PLATTE CITY VOTERS WILL DECIDE AT APRIL 2 ELECTION
Two candidates are vying for Platte City mayor in the upcoming Tuesday, April 2 municipal election.
Tony Paolillo, incumbent mayor, is being challenged by Steve Hoeger, a current member of the board of aldermen.
Steve Hoeger has been a member of the Platte City Board of Aldermen for the past six years after he was appointed by then-mayor Frank Offutt to finish an unfulfilled term by an alderman who moved out of state. Hoeger has since been elected three times to serve, including two-year terms in 2019, 2021 and 2023.
While he values the role he has played representing other city residents and affecting changes that impact quality of life, he believes his professional experiences have provided the best background to prepare for a role as mayor. The 54-year-old said his jobs in emergency management have focused on bringing medical professionals together to prepare for internal or external disasters, including terrorist events and mass shootings. It’s these positions that have made him adept at building teams that know how to work cooperatively.
“Every day I’m out working bringing together others to prepare for a disaster,” he said. “I’m very used to forming a consensus. We cooperate to make things happen.”
His experience has been in medical arenas, including 30 years as a paramedic with multiple services, including two years with Gold Cross Ambulance, five years with Heartland EMS in St. Joseph, Mo., Northland Regional Ambulance District, where he also was elected and served six years as a member of their board of directors. He began serving in management roles in 1996, including 10 years with American Medical Response, the largest ambulance service in the country.
Hoeger said he and his wife, Holly, chose Platte City as a halfway point between her family in St. Joseph and his job in Johnson County. The couple, who’ve been married for 30 years, have two grown daughters.
Hoeger pointed to his work with Mid-America Regional Council (MARC) as creating another building block to his experience bringing different entities together in a common goal. He continues as chair of the MARC Healthcare Coalition, a role he has held since 2019. He is the MARC Healthcare Coalition’s public information officer, a role he’s held for the past five years, where he was interviewed extensively about the hospital response to the shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl parade and rally. He described such collaborative efforts as “getting different agencies, cities and counties to cooperate, agree and march in the same direction.”
He used these varied experiences as a springboard to positions such as the corporate director of emergency management at University Health, formerly Truman Medical Centers. University Health consists of two hospitals and numerous clinics in the Kansas City area. As such, he has managed disasters including the hospital system impacted by the mass shooting that killed one and injured more than a dozen people during the Kansas City Chiefs Championship parade and celebration. Because the downtown campus at 22nd and Holmes is a level one trauma center and less than two miles from the shooting, the system treated 12 patients injured in the disaster and an on-scene medical unit who treated those injured before they were transported to hospitals. In his role leading the Missouri Disaster Medical Assistance Team from 2006 to 2012, he responded to the tornado that ripped through Joplin, arriving on site to establish a temporary hospital to triage those injured by the twister.
As mayor, Hoeger said that he’ll focus on maintaining and upgrading infrastructure throughout the city and advocating for efficient spending and “exploring public-private partnerships to fund” such projects.
If elected, Hoeger said he also plans to make city services easier for residents to navigate by implementing online services, such as bill payment and posting information and applications online, such as those for business licensing, for example.
While happy serving as an alderman, Hoeger said a series of missteps that led the board to fire City Administrator Marji Gehr caused him to realize the city is ready for a change in leadership. He described current Mayor Tony Paolillo’s reaction to the controversy, saying Paolillo “supported her (Gehr) the entire time even though it wasn’t going well.”
In addition, Hoeger said Paolillo has not worked well with members of the board of aldermen and has instituted several changes without consulting or communicating first with the board. Those include changes to the board’s meeting schedule. Previously, board members each had served on various subcommittees, which some members also chaired. Hoeger chaired the personnel and public safety subcommittees. While such changes are “his prerogative” as mayor, then-City Administrator Gehr only notified board members of the changes in an email with no explanation or room for discussion.
“You don’t build consensus that way and you don’t make friends. He has never been collaborative,” Hoeger said of Paolillo and contrasted his leadership style with that of former longtime Mayor Frank Offutt, whom he said built a strong relationship with board members.
Paolillo’s actions have created a lack of trust, Hoeger said.
“I think that’s going to be a tough relationship to mend,” he said. Therefore, Hoeger said he has been leading an effort “to bring healing back to the city” after what he described as a rocky road under the leadership of Paolillo and during Marji Gehr’s time as city administrator.
Tony Paolillo has served as Platte City mayor since 2020 and previously was a member of the board of aldermen for 16 years. He also has served on the Platte County Regional Sewer District Board of Trustees since 2011, a position to which he was appointed by members of the Platte County Commission. He continues to serve in that role.
If re-elected, Paolillo plans to make the city run more efficiently by “making it easier for taxpayers and businesses to work with the city” by establishing online bill payment and allowing businesses to review licensing online. As mayor, Paolillo said he has helped lead the construction of a new City Hall building, which the city occupied in November. The new space soon will be equipped with several new amenities such as electronic audio-visual equipment and microphones in the board of aldermen meeting space.
Paolillo described his management style as laissez-faire and believes this approach was off-putting to the aldermen and led to their unhappiness with the way he handled the situation with the city administrator, whom they eventually fired.
“I do not govern via rumors—I do facts and take them into consideration. I’m not a micro-manager,” he said. “The taxpayers pay our employees (to do their jobs) and we have rules and regulations on the books” that set expectations. He described the board of aldermen was “a little upset they don’t get the opportunity to micro-manage employees.” Paolillo said state law dictates aldermen don’t have the power to ask employees to perform tasks. Paolillo said they can only do this as a board. Besides, he said, the mayor only gets a vote if there’s a tie among members of the board.
Paolillo, who grew up in St. Joseph, Mo., has lived in Platte City with his wife, Rachel, since 2000. The 50-year-old said he attended Missouri Western State College in St. Joseph but did not earn a degree. Paolillo owns a deck and fence construction company and said he and his wife chose Platte City because it was the halfway point between their two jobs.
The city’s population has grown from about 2,000 when he and his wife first arrived to about 5,000. He believes Platte City will continue to grow with good leadership, which he said he has provided and can continue to offer if he’s re-elected. He’s proud that the city recently instituted a free fourth of July weekend festival during his tenure. The event, which he said was his brainchild, includes food vendors and children’s games and has recently been held at a new splash park, named Rising Star. The event held on Main Street for the first couple of years but Paolillo said the new venue is cooler than the downtown location and offers shade trees in addition to the water feature and is more accessible to everyone, he said. He said residents have offered “a lot of compliments and ideas to make it better.”
Staff hosts a listening session once a month to hear from the public about hot topics and is “an easy way to communicate with the city. The first meeting kicked off in 2024. I want them to come and talk and to listen to them.” This change was the idea of Paolillo and Gehr, he said.
As for the controversy surrounding Gehr, the former city administrator, Paolillo said board of aldermen members “could have “asked anytime for a meeting about the issues surrounding her performance, but waited until late December to decide it was a problem. They were responding to rumors about her personal life,” he said.
Paolillo said elected officials are searching for a firm to provide an interim city administrator to serve while board members choose a new city administrator. He said the new administrator should have good communication skills and work cooperatively with current city staff and the public. He’s unsure how long the search will take.
“They should not rush through this,” he said.
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