On July 30, 2026, while guest hosting Mundo in the Morning on KCMO Talk Radio, Patrick Tuohey spoke with Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway about her office’s lawsuit against Kansas City over its race- and sex-conscious contracting preferences.

Listen to more from KCMO Talk Radio here.

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Jackson County has begun attempting to correct its poorly conducted reassessments in 2023 and 2025. It will do this by retroactively rolling back property assessments for some property owners, sending refunds to other taxpayers, and withholding future tax funds from other taxing entities, such as fire districts, to make up for the overpayments by taxpayers in 2023 and 2025. The county has to withhold future payments because counties collect all the property taxes within the county, but then distribute almost all of that money to other taxing districts. Jackson County does not have a large pot of its own money it can make amends from. Not surprisingly, some of those taxing entities are suing over the withholding of their future tax payments.

The problem is, those school districts and other taxing entities were not the ones who caused the problems in 2023 and 2025. They followed the rules, set their tax rates, received their tax money, and spent it. Now they are being told they have to give some of it back.

So, I understand the objections by the taxing districts, but I have much more sympathy for the taxpayers who were victimized by a poor process over the past few reassessments. The Jackson County assessor’s office, among other problems, failed to provide taxpayers with the rights of appeal and relief they were entitled to during the process. So, yes, some taxpayers were overcharged because they did not have their full opportunity to appeal their taxes.

In short, the new Jackson County leadership team deserves credit for changing course and finally trying to correct the problems and refund money to some taxpayers.  I think the taxpayers deserve these refunds—and the entire process needs wholesale changes.

I have no idea how the courts will rule in this lawsuit. I’ll be following it closely. Hopefully this controversy and similar, recent issues in Platte County can lead to massive changes in how we conduct property reassessments in Missouri.

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St. Louis City has one of these caps too. The St. Louis Board of Aldermen passed an ordinance in July of 2020 that sets a cap on fees that third-party delivery services charge restaurants at 20 percent (up from the 5 percent originally proposed). This ordinance includes a sunset measure that ends the cap 60 days after the city’s health proclamation has been lifted.

Previous agreements between restaurants and delivery services generally set fees higher than 20 percent. The city’s health proclamation is still in place, so this arbitrary cap has been intruding in the market for about 15 months. As predicted, consumers have been experiencing the effects. For example, DoorDash added a regulatory response fee on all delivery orders in St. Louis City (and other places across the country) with a spokesperson noting that this fee was necessary to pay drivers appropriately amid pricing regulations.

The contention between delivery companies and lawmakers seems to exist nationwide, and it’s coming to a head with this lawsuit. I’m not a lawyer, but I think workers and consumers have paid the price for lawmaker interference in the market for long enough. St. Louis City should remove this cap now to avoid any potential repercussions from the lawsuit and to honor market arrangements between delivery services and restaurants.

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A lot of families have found out just this week whether their children will have to wear masks full time when they head back to school. And a lot of families on both sides are very angry. I believe that these families should not be forced to put their children in physically upsetting circumstances—whether that’s mandatory masking or optional masking—and that they need options to move their children to a different educational environment as quickly as possible. The school year is starting or has already started. The court system is slow.

Florida and Arizona have expanded existing scholarship programs to qualify families who have strong preferences on masking policy. Missouri could do the same. We have a new empowerment scholarship account that will become law in days. That program could provide the structure and federal stimulus funds—of which Missouri has received billions for education—could provide the means to put scholarships in the hands of families.  Unconventional times call for unconventional solutions.

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At this point, nothing has been established—all we know is that an accusation has been made and denied. But in any case, attendance numbers are more important than many people realize. Not only do attendance data affect how much funding the district receives from the state, but they also factor in the Annual Performance Review and the district’s accreditation classification.

Last December, the State Board of Education voted unanimously to reclassify Riverview Gardens as provisionally accredited. According to state law, because the district was no longer unaccredited, students from Riverview Gardens lost the right to transfer to better-performing districts. If the accreditation of the district was based on incorrect attendance information, then students may have been unfairly deprived of better educational opportunities.

I do not doubt that there has been real progress in the district in the past few years, but the integrity of the attendance numbers is vital so that the district can be evaluated according to its true performance. We will continue to watch this story closely as it develops. 

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