Kansas City votes on city council, weed & Airbnb tax April 4. Here are elections to watch

A new Kansas City Council takes office in August and it’s guaranteed to look different than the current one.

Goodbye Katheryn Shields, Teresa Loar, Kevin McManus, Lee Barnes, Dan Fowler and Heather Hall. All have reached the end of their term limits.

Hello, who?

Seven of the current 13 members, including Mayor Quinton Lucas, want another four years, but only one of them is a shoo-in. Councilwoman Ryana Parks-Shaw is running unopposed in the 5th District.

Six council seats are wide open, and only one of them is uncontested. Former Democratic state Rep. Wes Rogers has no opponent in the 2nd District.

So with March Madness almost out of the way, it’s time for Kansas Citians to fill in their voter brackets as the winnowing process begins with Tuesday’s knock-out round, the April 4 primary. Any registered Missouri voter can cast a ballot early with no excuse.

In addition, school districts throughout the Missouri side of the metro will have school board elections and voters will decide a variety of ballot issues.

In Kansas City, 33 candidates for City Council are vying to keep or secure office space in City Hall after Aug. 1. Most if not all of them have been appearing at candidate forums at community centers and other public spaces the past six weeks or so.

For close to a year, the most energetic among them have been knocking on doors and filling their Facebook pages with fresh content while raising money to pay for campaign advertising and, in some instances, even campaign staff.

Their aim has been to impress what is unfortunately a teeny percentage of voters who turn out for municipal elections. Typically only one in five of those registered to vote cast ballots in the primary in support of the candidates they feel are best qualified to address the major issues in this campaign.

Among the issues, as usual, are affordable housing, public safety and the need to improve city services. Even niche issues like bike lanes differentiate the candidates, as some voters consider them essential infrastructure and others a scourge.

Some more election math: While all 13 city council positions are on next week’s primary ballots, the outcomes of those races only matter in seven of them.

This is the knockout round, where two candidates advance to the June 20 general election in each race — if there are at least two candidates. The results next Tuesday will be immaterial for four races, including for mayor, in which only two candidates are running. However, even in some of those races, many candidates have been campaigning vigorously and raising money ahead of the primary to build up momentum and name recognition for the vote that really counts.

We’re looking at you Melissa Patterson Hazley, who is hoping to unseat Councilman Brandon Ellington in the 3rd District At-Large race.

But the seven races with three or more candidates are where primary voters need to pay the most attention right now.

Their votes also will be decisive in the outcome of three or more ballot issues. The number depends on which of Kansas City’s four counties each voter resides.

Like many other cities in the region, Kansas City wants permission to levy a 3 percent tax on legal weed. That’s Question 1.

But note that Jackson and Cass counties are also asking Kansas City voters to approve 3 percent countywide marijuana taxes on top of the city tax.

Question 2 is Kansas City’s request that voters approve a 7.5 percent sales tax on all short-term rentals (think Vrbos and Airbnbs) not already subject to the city’s convention and tourism tax that hotel and motel customers pay.

Question 3 doubles the $1.50 a night lodging fee for stays in hotels, motels and short-term rentals.

Now onto the brackets.

1st District At-Large

Incumbent Kevin O’Neill is facing off with fellow northlanders Pam Mason and Ronda Smith in this citywide race.

Mason is the former presiding commissioner for Clay County, who had to give up that job after losing to Jerry Nolte in the 2014 Republican primary. Fighting crime is one of her key issues.

Crime is also a key focus for Smith, who was treasurer of the Take KC Back campaign in 2021 to recall eight council members and the mayor after a judge ruled that they violated Missouri law by withholding $42 million from the police budget.

However, O’Neill was not one of them, so there’s no wedge against him and he leads both his opponents in money raised and endorsements.

2nd District At-Large

This is Loar’s seat, which she must give up at the end of July due to term limits. Two of the three candidates will go on to the general election.

Jenay Manley and Lindsay French have the most active campaigns and biggest bank accounts.

Neither has run for office before, but both have been politically active. Manley is one of the organizers of KC Tenants, a non-profit group that has been influential at City Hall on affordable housing issues.

She was active in the protests to stop evictions during the pandemic and was proudly arrested for trespassing at the downtown courthouse as a way to shine a light on the problem. Naturally, housing is at the forefront of her campaign.

French is a graphic designer who has been active in political campaigns. Although she is less well known than Manley, French has amassed perhaps the greatest number of endorsements of all the candidates in these city elections, including from former Northland city councilmen John Fairfield, Ed Ford and Scott Wagner, who is her campaign treasurer.

Mickey Younghanz is the third candidate. A contractor and home remodeler, he ran as a Republican and lost a 2020 race for a Missouri Senate seat.

4th District At-Large

Five candidates are running to replace Shields.

