Wichita misled feds in applying for $4 million grant that profits City Hall insiders

The Wichita city manager’s office used outdated and misleading COVID-19 data on deaths among Wichita’s Black population to secure a $4 million federal grant that pays hundreds of thousands of dollars to a consultant who recently worked at City Hall and a subcontractor with close personal ties to Vice Mayor Brandon Johnson.

By voting to award the grant, Johnson also approved paying his wife’s best friend $210,000 — part of a no-bid contract to handle marketing for the Wichita Black Alliance’s Facts Not Fear ICT campaign, which aims to improve health literacy in Wichita’s racial and ethnic minority populations in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The federal grant was awarded by the City Council to Community Connections Consulting Services on Aug. 3. It aims to improve social distancing, mask wearing, COVID-19 testing and vaccinations through marketing and to provide information on testing and vaccination sites, aid for food and housing and mental health services “in a culturally relevant and sensitive manner that will resonate” with Black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American communities, records show.

Eagle research on the city’s grant application materials, secretary of state business filings, company websites and social media posts found previously undisclosed connections between the grant recipients and public officials who applied for and approved it on behalf of the city. The findings raise fundamental questions about honesty, transparency, oversight and favoritism in a multi-million-dollar federal grant program aimed at improving Wichita’s COVID-19 response.

The Eagle investigation also uncovered several possible breaches of the city’s ethics law by Johnson, from doing city business with friends and private business associates to appointing a friend to a city board.

The Eagle also found that the city representative who filled out the federal grant application for City Hall, Sarah Milligan, an aide in the city manager’s office, was hired by the consulting company that received the $4 million grant after her employment with the city ended.

Johnson said he sought advice from the city attorney before voting on the project. He added that neither he nor his wife will directly benefit from the federal grant.

The city attorney’s office declined to comment for this story through a city spokesperson.

“The City does not see a conflict,” the spokesperson said in a written response to questions on the former city officials who are now handling the grant through a private company.

Misleading numbers

The Office of Minority Health, a branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, awarded Wichita the $4 million grant because of a “compelling need” for improved health literacy among Black Wichitans, records show.

To get the grant, the city manager’s office applied in late April, claiming the effects of COVID-19 had been, and continue to be, “nothing short of catastrophic” for racial and ethnic minorities in Wichita.

The city falsely claimed in its application that Black people represented 6% of the Sedgwick County population and 30% of its COVID-19 deaths.

Those numbers were out of date and did not apply to Sedgwick County, The Eagle found.

They were accurate for the state of Kansas, not the county, when they were first reported by The Eagle in May 2020 — two months after Sedgwick County’s first COVID case and 11 months before the city applied for the grant.

Sedgwick County data shows that by the time the city applied for the health literacy grant, Black residents accounted for a lower share of COVID deaths than their share of the Sedgwick County population, representing 9% of the county population and 7% of COVID-19 deaths. For comparison, white people made up 64% of the county population and 69% of deaths.

At the state level, Black people now represent 12.4% of the population and 8% of the COVID-related deaths.

Despite those publicly available numbers, federal grant reviewers took the city at its word, records show.

It’s unclear from the city’s grant application and a federal review whether anyone in government has independently vetted the Facts Not Fear ICT project.

In an evaluation of the grant application, provided to The Eagle by the city, the federal grant reviewer repeatedly misspelled Wichita and left 16 out of 20 criteria meant to measure the strengths and weaknesses of the project completely blank.

“The applicant demonstrates a compelling need for increased awareness and outreach to the Black and Hispanic residents of Witchita (sic),” according to the review. “There is also clear indication that the target population has low health literacy as well, which contributes to the high statistics that shows 30% of COVID-19 deaths are amongst the Black population. The applicant provides strong data that shows the disparities for Blacks and Hispanics living in Witchita (sic).”

The city manager’s office did not answer who in that office reviewed the data before applying for the federal grant.

The grant application was filed under Assistant City Manager Donte Martin’s name, but it was signed electronically by Sarah Milligan, a management fellow in the city manager’s office at the time. She was also responsible for the city’s research used to draft its new ethics policy.

