Ex-KC civil rights director sues official for discrimination as city works to keep him

Kansas City’s former director of civil rights and equal opportunity Andrea Dorch has sued the city and City Manager Brian Platt for race and age discrimination.

Dorch, 47, claims that Platt told her last April that she could quit or be fired for allegedly violating the city’s rule that all employees live within the city limits. Dorch claims that was a “pretexual” excuse, part of a pattern of the city’s selective enforcement of the residency rule to get rid of certain employees, particularly Black women like her.

Dorch’s lawsuit in Jackson County Circuit Court includes many of the same allegations she made last spring, when The Star reported on her ouster, setting off a furor among civil rights leaders who decried a culture of discrimination at City Hall. It comes as the city is in the process of negotiating a contract extension for Platt.

Dorch claims Platt and others at City Hall were irritated with her for slowing the award of city contracts by requiring that city departments strictly comply with requirements that minority and women businesses get their fair share of those contracts. She said Platt and other officials also objected to her efforts to enforce required participation levels of minority- and woman-owned business enterprises on the $800 million Meta data center development in the Northland.

Without her knowledge, the city allowed the project to go forward without the ordinary requirements, she says in the lawsuit. She claims that Platt reprimanded her for advocating to the mayor and city council that the city reverse that position.

Three days after that Jan. 10, 2023 letter of reprimand, Dorch claims, private investigators hired by the city began to shadow her as part of an investigation that, as The Star previously reported, began in the fall of 2022 to establish whether she was violating the residency requirement, the suit claims.

Dorch has listed a Kansas City address as her place of residence since 1994. She bought a house in Lee’s Summit in 2020, during a break in her employment with the city to work for the federal government. Platt rehired her in 2021 to head the Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity Department. That required a background check that, according to the lawsuit, disclosed that she owned the Lee’s Summit house.

She continued to list a Kansas City address as her principal residence. Her vehicle registrations still list that address, and it is her address for purposes of voting, the suit says.

Selective enforcement alleged

As evidence of the city’s selective enforcement of the residency requirement, the lawsuit notes that the city council in 2021 waived the residency requirement for Kathy Nelson when Nelson, CEO of the nonprofit Kansas City Sports Commission, took on the dual role as CEO of the taxpayer-funded Greater Kansas City Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Also, under a special arrangement with Platt, Kansas City Fire Captain Tim Dupin has been excused from his regular fire department duties since July 2021 and allowed to live and work in Washington, D.C. for the International Association of Fire Fighters union.

In addition to the $150,000 annual salary he is paid as the union’s full-time political director, Dupin continues to collect an annual city salary of $86,000, as guaranteed by a side letter to the local union contract.

The suit notes that Nelson and Dupin are white.

Kansas City issued the following statement through the mayor’s office in response to the lawsuit:

“Per standard practice, the City will not comment on pending lawsuits. On the merits of the Meta project itself —one of the largest infrastructure projects in recent Kansas City history — more than $186 million in construction and other support work has already been committed to registered minority- and women-owned businesses, and growing.

“Kansas City government continues its work with Meta to ensure the more than $1 billion project meets all goals set by the City Council throughout all phases of construction. We expect Meta’s contract utilization plan to be finalized with the City this spring.

“We are proud of our City staff and all efforts to ensure equitable inclusion both inside of City Hall and in the workforce on all public projects.”

Dorch asks for a jury to award her lost compensation and benefits, attorney’s fees and non-economic damages for career disruption, pain, mental anguish and emotion distress.

The lawsuit says she was fearful after noticing that someone was following her for two weeks in January of 2023, not realizing that they were private investigators hired by the city.

“As a single female with children,” the lawsuit says, “Plaintiff told her friends and others around her that she was fearful she was being followed and that someone was sitting outside her residence.”

According to the suit, Dorch “became more and more frightened as she continues to believe she was being followed and surveilled but had no knowledge as to who or why.”

Black civil rights leader decried the surveillance and Dorch’s job loss last May at City Hall when they demanded that Platt submit his resignation for allegedly allowing a culture of discrimination to exist in city government.

Platt has denied that such a culture exists.

Last week, the city council voted 9-4 to authorize Mayor Quinton Lucas to negotiate a renewal of Platt’s four-year employment agreement, which expires this year.

Lucas was alone among the council’s five Black members in supporting the move.