Major WyCo developer arrested by KBI. And AG Kobach could do much, much more in KCK | Opinion

Matt Watkins is a big deal in Wyandotte County, where he is a major commercial developer while also chairing the Kansas City, Kansas Housing Authority. He’s a repeat Rotary Club president, former county chair of the Democratic Party and former state party treasurer. And he was arrested earlier this month, charged with forgery, identity theft and fraudulent campaign finance reporting.

I only heard that he’d spent the night in jail because some of those in KCK who blamed Watkins when HUD began forcing elderly Black residents of Juniper Gardens out of their long-neglected subsidized housing there told me about it. They were not exactly in tears at the sight of his mugshot, and that they’d always seen someone in commercial real estate while also in charge of public housing as inherently conflicted only compounded the schadenfreude.

A spokeswoman for the Kansas Bureau of Investigations confirmed that KBI agents had taken Watkins in around 10:30 a.m. on June 15. He was booked into the Wyandotte County Jail, she said, but the charges had been filed in Shawnee County District Court in Topeka, where I paid my 50 cents to the cashier and looked over the allegations and list of potential witnesses.

So what is the 46-year-old son of Democratic Kansas powerbroker Dan Watkins accused of doing, exactly? Pretending to be someone else — a man from Arizona — in official filings to open a political action committee that opposed two local candidates four years ago.

Jorge Flores, a former KCKPD cop who left the force because he saw it as corrupt — let me give you a minute to absorb the news that there is such a person — told me the charges stem from the “smear campaign” against him and then-County Commissioner Ann Brandau-Murguia that the anonymous PAC orchestrated in 2019.

Flores, at the time only 26 years old, was running for a seat on the board of commissioners, and Brandau-Murguia was running for reelection. Both are Democrats, but were opposed by “the Democratic machine.”

“If the machine gets mad at you, they’re going to get you,” Brandau-Murguia told me.

Just one case in point: The KCKPD told The Star that there had been multiple disciplinary complaints against Flores. Which is interesting, given that the department always insisted that there had never been a single such complaint against indicted former detective Roger Golubski during his 35 years on the force. Several of his many alleged victims have told me that they tried to file a complaint against him, but were either waved off or told that someone would be in touch, and no one ever was.

Better WyCo PAC bought mailers, social media ads

In 2019, a mysterious political action committee called A Better WyCo went after both Flores and Brandau-Murguia with flyers, mailers and ads on social media. The mailers suggested that as a police officer, Flores had been responsible for the 2018 death of a young woman after a traffic stop. That wasn’t true.

(“I initiated the stop” over missing tags, of all things, he said, but “we let it go, and 10, 15 minutes later, other officers saw her” and began a wild and fatal chase. “The smear campaign said I was part of a murder.”)

The PAC also put out info that Brandau-Murguia had been charged with domestic violence. (She was accused and held for six hours, after having her nose broken by a man she thought of as a friend, who was suffering from PTSD. No charges were ever filed.)

The PAC’s efforts were “very intense, and would have cost thousands of dollars,” said Flores, who was also anonymously threatened over his decision to run. “They were saying we were collaborating to take over government — crazy stuff. … None of it was true. … It was ugly, and it’s fraud; they were some kind of hate group.”

Neither he nor Brandau-Murguia, at the time a member of the Kansas Board of Regents, ever knew who was behind the PAC. “Then, after we lost,” Flores said, “no one ever heard of A Better WyCo any more.”

Also after the loss, though, Brandau-Murguia suddenly had plenty of time to investigate the PAC, and was told by an employee at the building in Piper where its post office box was located that the man behind the address was Watkins. After a lot more digging, Flores said, “there was a criminal complaint filed by Ann,” that eventually led the KBI, now under Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, to file criminal charges.

Watkins declined to explain how he wound up being arrested and released on $2,500 bond, on conditions that include a no-contact order. “I probably shouldn’t say anything, so I’ll leave that up to my attorney,” he told me, and referred me to Lawrence lawyer Adam Hall, who responded to my messages by ignoring them.

Having covered national politics for 20 years, misleading anonymous flyers don’t shock me, though shameless sneak attacks like, say, the disgusting GOP hit on Republican John McCain during the 2000 presidential primary in South Carolina, are still indefensible. They’re also why so many people don’t vote at all.

But that such tactics are per usual in KCK and lots of other places — and that, I’ll be darned, there was even a kernel of truth in what A Better WyCo put out about Brandau-Murguia and Flores — do not make disinformation, cowardly assaults or phony paperwork OK.

If Watkins did what he’s accused of doing, and I don’t assume that he did, then why should he hold any position of responsibility?

Will Kobach’s KBI investigate alleged election fraud?

Of course I do wonder if Kobach’s KBI is pursuing these charges because a) yay, this alleged fraud was associated with an election and b) it involves Democrats.

But doing the right thing for the wrong reason is more than fine with me, because that’s how change for the better often happens.

I have not, it’s true, been a fan of the AG, dubbing him the “Javert of voter fraud” six years ago.

But because anyone attempting to fight corruption deserves support in that if in nothing else, I invite Kobach to focus for real rather than in passing on KCK, where Democrats happen to be in charge and where, if worms and double-dealing aren’t under every single slab, I just haven’t located the clean ones yet.

Look into the wrongdoing there, Kris, and you’ll never have time to go back to worrying about the handful of trans Kansans who want to amend their birth certificates, or bird-dogging the also tiny number of Kansans who own multiple homes and in error, voted near the wrong one.

I do not like to think that Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, with whom I mostly agree, has said zero words about KCK criminality because the place is run by members of her own tribe, but I don’t rule it out, either.

The people of KCK have been suffering from the corruption of its institutions for a long, long time, and whoever is willing to do something about that is someone whose efforts I want to support. If that’s Kris Kobach, then Javert, buddy, give me a call.