Milligan’s fellowship at the city ended in May, a month after the city applied for the grant. After the City Council awarded the grant to Community Connections in August, she was hired at the consulting firm to work on the grant project. She is set to receive $80,000 over two years.

“I don’t believe I did anything wrong by accepting the position, because when I applied for it, I had no way of knowing what would happen with the grant,” she said in a written response to questions.

Milligan, who compiled the grant application materials and submitted them to the Office of Minority Health, would not say who introduced the misleading COVID-19 death data into the application.

“The application was put together by a team of people working hard to try to find ways to attempt to correct historical health inequities and prevent further loss of life due to COVID-19,” she wrote. “I merely played a coordinating role, and it would be inappropriate for me to try to speak to things beyond that role.”

Jim Jonas, the city’s director of strategic communications, acknowledged in a written statement that the numbers came from a May 2020 news article but disagreed with The Eagle’s characterization of the data used to get the grant.

“The assertion that the grant proposal’s data was ‘wildly’ (your description) out of date is factually inaccurate,” Jonas wrote, pointing to other data submitted on COVID-19 case rates, testing and vaccinations by ethnicity, which were timely.

He did not explain how the outdated death count became one of the city’s key pillars in its grant application.

“The bottom line is that both the hard data used in the project grant proposal, along with historic and contemporary realities, make it crystal clear that underserved communities in Wichita are in critical need of targeted COVID outreach and health literacy efforts,” he wrote. “We’re proud to be moving forward with this campaign with the support of the HHS Office of Minority Health.”

Pay bump

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services grant went to Community Connections Consulting Services, LLC, a consulting firm whose owner and chief executive, Angeline Johnson, worked in the city manager’s office on a separate fellowship as recently as June.

She is not related to Brandon Johnson or his spouse, Danielle, but she listed Danielle on her company’s website as a business associate at the time the council voted to approve the grant.

Danielle Johnson is executive director of Wichita Habitat for Humanity, co-owns a diversity training business — Inclusive Growth Strategies — with her husband and serves as vice chair of the Sedgwick County Democratic Party.

Under the city’s ethics code, Johnson should have disclosed the association and abstained from voting. Instead, he moved to approve the grant award, was the most vocal proponent of the proposal and voted in favor of awarding the grant.

He declined to respond to questions about the potential ethics violation.

“I stand behind the work that the Wichita Black Alliance has done, the lives saved, and the work that will come from this wonderful opportunity to impact more lives within the Latino, Asian, Native, and African-American communities in Wichita,” Johnson said in a written statement.

Johnson is a founding member of the Wichita Black Alliance and his company, Inclusive Growth Strategies, handled payments for the Facts Not Fear campaign in 2020, which was funded by a CARES Act grant from Sedgwick County.

The ethics code says council members “shall refrain” from “making decisions involving business associates, customers, clients, friends and competitors” and “shall refrain from using their influence as members of the governing body in attempts to secure contracts, zoning or other favorable municipal action for friends, customers, clients, immediate family members or business associates.”

The City Council created an Ethics Advisory Board in April to investigate potential violations. But several board seats remain vacant, preventing it from meeting before the November election, in which Johnson is running to retain his seat.

Angeline Johnson’s $130,000 a year salary for two years represents a pay bump of $50,000 a year compared to what she made in the city manager’s office, where she oversaw the city’s Opportunity Zones program.

She worked as Wichita’s chief engagement and Opportunity Zones officer 2019-2021 on a fellowship for FUSE Corps, a nonprofit that aims to expand social and economic opportunities, “especially for communities that have been limited by a history of systemic and institutionalized racism,” according to the organization’s mission statement.

“She was working close with me, trying to get neighborhood development as a part of our opportunity zones program,” Brandon Johnson said. “Unfortunately, we never saw that take off.”

Brandon Johnson said Wichita has had very low participation in its Opportunity Zones program, which offered deferred tax rates to businesses investing in designated areas.

