Kansas City suspended their city manager for being found liable for ousting an employee who would not lie to the public. That seems bad. The funny thing is that the City of Kansas City and their social media active mayor have barely even addressed the issue. Mayor Quinton Lucas spends his days tweeting about his political views, his perceived city successes like buying trash bins for an entire city, the Royals, Chiefs, and a plethora of other items, but he has failed to address the fact that the city was lying to the residents about basic services.
The city manager was found by a court to have instructed his communications staff to lie about the amount of roads that were being paved and yet no one even seems to care. This from a city that can barely pick up the trash and plow the streets, yet they’re paying out a $900,000 court settlement for a situation created by the city manager to make it look like they’re doing basic services better. I’d hasten to say they probably are not doing basic services better but trust the science and or the tweets.
Modern day city management is simply to tell you they’re doing more and better, but not really doing more and better. Let all that sink in
Platte City’s City Administrator bailed after he grabbed a couple of coffees and found the restroom at City Hall. Not sure if he had time to tweet anything. Not sure if that was a beneficial hire. Wondering if his picture ID even made it in time before he resigned. Kinda sad if he never even got keys to everything.
They’re on the city administrator struggle bus over at Platte City Municipal Headquarters. Brand new office and no one wants to sit in it is kind of sad to me.
That job history is going to look awkward on a resume.
City government used to be simple. Make sure the people had water in the faucet, a place for the toilets to run that wasn’t in your yard, streets to drive on, someone to grab the trash once a week and some police and firemen to stop by when called. Somehow, humans have managed to complicate that at this point. We are a broken species.
Former Platte City Administrator DJ Gehrt probably fears his phone ringing every day. Probably makes him jumpy every time it pings.
“Hey D.J., Platte City here. Can you come back and interim again? Not sure what all we’ve messed up since you left the last time, but if you could stop by and straighten everything out, we’ll promise not to call for another three months or so. Hope retirement is going well, see you Monday morning.”
Dude wound up in a marriage to Platte City that he can’t extract himself from. Maybe the Pope can excommunicate it or something and free DJ, assuming the Pope gets to feeling better.
Without going full real estate nerd with you, there is an interesting national development on the horizon that we are seeing locally. Since COVID, FHA has been extending “loan default mitigation” on hundreds of thousands of loans. Basically, if people got behind on their loans FHA would loan them some more money and extend the note up to 40 years in many cases. The “COVID mitigation” rules are still being utilized that allow many people to have bought homes in 2019-2024 to have made from zero to a few loan payments yet never face foreclosure. Eventually that bubble will burst. I’m not sure it’s 2008 type burst, but it will make a dent when the game of musical chairs/loans stops.
I’m no banker, but it seems unsustainable for people to get loans and never make payments on them. It’s not like they’re government.
(Guy Speckman can be reached telling everyone he did more and better than what he actually did)
