Fully Funded Law Enforcement

Without strong law enforcement, everything else in our society collapses, which is why public safety was my number one priority in my previous campaign.  And since being elected, I’ve participated in three budgets, this year will be my fourth, and we have fully funded the Sheriff’s Office, the Prosecutor’s Office, and the Courts all three years. And though I haven’t seen the budget requests yet for 2026, I suspect we’ll fully fund these important agencies once again.

Last year we cut the county’s property tax levy from an already very low 6 cents to a nearly non-existent 1 cent. And we were able to do that because we’re focused on controlling expenses and limiting the size of the county government.

Also last year, we enacted the Senior Property Tax Freeze that will begin offering senior homeowners property tax relief this year. 

We appointed what might be the fairest and most taxpayer friendly BOE ever - Lee Ann Fadler, who chairs the board, Tom Hutsler, and Fred Pouche. They just finished their third summer of appeals, and based on all the heat they’ve been catching, they must have done a great job.

We refused to comply with the State Tax Commission’s onerous order to increase residential property valuations by 15%, which would have led to very large property tax increases to all homeowners in Platte County. Instead of complying, we negotiated that 15% down to just 6.8% over 2024 values, which equates to just 3.4% per year for 2024 and 2025. This is still too high, but it’s better than 15%. I’m very proud of the work we did on this.

Unlike some special interest groups that tried to impose a quarter cent sales tax on everyone that would last forever, which we refused to authorize, the County operates on three sales taxes that all have 10-year sunsets. That way if you don’t like what we’re doing with your sales tax dollars, you can vote to not authorize an extension. 

We significantly increased transparency and accountability at the county level by investing significantly in technology in a couple of areas. The first step was to digitize all county documents and index them so that the public can search for them. Second was a complete overhaul of the county’s website that makes those searches possible. And finally we contracted with an outside firm that has the technology that allows us to process extremely large sunshine requests in a timely manner.

Just this past April, a grown man exposed himself to a woman and her 7-year-old daughter in the North Kansas City YMCA. It turned out that the YMCA’s policies allowed biological men to use the women’s restrooms and locker rooms. I immediately contacted the Executive Director for the 2 Platte County YMCA’s and demanded that they change that policy and in less than a week, they did just that. Women can now feel safe in restrooms and locker rooms at the YMCA. 

In September 2025 we terminated our relationship with the Clay Platte Ray Mental Health Board, action that will likely lead to an additional million dollars in mental health services for Platte County residents and will also lead to more local control. And we did it without raising taxes. In December I started looking into Clay Platte Ray’s finances and discovered that the mental health board, which receives taxpayer funding from Clay, Platte, and Ray counties, was not tracking their funding to make sure that each county receives its share of services. It looks like we’ve been subsidizing Clay and Ray counties to the tune of about $1M per year.  This is a big win for Platte County mental health services, and all accomplished without raising taxes.

We’ve improved and expanded Platte County’s parks system.  In case you didn’t know, the Northland has a fantastic system of trails for bikes and pedestrians, a system of trails that connect neighborhoods to parks, shopping, and other neighborhoods. Over the past couple of years, we’ve completed two beautiful new trails right here in Parkville and we’re currently in the design phase of three other trails. In addition to that, we’ve made substantial improvements to the Michael Gunn Park and the Platte Ridge Park, and we’re planning improvements to the Barry Platte Park.