“We never got the type of affordable-housing, neighborhood-development stuff that I was pushing for,” he said. “But she (Angeline) was really helping with that.”

Friends and supporters

Also benefiting from the grant is Ti’Juana Hardwell, a Democratic precinct committeewoman and close family friend of Vice Mayor Johnson and Danielle Johnson. As the project manager and subcontractor of the grant program, she is set to make $210,000 in salary over two years.

Neither Hardwell, owner of Mamarazzi Communications, nor Angeline Johnson has experience running a public health campaign outside of the Facts Not Fear campaign, according to their resumes provided by the city and included in the grant application.

Angeline Johnson’s experience includes multiple short-term economic development and education-related projects for nonprofits and municipal governments across the country. Her private, for-profit company, Community Connections, was registered in Ohio in 2019 and incorporated in Kansas in April 2021. Its only project to date appears to be the Facts Not Fear campaign.

Hardwell is a local activist and hip hop promoter. On her resume, her company’s top bullet point for relevant experience is NBA Hall of Fame point guard Gary Payton, with no date or description of the work completed. A representative for Payton did not respond to questions.

Hardwell’s top reference on her resume is Danielle Johnson.

In a 2020 interview with Vibe Wichita, Hardwell described Danielle Johnson as her best friend.

“Of course you know my best friend, Danielle Johnson. She’s someone who has always been a soundboard for me,” Hardwell said in the interview.

Hardwell’s relationship with the Johnsons goes back at least a decade, social media posts show. At the Johnsons’ 2011 wedding, Hardwell was the maid of honor.

But Hardwell’s ties to the Johnsons extend beyond personal relationships.

When Brandon Johnson ran for City Council in 2017, Hardwell was one of his most vocal supporters online. This year, her company donated to his re-election campaign. (Angeline Johnson also donated to his campaign as an individual.)

Once on the City Council, Johnson used his influence to Hardwell’s benefit. He appointed her to the Animal Control Advisory Board, another potential violation of the ethics ordinance, which prohibits council members from appointing friends or business associates to city boards.

He promoted her work on his social media pages and applauded her community organizing in his district. She urged her followers to vote for Johnson. Sometimes his work for the city and her activism overlapped: in 2020, they worked together to protest a payday loan business near 13th Street and Oliver. And they were key figures in the formation of the Wichita Black Alliance, an unofficial coalition that includes several Black state and local officials, including Brandon Johnson.

When the Johnsons bought a house this fall, Hardwell was their Realtor.

“The mere notion that favoritism is why my minority and women-led business has a seat at the table is insulting,” Hardwell wrote in response to The Eagle’s questions about whether her relationship with the Johnsons had any role in her involvement in the project.

“I do believe that your privilege may afford you the luxury of not realizing how small the Black community in Wichita, KS truly is,” she wrote. “When it comes to hiring a minority marketing and communications firm in Sedgwick County, there are few. There are even fewer that are willing to take on work of this magnitude. And still there are fewer with a meaningful rapport within the under-served community that this particular grant seeks to inform through health literacy.”

“I buck at your insinuations and hope that as you look to do some investigative journalism, you also investigate other minority based firms in the city who have a background with this type of work.”

The Kansas Department of Commerce lists four marketing/consulting companies registered as minority-owned businesses in Kansas. The list does not include Hardwell’s Mamarazzi Communications, which was incorporated in July 2020.

James Barfield, a former planning commissioner who served on the Kansas African American Affairs Commission and is a Wichita business owner, said he’s unfamiliar with Hardwell’s work and the Facts Not Fear campaign in 2020, which was funded with more than half a million dollars in CARES Act funds awarded by Sedgwick County and targeted Wichita’s Black population. The new campaign is an extension of that work.

“If I can’t see any benefits from what you’re doing, where is the impact? . . . There’s a long history of money meant to help the Black community never finding its way there,” he said.

“I simply want to see some impact on the community. In other words, I think the money should find its way into the community, as it was intended to, not just to a few high salaries.”

Outside of salaries, Health and Human Services records show a budget of $24,000 for supplies and about $3.2 million for subcontractors, much of which will likely go to university researchers who will help with the project.

