Sedgwick County commissioners criticize Cruse’s corruption claims; she doubles down

The Sedgwick County Commission publicly criticized Commissioner Lacey Cruse on Wednesday, a week after she accused the county staff, a prominent developer and multiple colleagues of corruption in a Facebook post.

“I wanted to clear the air on a number of items,” Commission Chairman David Dennis said. “There’s been accusations of corruption, accusations that commissioners are having favorites out here and doing things for their friends, and I wanted to make sure that everyone knew that every accusation I saw in that post was inaccurate.”

Cruse — in her first public statement on the post — doubled down on her accusations of the appearance of impropriety, saying she she would “stick by those words.”

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.

Lange Real Estate, the county’s on-call real estate agent, asked county staff if the county would be willing to sell it so it could be developed into a dog park/bar and restaurant. When County Manager Tom Stolz took the proposal to commissioners, Cruse said it “raised red flags” and looked like the “beginnings of a backroom deal.”

Stolz told The Eagle the county was working within its policies and that it seemed Cruse was trying to negotiate a sweetheart deal with Old Town developer Dave Burk.

Sedgwick County spent more than $2 million on the parking lot in 2011, intending for it to serve as overflow parking for Intrust Bank Arena. Now, two competing companies — Lange and Wave Old Town LLC, co-owned by Burk — have an interest in the parking lot, which has more than 280 stalls.

Lange and Burk have been competing in the background on a much larger project, each making moves towards developing a social services hub in Wichita, similar to Haven for Hope in San Antonio. 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, but the deal ultimately fell through.

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, where they visited the Haven for Hope campus.

Dennis and Lopez said Wednesday they plan to report the gifts on their substantial interest forms.

Cruse, one of two Democrats on the commission, is running for re-election against Republican challenger Ryan Baty, owner of the Mattress Hub.

The other Democratic commissioner, Sarah Lopez, said she has previously tried to avoid being too critical of Cruse so close to an election. She said the Facebook post changed her mind.

On Wednesday, she read a lengthy statement from the bench, criticizing Cruse for “attacking staff publicly” and causing “distrust in the community.”

“We can’t allow partisan politics to continue to interfere with progress for the residents of Sedgwick County,” Lopez said. “Mental health, public safety, economic development — just to name a few — are too important to continue to allow mistruths to get in the way.”

After the meeting, Cruse summed up her colleagues’ criticism as “the system fighting back against somebody who is fighting the system.”

“This is the good old boys network,” Cruse said. “It’s not just privileged white men. It’s whoever moves their agenda forward.”

Two high-profile public incidents led to Wednesday’s public rebuke.

Last month, Cruse was banned from XY Bar in Old Town after she called a bartender a racially insensitive name. Cruse apologized. She said it was a misunderstanding and that she did not have any racist intent.

At the time, Cruse’s commission colleagues issued written statements calling her actions “disappointing and disturbing” and pointing to a possible violation of the board’s code of ethics.

The Sedgwick County Black Republican Council and the Republican National Hispanic Assembly of Sedgwick County called on Cruse to resign over the controversy at last week’s meeting, in a letter read by Rep. Patrick Penn, a Black Republican.

Cruse did not comment on the calls for her resignation last week. Immediately after that meeting, she released her 2,000-word Facebook post. She later posted on her private Facebook account asking, “What if all of us just start burning the whole f—ing place to the ground”?

Lopez also condemned those statements.

“Leaders should be the ones to build the bridges with not just our staff but our community partners, local private businesses and, most importantly, our community members,” Lopez said. “We should not, under any circumstances, just want to burn it all down.”

Cruse told The Eagle on Wednesday that her comment, made in a moment of frustration, was metaphorical.

“I’m tired of being quiet. I’m tired of being silenced,” Cruse said. “I’m tired of this good old boy network just trampling over it.

“I’m not necessarily saying that every single person in the county is corrupt. I’m saying that this is what it looks like. This is how it happens. This is the beginning.”

The board stopped short of censuring Cruse or calling for her to resign, a step it took against then-Commissioner Michael O’Donnell in 2020 after a secret recording showed he participated in a smear video campaign that falsely accused Mayor Brandon Whipple of sexual harassment and a cover-up that blamed former Sedgwick County GOP Chair Dalton Glasscock for the video.

Cruse said she’s not going to back down.

“If the county is going to decide to sell property, we should discuss it as a commission and then approach our on-call agent — not the other way around,” Cruse said during the meeting.

“We should make decisions based on what’s best for the county,” she said. “We should not make decisions based because our on-call agent has texting access to our staff and they want to purchase it for their own use.

“When I asked the questions, I was met with a wave of defensiveness that raised some major red flags, which is the reason why I took this to the public.”