After resignation, Michael O’Donnell asked Sedgwick County for money for new employer
Sedgwick County commissioners delayed a $36,000 payment to Mayflower Clinic on Tuesday after the nonprofit’s founder failed to disclose the involvement of former Sedgwick County Commissioner Michael O’Donnell, who resigned from the commission in November amid scandal and is now the health clinic’s executive director.
Commissioners Lacey Cruse and Sarah Lopez said they don’t feel comfortable giving taxpayer money to an organization that is associated with O’Donnell, given his admitted history of misusing money.
In 2018, he was indicted and later acquitted on federal charges of money laundering and wire fraud for paying friends out of his campaign account.
Earlier this year, he admitted that the payments were violations of the state’s campaign finance laws and agreed to pay a $12,500 fine to the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission.
O’Donnell resigned after a yearlong investigation by The Eagle showed how he and two other Republican officials — former state Rep. Michael Capps and former City Council member James Clendenin — sought to frame the county’s GOP chairman for a falsified ad they put together smearing then-mayoral candidate Brandon Whipple with false accusations of sexual harassment.
O’Donnell was a chief fundraiser for the dark-money attack ad and helped develop the script, court records from a lawsuit filed by Whipple show.
O’Donnell admitted to The Eagle that he funneled money through a nonprofit youth sports charity in an effort to protect donors, a move experts said violates federal law.
Commissioners David Dennis and Jim Howell expressed support for the Mayflower project, saying it would help offset a staff shortage at the county’s COMCARE mental health center.
“We’re 200 people short,” Dennis said. “I don’t care what happens. We’re looking at an option here to have some assistance for behavioral health, our number one issue. And why are we arguing about this today? . . . Because one person is involved in it that two people don’t like.”
O’Donnell’s apparent ties to the Mayflower project came to light after Cruse pressed founder and local entrepreneur Abdul Arif for answers on who actually works for the clinic. Cruse asked Arif to name the organization’s staff members, outreach coordinators and fundraisers.
Arif named several staff members, but failed to mention O’Donnell, who county officials later said had initially made the request from the county on Mayflower’s behalf.
“Why are you hiding that?” Cruse said. “That, to me, seems not very transparent. If you’re not transparent in this public meeting, how are you going to be transparent behind closed doors and when you’re not in front of a camera?”
“This just gets a little tricky with those who are involved,” Cruse said. “It seems a little disingenuous, considering that you know the person proposing it originally does not have the best history, and it kind of seems like someone knows how to work a system. And so that’s what he’s doing, and it kind of pains me that you wouldn’t mention that he’s working on this with you.”
The clinic has avoided publicly disclosing O’Donnell’s role. He is not listed on Mayflower Clinic’s website and the clinic refused to say whether he worked there when asked by The Eagle in April.
“We did not bring him up, and we did not bring him here because we thought that may introduce some kind of conflict because of his past,” Amanda Lamm, clinic coordinator of Mayflower Clinic, told commissioners Tuesday.
But behind the scenes, O’Donnell and Arif approached county administrators this spring asking for $36,000, a dollar amount that’s small enough it could have been approved by County Manager Tom Stolz without bringing it before the commission.
Arif said, “Michael O’Donnell is an unnecessary distraction to the process. The real client is the working men and women of Wichita.”
“I feel like your questioning is unnecessarily distracting to the effort we have here,” Arif told Cruse. “And I would appreciate if you stay on the focus of how I can help the working men and women in Wichita, please.”
“I feel like it’s 100 percent relevant,” Cruse said. “So I guess we can disagree on that.”
“If Michael O’Donnell wasn’t involved in this in any way, shape or form, we wouldn’t be having this discussion,” Dennis said. “It would have breezed by because our number one issue that we tout constantly is behavioral health.”
The money in question Tuesday would ostensibly fund a mental health start-up program for Mayflower, a health clinic for the uninsured that relies largely on volunteer physicians and does not provide mental health services at this time. A recent county staff report cast doubt on whether the clinic would help boost the county’s mental health care services.
Arif said the clinic wants to focus on Wichita’s Hispanic community and has a goal of 10 patients a week. It would be open noon-5 p.m., Wednesday-Sunday.
But many mental health patients who typically interact with the county — through its jail or COMCARE — would likely be ineligible.
“We’ll have a good screening process,” Arif said. “We would like to stay away from patients that have some violence in their background or some addiction issues so that they don’t crash before we get started. And we want to make sure that we start slow and easy and then work our way up to a little bit more difficult and challenging type of patients.”
A July 30 county assessment of Mayflower’s proposal said it “may not be the right proposal, or the right time to meet Mayflower’s request.”
“The proposal takes limited resources from COMCARE to pay for care that is traditionally uncompensated,” the report says, adding that “much of the proposal focuses on what COMCARE (the county’s mental health clinic) will do to get patients to Mayflower.”
Lamm said it was not O’Donnell’s idea and that he has no involvement in health care at the clinic.
“The reason why Michael (O’Donnell) was one of the first people to reach out to you guys was because he is such a big contact for us,” Lamm said. “Everybody in the city knows him. Therefore, he is more aware of opportunities like this than we are, which is why we were not the first people to come to you.”
Cruse said questions surrounding O’Donnell’s previous mishandling of money should be a deal breaker.
“When someone has been charged by the federal government for crimes handling money, and you come and ask the government for money — he comes and asks the government for money — there is a red flag that goes up with me,” Cruse said.
O’Donnell was federally indicted in 2018 and stood trial in 2019 for wire fraud and money laundering charges related to paying out $10,500 in campaign funds to friends and trying to cover it up. He was acquitted of most charges.
In January, O’Donnell admitted to the state ethics commission that he funneled $10,500 from his campaign accounts to his personal checking account and to four friends, whom he falsely reported as campaign workers, according to a consent decree approved by the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission.
Despite Cruse’s objections, the proposal is likely to resurface in a few weeks.
Lopez, who defeated O’Donnell in the November election, said she would be in favor of funding Mayflower if county staff decides it’s appropriate.
Commission Chairman Pete Meitzner said he agrees county staff should do another assessment of Mayflower’s proposal and come back with a recommendation as early as two weeks from Tuesday.
“I think all commissioners knew that Michael O’Donnell was involved in this from the very beginning,” Howell said. “I don’t know that that’s a relevant point. The point, I think, is that there’s a mental health clinic that’s coming to us asking for some help to get on their feet. I believe they will be accountable to us.”
Lopez she said she won’t support funding Mayflower until she understands exactly where the money would go.
“To be perfectly honest, I think it would be really helpful for us to know exactly how the money that we give is going to be spent just because of who’s involved,” Lopez said. “And I hate that that’s the way it is, but just to make sure that our community feels like that money is being put to the right use.”
Arif said the $36,000 isn’t much money to the county.
“Thirty-six thousand dollars is a rounding error,” Arif said. “It’s not a lot of money for the county.”
“Thirty-six thousand dollars might not be a ton of money to you,” Lopez said. “But it is a lot of money, and this is taxpayer money that we’re discussing here.”
“Every dollar is a lot of money,” Howell said. “I don’t want to waste any taxpayer money, but we do have an enormous problem in Sedgwick County with mental health.”
This story was originally published August 17, 2021 at 2:46 PM.