Salary and job description

Under the terms of that grant, Angeline Johnson is set to receive a salary of $260,000 for two years as project director, or $130,000 a year. That’s $25,000 more than Wichita’s mayor’s annual salary and $80,000 more than the six City Council members’ salaries.

She will manage the project’s $4 million budget and report updates and outcomes to the city of Wichita and the HHS’s Office of Minority Health.

Hardwell will receive a salary comparable to the mayor’s, at $105,000 a year for two years.

Her job description for the grant says she will set up meetings between community liaisons for the African American/Black, Hispanic/Latino, Asian and Native American populations and provide them with coaching on how to do surveys, distribute health literature. She’s also responsible for producing commercials on local television and radio stations “that have minority audiences” and securing news coverage on local TV, radio and print news outlets.

Over two years, the four community liaisons — who have not yet been hired — would each receive about $109,540 and a part-time project assistant would get more than $80,000.

Milligan, the city’s former management fellow who applied for the grant as a city official, will be the project assistant for Community Connections, she confirmed in an email.

Conflict questions

The City Council unanimously approved awarding the grant to Community Connections in August.

City officials said there was no bid on the $4 million grant award because Community Connections and the Wichita Black Alliance approached them with the grant funding opportunity.

“Without the efforts of (Community Connections) and (Wichita Black Alliance), there would not have been an application or the $4M federal award to improve health literacy among underserved populations in Wichita,” city spokesperson Megan Lovely said.

City officials say the connections between the grant recipients and City Hall don’t create any conflicts of interest but would not comment on Brandon Johnson’s ties to the project.

“The responsibility to identify conflicts of interest is the responsibility of council members,” Lovely wrote in response to written questions.

At least one council member sees conflicts of interest between the city, Vice Mayor Johnson and the grant recipients.

Council member Jeff Blubaugh voted to approve the grant in August. But he said he had reservations when he saw a photograph of Johnson’s wife, Danielle, posted on the Community Connections website listing her as an associate.

“In light of the new ethics policy Vice Mayor Johnson was so supportive of, I was surprised to see his wife’s picture on their website and listed as an associate,” Blubaugh said. “Learning that, it does raise some questions because Vice Mayor Johnson has recused himself from several votes this year due to his wife’s position with Habitat for Humanity.

“Further questions arose when I learned Angeline Johnson was the owner of the for-profit company. At the time she set up the corporation, . . . she was a contract employee with the city.”

Blubaugh took a screenshot of Danielle Johnson’s profile on the Community Connections website during the council meeting, and it recently ended up on Facebook, posted by former Republican state Rep. John Whitmer, who hosts a local talk radio show.

“If I’m a City Council person, and we’re awarding a multi-million dollar grant to an organization, I think anyone with any integrity or ethics, especially a City Council member that has been pushing ethics, would recuse himself from that vote, knowing that his wife had an association with the organization that was going to receive those funds,” Whitmer said in an interview with The Eagle.

“It’s the appearance of impropriety,” he said. “It stinks. Clearly she’s got an association with them or she wouldn’t allow them to use her picture.”

Brandon Johnson, a Democrat who recently replaced Whitmer on the Kansas Commission of Peace Officers’ Standards and Training, dismissed Whitmer’s concerns as politically motivated, calling his social media post “a frivolous attempt by Whitmer to attack my character as he has done since I was appointed to chair CPOST and replace him.”

Johnson said he doesn’t believe he did anything wrong.

“The only reason that my vote even happened that day is that we had already had a conversation about that when we (the city) applied for it (the federal grant),” Brandon Johnson said.

“I said that any dollars that came through the city, that we (Brandon Johnson and his wife) cannot be a part of it. As long as that’s understood, I’m OK with going forward. We talked with (city) legal, and legal basically said the same thing, ‘You can’t take one cent from this. You can’t be involved in it in that way.’”