Originally from Manhattan, Kansas, Jess Blubaugh is chief philanthropy officer at United Way of Greater Kansas City and formerly an executive at the Kansas City Sports Commission and Foundation. She is on the board of the Mid America LGBT Chamber of Commerce and is president of the Longfellow neighborhood association.

Justin M. Short is a member of the city’s LGBTQ Commission and is originally from the Northland, where his dad, Michael Short, was formerly a Platte County commissioner. He was formerly a cruise director for a cruise ship line and now manages the building he lives in downtown. One of his pitches is that he will be a full-time council member if elected.

John DiCapo is the son of longtime restaurateur Carl DiCapo, who owned the Italian Gardens downtown. The son recently sold one of his businesses, DiCapo Foods, which was best known for its biscotti. He ran for mayor in 2007 as a protest against the city allowing food trucks to park outside the lunch counter he ran out of the city-owned parking garage across from City Hall.

Mark Funkhouser won that mayoral race, and a then very-young Crispin Rea was his personal assistant. Rea is now a candidate to replace Shields. He won a seat on the Kansas City school board when he was 24, pulled out of a city council race in 2014 and now is a special victims unit prosecutor with the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office.

Finally, there’s Grace Cabrera. Born in Cuba, she and her family arrived in Kansas City in 1998 and settled in the Old Northeast area.

Her website says she has 17 years of experience in administrative health. “Most of those years were spent in nonprofit community health centers where I had the joy of working with many refugees like myself,” she writes.

5th District At-Large

Three candidates are running to replace Lee Barnes in the 5th District At-Large seat.

Theresa Cass Galvin gave up her seat on the Jackson County Legislature to run as the Republican nominee for county executive, but lost in November. She joined this race for a seat on the council soon after and has the support of the police union.

She faces stiff opposition from Darrell Curls, a former Hickman Mills school board president, who is on the board of directors of the Black political club Freedom Inc. That will help him in the so-called Freedom precincts south of the Missouri River, but this is a citywide race, so Galvin is likely to get some support in the more conservative Northland.

Michael Kelley, policy director at BikeWalkKC, rounds out the field. Kelley punches a lot of buttons for policy wonks and supporters of liberal causes. He worked to pass the ordinance that forces planners to consider more than cars in street design, advocated for more public restrooms to help the homeless and is on the Kansas City Environmental Management Commission.

6th District At-Large

Councilwoman Andrea Bough has two opponents in her race for re-election. She has a bushel full of endorsements and has spent the last four years getting accolades for her progressive stances on affordable housing policy and other issues.

City Hall watchers don’t expect Bough, a development lawyer, to have any trouble going onto the general election with the most votes. She has raised $123,000 in campaign contributions so far, compared to less than $10,000 for her two opponents combined.

Insurance agency owner Mary Nestel’s campaign has focused on public safety — she was endorsed by the police union — and she is opposed to government overreach, a view informed by the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Former public school teacher Jill Sasse has also made public safety a focus of her campaign along with the need for more affordable housing and her desire to reduce government spending.

The 4th District

Councilman Eric Bunch has two opponents trying to deny him a second term.

A transit advocate and co-founder of the group BikeWalk KC, Bunch represents some of the city’s more affluent and poorest neighborhoods south of the Missouri River, as well as some territory north and west of North Kansas City.

One of his challengers this election is Henry Rizzo, who has been elected 10 times by Kansas City voters to represent them at the county courthouse and Missouri’s capital.

But it’s been 17 years since Rizzo last prevailed at the polls and more than a dozen since he lost his seat on the Jackson County Legislature and receded from the headlines.

The 4th District includes the Old Northeast area that for many years was Rizzo’s base of support as head of the Old Northeast Democratic Club and whose voters Rizzo hopes will remember him when they cast ballots on April 4.

Bunch is counting on those same voters and those who weren’t around when Rizzo was to re-elect him based on his support of things like zero fare buses and his advocacy for affordable housing.

Also in the race is a third candidate: Bunch’s former legislative aide Crissy Dastrup.

Until she announced her candidacy a year ago, Dastrup’s previous experience in electoral politics was supporting others who were running for local office and getting herself elected to the streetcar taxing district board.

Dastrup was hired by Bunch the day he took office in August 2019. Bunch fired Dastrup in September 2021 when she told him he wasn’t working as hard at the job as she thought he should have been, especially during the first years of the pandemic, and had too narrow of a focus on transportation.

6th District

Five candidates are running for the open 6th District seat currently held by Kevin McManus. But the 6th ain’t what is used to be.

Its southeast section was sliced off and made part of the 5th District, and its northern border stretches farther north to include Waldo, Brookside and the south Plaza.

It will be interesting to see how that affects a race in which the most well-known candidate is Dan Tarwater, a right-leaning Democrat whose views on some issues might not play as well with those voters.

