clendenin.
Capps, a state representative, and O’Donnell, a county commissioner, both lost in the 2020 election.
The City Council, sans Whipple and Clendenin, passed a resolution condemning Clendenin for breaking the ethics code and asked him to “consider the will of his constituents ... as he makes decisions about the future of his term as a City Council Member.”
Clendenin resigned at the end of the year after the DA’s office filed an ouster petition that accused him, among other things, of violating the city’s code of ethics.
Whipple said the city’s ethics ordinance seeks to penalize those sorts of behaviors.
“The gifts, the trips, the undue influencing, the money laundering, the hit jobs and just overall dishonest conduct — the ethics reform would make it so those could be handled without an investigation by The Eagle or someone filing a lawsuit or the District Attorney getting involved,” he said.
This story was originally published April 18, 2021 at 4:17 AM.