“At that point, Danielle and I backed out of it. I have input as far as advising and trying to make connections for Angeline and all the liaisons and the stakeholder group, and I try to advise about how to communicate within the Black community. But, aside from that, that’s my only role in it.”

He said he sees no conflict of interest in awarding the grant.

“There aren’t a lot of Diversity and Inclusion professionals within the city of Wichita,” Johnson said. “Often these individuals network, advise and/or work together to make the best impact in the work, so it isn’t abnormal to see two or more well-known names referencing or recommending one another.

“Professionals of color are also a smaller, tight knit community building synergy to uplift one another within our city.”

In an interview with The Eagle, Danielle Johnson said she gave her permission to be listed on the website but never worked for Angeline Johnson’s company.

“I’ve never done any business for her organization,” she said. “The plan was, and this was months ago, before even the $4 million ask came up, it was ‘Hey, I have an LLC, you have an LLC, if you need someone to do diversity work, I do that. I would love to be a subcontractor under you as Danielle Johnson, not as (Inclusive Growth Strategies). Like, I want to be able to do this work for you as a subcontractor.’ So I was listed on her website, and then I was going to list her as a subcontractor under Inclusive Growth Strategies.

“I’m always running a million miles an hour. I didn’t have an opportunity to get her added to our organization and company, and we’ve never even had a chance to do business together.

“I didn’t have the time, the capacity or the ability to be a part of this,” she said. “And after they realized that this was going to be something that ran through the city, it was clear that I can have no involvement. I can’t do any paid business for the city. I’m well aware of this.”

Ethics feud

Questions surrounding the grant have further escalated a feud over a new ethics policy between Blubaugh, a Republican, and Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple, a Democrat. Blubaugh has accused Whipple of trying to weaponize the ethics policy against Republicans while ignoring unethical behavior by fellow Democrats.

Whipple, who campaigned on ending insider deals at City Hall and has championed ethics reform on the City Council, said Johnson should have disclosed his relationships and recused himself from voting on the grant, as he has on dozens of votes regarding city business with Habitat for Humanity.

But he questioned Blubaugh’s motives for raising concerns at the height of Johnson’s re-election campaign.

Whipple pointed to other council members — Bryan Frye, Becky Tuttle and Cindy Claycomb — who he said have made decisions in the past regarding friends, business associates or spouses without any objection by Blubaugh.

He said spouses of Frye and Tuttle are employees of companies that do business with the city of Wichita. However, records show that they have disclosed those relationships and recused themselves from votes on those contracts.

He said Frye and Claycomb have also voted to award city incentives to their friends without consequence. Claycomb has voted on several city incentives packages for her friend and local developer Dave Burk, Whipple said, without disclosing the relationship from the bench. Claycomb has not responded to The Eagle’s questions about her relationship with Burk and whether she believes it creates a conflict of interest.

And Frye once proclaimed during a council meeting that he had been friends with all four members of Riverfront Partners LLC — Burk, George Laham, Dave Wells and Jerry Jones — for years before casting a vote to award a mammoth package of incentives to them for development around Riverfront Stadium the week before Whipple was sworn into office.

“We’ve seen this stuff in the past,” Whipple said. “But I didn’t see a story on those, and I don’t remember any council members raising any concerns about those relationships.”

“(Blubaugh) didn’t raise the question and didn’t actually follow the rules or follow the process for, you know, to put this through the ethics board. It makes me wonder if he actually thought it was a violation,” he said. “Because that’s how this is suppose to work is if someone on the council finds any information that is questionable, or that brings up a question of whether something is a violation, it’s up to all of us to bring that forward.”

Whipple also vented frustrations about delayed appointments to the ethics board, which has been inactive for six months. Whipple, Blubaugh, Claycomb and Tuttle have appointed members to the board. But Johnson, Frye and Jared Cerullo have not. The city has also not named an ethics officer to chair the advisory board and receive formal complaints.

“And now, the press is doing the investigation instead of the actual ethics board doing the investigation,” Whipple said. “So, yeah, I wish we would go through the process which we established so that we could get proper resolution to this.”

This story was originally published October 28, 2021 at 4:07 AM.