Private flights, public fights: Sedgwick County commissioners trade jabs, accusations

A Sedgwick County commissioner is alleging corruption in a proposed downtown Wichita land deal after the interested buyer took two commissioners to San Antonio earlier this year — gifting one a free flight on the company’s private jet.

In a nearly 2,000-word Facebook post, Sedgwick County Commissioner Lacey Cruse accused multiple county officials and development company Lange Real Estate of backdoor dealing in a proposed purchase of a county parking lot downtown.

The commissioners involved in the trip to see Haven For Hope, a large homeless shelter and social services campus, in San Antonio — Democrat Sarah Lopez and Republican David Dennis — said they had nothing to do with the downtown discussions. They called Cruse’s allegations an election-year stunt aimed at deflecting attention away from calls for her to resign after she was banned from an Old Town nightclub last month for racially insensitive comments to a bartender.

A representative for Lange said the company declined to comment.

At issue is one of the largest free public parking lots in downtown Wichita — a 1.3-acre county-owned lot at Second and St. Francis. Sedgwick County spent more than $2 million on the project in 2011, intending the parking lot to serve as overflow parking for Intrust Bank Arena.

Now, two competing companies — Lange and Wave Old Town LLC — have an interest in the parking lot, which has more than 280 stalls.

The county has been exploring options for the lot because of complaints of trash, vandalism and unsafe driving. Wave, an entertainment venue and bar directly north of the lot, has declined to enter an agreement to pay the county to clean up the lot unless the county enters into a long-term lease to privatize the lot for event parking.

Lange wants to develop it into a dog park, bar and event space, similar to Bar K in Kansas City, and approached the city of Wichita looking for downtown space via City Council member Maggie Ballard before turning to the county.

Wave — owned by Wichita developers Dave Burk, Dave Wells, Jerry Jones, Pat Do and Steve Barrett along with event manager Adam Hartke — would prefer it remain a parking lot.

Affiliates with the two companies have also been competing on a much larger project. Lange and Burk have each made moves towards developing a social services hub in Wichita. Lange recently announced its community foundation is building a $35 million behavioral health campus in south Wichita. Burk purchased several properties in Midtown with plans to sell them to the county for a social services hub.

In her Wednesday Facebook post, Cruse said County Manager Tom Stolz asked her last week whether she approved of selling the parking lot to Lange, which is one of three on-call contractors hired to help the county buy and sell real estate. She wrote that the conversation “set off bright red flags” and looked like the “beginnings of a backroom deal.”

“By offering the parking lot for sale because of a request from the Lange Group, county management is now in the process of ‘offering an undue advantage,’” Cruse wrote.

Cruse said in her Facebook post that she remembered telling Stolz: “So because Lange has a direct line to county management as our on-call real estate agent and wants to buy this parking lot, we will now sell the site because they want to buy it? What about previous discussions with the neighbors surrounding the parking lot?”

Stolz told The Eagle it appeared Cruse was attempting to block the sale so the county could arrange a deal with Wave for control of the lot.

“We’ve had a history where she has asked to do land deals with Dave Burk without going out for competitive bid,” Stolz said. “That’s not a criticism of her; that’s just her not understanding early in her days as a commissioner that we cannot do that.”

Burk declined to comment.

In her Facebook post, Cruse included the text of several emails between her and Stolz, where Stolz pushed back on Cruse’s accusations of favoritism by suggesting she is trying to help Wave.

“Again, if you want me to somehow give the Wave or Dave Burke (sic) some type of inside deal on this,, I cannot let that happen,” Stolz wrote in an Aug. 31 email to Cruse.

“County Manager, Tom Stolz, is now actively gaslighting me,” Cruse said in her Facebook post. “GASLIGHTING. I have never asked for any kind of deal for anyone.”

Cruse did not answer phone calls Wednesday or respond to requests for comment Thursday.

“I don’t even know what gaslighting is,” Stolz said.

