Another emotionally charged round of comments from local residents filled Tuesday’s Iola City Council meeting, again focusing on former City Administrator Judy Brigham’s dismissal a few weeks before she was scheduled to retire.
The complaints came with an added twist. Former mayor John McRae told the council about what could be best described as a secret meeting that he thought could eventually lead to the ouster of two council members, Ken Rowe and Kendall Callahan.
The former mayor, speaking in the public forum portion of the meeting, relayed a meeting he learned about in late September between City Administrator Carl Slaugh and representatives from Westar, the state’s largest public utility.
The Westar meeting was scheduled by Rowe and Callahan unbeknownst to Slaugh before the Westar representatives showed up in Iola, McRae said. Likewise, neither City Attorney Chuck Apt nor Scott Shreve, the city’s utility consultant, knew about the meeting.
The meeting flew in the face of the council’s stated support of transparency, McRae said.
“None of the other council members knew about it,” McRae said.
McRae did not identify Rowe or Callahan at Tuesday’s meeting, but did so afterward in an email to the Register. “I think everyone there knew who I was talking about,” he said.
McRae said their actions of scheduling the behind-the-scenes meeting did not violate any open meetings act, but did violate the spirit of open meetings policies, and thus qualified for grounds for Iolans to attempt a recall vote.
“I want the public to see the sunlight shine on this council and demand that you do things right,” McRae told the council. “I think it was the same two guys that probably provided the fodder to get rid of Judy. The two of you are absolutely toxic. You would be doing the city a service if you stepped down.”
Iola no longer purchases wholesale electricity through Westar, ending its decades-long pact several years ago to join the Kansas Power Pool, a consortium of municipalities across the state that act as a single electric customer.
ROWE AND CALLAHAN both apologized for the mixup related to not contacting Slaugh earlier about the Westar meeting.
Both said the meeting was simply a fact-finding mission.
“We are going to be asked in two weeks whether we want to sign a long-term agreement with the Kansas Power Pool,” Rowe said. “And nobody from the city had contacted Westar to determine what they could provide.”
Rowe said he and Callahan had visited informally with Westar representatives before agreeing that further talks would need to have Slaugh and other city representatives on hand.
“If it was a secret meeting, why would we have it at City Hall,” Rowe said.
Callahan declined to respond to McRae’s comments.
