Shawnee Mayor Michelle Distler has reached a diversion agreement in the felony perjury case pending against her in Johnson County District Court.
Court records indicate that an agreement was reached Tuesday but no document has been filed outlining the terms.
Diversion is an option apart from an innocent or guilty plea. If she successfully meets the requirements laid out in the agreement, the charge of felony perjury could be dropped.
A felony conviction would make Distler ineligible to hold office, under Kansas law.
Distler’s lawyer, Robin Fowler, offered this statement to the Post Wednesday afternoon regarding Distler:
“She looks forward to moving on with her life in a constructive way and plans to continue to do her part to try and make her community a better place to live. She also wishes to express her heartfelt apology to anyone impacted by these events,” Fowler said via email.
A spokesperson for the Johnson County District Attorney’s office said only that Distler “accepted the standard diversion contract and must comply with all the terms.”
Falsified open meetings complaint behind charge
The charge against Distler arose from a somewhat complicated situation around an open meetings complaint she admitted to filing last March under someone else’s name.
According to the court charging document, it began with an email chain Distler was included on in March 2020 along with several others, including four Shawnee city councilmembers.
Distler told investigators she was concerned that the conversation playing out over the email chain violated Kansas open meetings statutes, since enough councilmembers were involved and responding.
But the email thread also involved some people who have been critical of her politically, and Distler told an investigator she was reluctant to file the complaint under her own name out of fear of retaliation.
Instead, she filled the online complaint form with the Kansas Attorney General’s office using the identifying information of another person. When that person received an automated confirmation receipt of the complaint form in his own email inbox, he contacted investigators.
The person whose information Distler used to file the complaint has not been publicly identified, but in the course of talking to investigators, Distler called him a “watchdog” for the city of Shawnee.
Distler told the investigator she did not send the complaint intentionally but instead, initially filled it out on an iPad at her home but then put it aside without sending it.
She contended that after returning to her iPad a few hours later, she found it had been sent after she had closed the cover of her iPad.
The investigator challenged that, noting that the electronically filed complaint’s time stamp did not match up with Distler’s purported timeline of events.
Distler has been mayor since 2015 and was a councilmember for nine years before that.
Recently she has found herself under fire politically because she declined to cast the deciding vote to name a council president (who runs council meetings in the mayor’s absence) and because of the controversy surrounding information the city put out about the costs of a proposed community center.