Stolz said Cruse pushed for the county to buy multiple investment properties Burk purchased near Broadway and Murdock to build a new Comcare crisis center, which would have been part of a behavioral health campus in Midtown similar to the one Lange is building in south Wichita.

“They were interesting properties, but at the end of the day, our policy would not allow us to go out and do a deal with Dave Burk without putting it out for a public competition,” Stolz said.

Stolz said Cruse’s accusations of corruption are baseless.

“I really feel like we’ve had a really good relationship with Commissioner Cruse, but I will tell you, lately, it just seems she’s very critical of staff. And that’s OK. It’s her right as a commissioner. Just like this Facebook post, it’s her right to put out what she perceives to be reality on what is happening inside of the county, but that’s just her opinion.”

Still, Stolz said Cruse’s allegations of corruption could cast doubt on the integrity of the county government.

“It blows my mind a little bit that Lacey (Cruse) sees this as some type of backside deal because, first of all, no deals have been done. We cannot sell it — only as a parking lot. You cannot even put a structure on it, so I don’t even know what developer would even be interested in it anymore.”

The concrete parking lot sits on a heavily contaminated site formerly owned by Coleman Co., which signed a still-active agreement with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment in 2009 that limits the property to parking only.

“It’s impossible for anyone to do a backdoor deal or whatever she referred to it as,” Stolz said. “I cannot, under any circumstances, pick a developer and sell it to them myself. It has to go into a public competition. What blows me away is she does not understand this policy. She does not understand this protocol.“

Other commissioners defended Stolz and said no deal for the sale of the parking lot could happen without an open and competitive bid.

“She clearly doesn’t understand how government works,” Dennis said. “Nothing could be sold without an open and transparent process where all of this would happen during an open meeting.”

“This is Government 101,” Lopez said. “It’s completely unfair that she is attacking our staff for doing their jobs. This is not a backroom deal. It’s just literally how government works.”

Trips down south

In her post, Cruse also raised concerns about a “cozy” relationship between Lange and multiple commissioners, who she did not name, “during a recent trip down south.”

Eagle reporting found commissioners Dennis and Lopez accepted previously undisclosed gifts in the form of free flights on private jets from Lange Real Estate and Hutton Construction in an April trip to San Antonio.

Dennis and Lopez toured Haven for Hope, the model for Lange’s behavioral health campus.

The behavioral health campus has been one of Sedgwick County’s top priorities for several years. With the southside campus, Lange has positioned itself to be the county’s private-sector partner in addressing mental illness, homelessness and drug addiction.

Dennis and Lopez said the free trip to San Antonio will not influence their decisions as county commissioners. Dennis flew on the Hutton jet. Lopez flew to San Antonio on the Lange jet and back to Wichita with Hutton.

Both commissioners discussed the trip months ago during an open meeting but did not mention how the flights were funded. They explained the flight arrangement to The Eagle when asked about it in response to Cruse’s post.

The county does not have any rules regarding county commissioners accepting or reporting gifts. Under state law, all gifts over $500 in value must be disclosed on statements of substantial interest forms. Neither official has filed one since the trip, records show, but the reports are only required to be filed annually.

“We presented on it (the trip) in an open meeting when we got back to the entire commission and as part of our commission meeting,” Dennis said. “So there’s absolutely nothing that we tried to do whatsoever that was not completely aboveboard.”

The April trip was not the first time commissioners have traveled to San Antonio with private-sector groups to tour Haven for Hope.

“I’ve been to San Antonio now a total of three times,” Dennis said.

His first trip in 2018 was funded by Ascension Via Christi, he said. Dennis and a group of elected officials and health professionals took commercial flights to San Antonio. Dennis returned in 2019 as part of the Wichita Chamber of Commerce’s City-to-City Leadership Visit, funded by the county.

Cruse twice traveled to San Antonio in 2019, her first year on the commission. The trips were county funded. She is Sedgwick County’s representative on the Mental Health and Substance Abuse Coalition, a group that has been pushing for a centralized social services hub similar to San Antonio’s in Wichita.