Tarwater, a former member of the Jackson County legislature, has a lot of support from labor, the police and fire unions, Freedom Inc. and other groups.

His opponents include Johnathan Duncan, an administrator at the Veterans of Foreign Wars who is endorsed by KC Tenants, which has planned an aggressive get out the vote effort on behalf of him and others on their slate.

Also running is Cecelia Carter, who serves on the board of the retirement systems for employees of Kansas City, Kansas, City Public Schools and the Missouri Association of Public Employees.

Also running are Michael Schuckman, an information systems senior analyst at the city’s Water Services Department, and Tiffany Moore, who represents the 6th District on the city’s Neighborhood Advisory Council.

The final brackets

Of the two-person races, the headliner by virtue of rank only is the contest between Lucas and Clay Chastain for mayor. But unless a write-in candidate changes things in the primary, both will be in the general and no one expects a nailbiter.

Other contests: Chris Gahagan and Nathan Willett are vying to replace Heather Hall in the newly redrawn 1st District. Councilwoman Melissa Robinson is being challenged by Sheri Hall in the 3rd District, and then there’s the aforementioned 3rd District At-Large contest between the incumbent Ellington and Hazley.

Kansas City school board

The last Kansas City school board election saw big spending and two hard-fought races, including one that unseated a longtime incumbent and board chair.

Not this time.

Though the past year was marked by the hiring of a new superintendent, packed meetings and contentious debates over school closures and the future of Kansas City Public Schools, hardly anyone is running in the April 4 election.

Three incumbents are stepping down from the seven-member board. In two races, newcomers are running unopposed, so they will be automatically seated. In the third race, no one met the qualifications to appear on the ballot. A write-in candidate will win.

“There was quite a bit of interest in 2021. And I think that was also national because of what had gone on with the pandemic and parents having a front row seat to schooling,” said board member Jennifer Wolfsie, who is not seeking reelection. “Having competitive races is always a good thing. With what we’re seeing now, I don’t know if maybe a lot of people have moved on to other things.”

School leaders argue the sleepy election isn’t a sign of apathy. They have been working to build excitement for KCPS, hoping to grow enrollment, better compete with neighboring schools and gain voter support for a bond initiative next year.

There’s still a competitive race among the write-in candidates in Sub-district 4, in the east-central region of the district. Monica Curls and Jay Gray are both meeting with voters, encouraging them to spell out their names on the ballot.

And many said that the lack of candidates doesn’t mean there wasn’t interest in the job. Some potential candidates didn’t realize their sub-districts had changed, following redistricting, or said that the new maps were confusing.

“A lot of people were applying who did not realize they were in the wrong district,” Gray said, adding that she also was initially unaware that her sub-district had changed.

And other candidates struggled to gather enough signatures. For at-large seats, 500 signatures are required, while candidates running in the other races need 250 signatures from active voters who live in the sub-district.

“While I’m running unopposed, I wasn’t the only person out trying to collect signatures,” said Josh Jackaway, who will take over Wolfsie’s at-large seat. “I know other people were trying to get on the ballot but didn’t meet that signature threshold.”

Wolfsie said collecting enough signatures from people residing in a sub-district, who are not only registered to vote but actively do so, “actually is more difficult than a lot of people realize.” Some candidates have several signatures thrown out, she said.

In election years, KCPS holds training courses for residents considering running for school board. Wolfsie said about 10 candidates attended this past fall.

She said the district plans to start offering those courses every year, and earlier in the fall, to help candidates get a head start on collecting signatures and meeting the qualifications.

On June 20, the district will hold a special election to fill another board seat, to replace Manny Abarca, who resigned in January to serve on the Jackson County Legislature. The open seat is in Sub-district 3, in the northern region of the district.

Other school districts

Though the past year was filled with debates over book bans, diversity and inclusion programs, and how to manage staff shortages, some Kansas City area districts have canceled elections because candidates were running unopposed. For some, the lack of candidates has signaled dwindling energy after an era of COVID-19 disputes and hyperpartisan politics.

But not for Lee’s Summit. The school board election with seven candidates running for three seats has been hotly contested. Candidates have starkly different views, clashing on book challenges, policies on transgender students’ rights and school choice. Newcomer Regina Garrett, for example, spoke at a February board meeting in favor of library book restrictions, arguing that students should not have access to “pornography” in schools. Six parents have challenged 200 books in the district.

Candidate David Grady has taken some heat for being present as rioters tried to overtake the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Grady said he only attended for former President Donald Trump’s rally and peacefully observed “with the hundreds of other law abiding citizens around us.”

North Kansas City, Liberty, Raytown and Hickman Mills also have competitive races this election.

That’s in contrast to unopposed races in Center, Park Hill, Blue Springs and Kansas City.

The Star’s Sarah Ritter, Kynala Phillips, Joseph Hernandez and Natalie Wallington contributed to this story.