On July 22, Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway filed a lawsuit against Kansas City for violating anti-discrimination laws. A copy of the suit is available here.
For some background, I recommend you read my June 18 column for The Kansas City Star. In short, I detail a city council session in which the city’s own consultants report that after reviewing seven years of contracting data, they could find no evidence to support the need for the city’s race- and sex-conscious contracting preferences. In fact, the consultancy’s director of research told the council bluntly, “You just don’t have the factual predicate” required to continue such set-asides.
What that really means is that the city has no defense against a lawsuit.
Members of the council were not pleased with the report’s findings. They could have viewed this as a huge victory for Kansas City—having reached a point where such discriminatory programs were no longer necessary. Instead, council members chose to question the results and the methodology. Mayor Lucas even offered a novel legal theory: “The courts suck.”
We know that column, the only reporting I have been able to find about the consultants’ report, played a role in Hanaway’s suit because she tells us so. Not only does the lawsuit track with what I wrote, including Lucas’s petulance, but she explicitly cites the column in the suit’s footnotes.
Following up on my column, on June 26, I spoke with Lee’s Summit–based civil rights attorney Jonathan Whitehead on KCMO Talk Radio’s Mundo in the Morning. Whitehead details the legal history regarding race- and sex-based discrimination, the rules it put in place for allowing such programs, and how the findings in Kansas City may put the city in legal jeopardy.
As with the Star column, you won’t find any such in-depth interviews on the topic anywhere else.