Lopez said she learned a great deal from her trip with Lange and Hutton.

“It was educational,” she said. “We didn’t strike any behind-the-scenes deals or anything. We were there to learn, and there was nothing secretive about it.”

Cruse’s actions under fire

Cruse published the lengthy Facebook post shortly after a county commission meeting at which Kansas Rep. Patrick Penn confronted her and called her behavior at a bar “completely uncalled for and unacceptable.”

Cruse, who is white, has come under increased scrutiny over a name she called an African American bartender at XY Bar last month.

The bartender said Cruse called her Shaquetta, which she perceived as a racial slur. The bar owner said Cruse called her Chiquita. Cruse said she called the bartender “Sheena” after Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, a comic book superhero, because she “thought she was fierce.”

Cruse was banned from XY.

Cruse said her comment had no racist intent. She apologized for calling the bartender a name. She defended her record as a commissioner and said she has been the biggest advocate for African Americans on the county commission.

Sedgwick County Commissioners publicly condemned Cruse’s remarks in a written statement that called her behavior “disappointing and disturbing.”

At the commission meeting Wednesday, Penn, a Black Republican who has publicly clashed with Cruse over an abortion rights newsletter, read into the record a joint statement from the Sedgwick County Black Republican Council and the Republican National Hispanic Assembly of Sedgwick County. Both organizations called on her to resign from the Kansas African American Museum Board and the Sedgwick County Commission.

“Had that been my wife, would you have called her Sheena, Queen of the Jungle?” he said. “Had it been my daughters, would you have called them Sheena, Queen of the Jungle? I understand that you say that it wasn’t Shaquetta and that it wasn’t Chiquita. All are horrible and beneath the dignity of this board. To come back and say that these are the things that you’ve done in the Black community, so that you get a pass, I’m here to tell you, you don’t.”

Cruse did not respond to Penn’s comments during the meeting.

Diversion?

Lopez and Dennis told The Eagle that the timing of Cruse’s accusations appeared calculated to draw attention away from Penn’s comments.

“It’s disappointing, and it’s just sad,” Lopez said. “There seems to be a great deal of deflection going on here from her recent behavior at XY Bar and from the Penn statement.”

“It disturbs me greatly,” Dennis said. “We have someone that is so desperate to be re-elected that she is taking every avenue she can to tear everybody else down to try and build herself up. She wants to look like she’s pure as the driven snow and the rest of the entire organization is corrupt, so this is one of her ways of trying to get re-elected.”

Commissioner Jim Howell said he can understand how Cruse could be concerned with development deals and cozy relationships between elected officials and real estate developers.

“That’s been an accusation of county commissioners for a long time,” Howell said. “And I do think that we need to be very careful not to cross a line where someone is doing business with the county and there appears to be a relationship or friendship.”

But, he said, Cruse also needs to be careful how she uses Facebook.

In the comment section of Cruse’s post, on her official Facebook page, she called a constituent “pathetic.” Hours later, she published another post on her personal Facebook page asking, “What if all of us just start burning the whole f—ing place to the ground”?

Howell said Cruse’s Facebook behavior appears to violate the County Commission’s code of ethics that says elected officials should model “decorum, respect for others and civility in all public relationships.”

“It appears to me that she is stirring up things in a way that is unprofessional and is causing great conflict,” Howell said.

“It is not the role of a county commissioner to discipline a colleague,” Howell said. “However, it’s also not the role of a county commissioner to have to apologize for his colleague, and I’ve done that numerous times this year.”

“The county needs to have an ethics advisor for things like this,” Howell said, referring to both Cruse’s behavior and the free flights to Dennis and Lopez.

Dennis, the chairman of the commission, said the board is unlikely to take any action in response to Cruse’s Facebook post.

“Any action that we take, she will portray herself as the victim and us as all the bad people,” Dennis said. “So I’m not taking any more action.”

This story was originally published September 9, 2022 at 4:05 PM.