Emails exchanged between Prairie Village Mayor Eric Mikkelson and a city-paid communications consultant last summer are at the heart of the latest attempt to recall the mayor.
Residents who support the petition effort say the emails show Mikkelson misused taxpayer money by communicating with city-hired consultants to craft a statement to the Post regarding previous unsuccessful recall petition efforts last year — but the consultant says they never actually billed the city for the correspondence in question.
Edward Greim, an attorney with Graves Garrett Greim representing those involved in the current recall effort, says Mikkelson was using the consultant’s advice for “personal gain” by trying to discredit efforts last year to have him recalled.
However, Shockey Consulting Services LLC, the company hired by the city last summer to help manage communications amid a rancorous debate over housing and zoning, says it did not invoice the city for those email exchanges between its consultant, Mikkelson and city staff because its contract with the city stipulated that work taking less than 15 minutes and producing no physical materials was not billable.
For his part, Mikkelson rejects the allegations in the petition, saying that the emails show “good government” in action during the height of last summer’s turmoil when those opposed to changes in housing and zoning policies were also trying to jumpstart an effort to recall him.
Sheila Shockey, the owner and founder of Shockey Consulting, says her firm “did not advise the city to advocate for the mayor regarding any” of last year’s recall petitions.
Earlier this month, Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe issued a memo finding sufficient legal grounds for the latest recall petition, but he noted that his office stopped short of actually reviewing evidence to determine whether petitioners’ allegations against Mikkelson are supported.
The Post asked petitioners, through Greim, for the emails that they say support their allegations. Some of those emails were also posted online by petition supporters.
Petitioners posted up in city parks over the Memorial Day weekend to gather signatures for the recall against Mikkelson. Based on state statute governing recall petition processes, petitioners need to gather roughly 4,000 signatures by mid-August in order to try to qualify it for a future ballot.
A step back: How the city got to this point
Last year around this time, the city of Prairie Village was embroiled in a tense citywide dispute over whether the city should relax housing rules to create more density in single-family neighborhoods.
Residents had banded together under the banner of Stop Rezoning Prairie Village, also known as PV United, a grassroots organization borne out of the opposition to an earlier set of housing recommendations.
By May 2023, Stop Rezoning PV had begun circulating three resident-led petitions that sought to restrict changes to the city’s zoning codes and also dramatically change Prairie Village’s current form of government. Residents and city council candidates backed by Stop Rezoning PV were gathering signatures in city parks to get those issues on the November 2023 ballot.
At the same time — and unknown to the general public — residents aligned with the Stop Rezoning group had also submitted a series of recall petitions against Mikkelson.
By the end of June, Howe had rejected four different recall petitions against Mikkelson, all submitted by the same three residents.
As part of the city’s efforts to communicate with the public over the housing recommendations, City Administrator Wes Jordan on June 5, 2023, signed a services agreement for community engagement and communications services with Shockey Consulting. He later notified the city council of the agreement, Deputy City Administrator Nickie Lee confirmed to the Post.
The agreement outlines a bill-by-hour contract for services, aimed in particular at helping the city with messaging and community engagement around the increasingly divisive issues of zoning and governance.
The Post looked at three email exchanges in particular, all of which directly mention the 2023 recall petitions. Greim, the attorney involved in the latest recall petition effort, sent the email exchanges to the Post.
The first is from June 7, 2023, before the recall petition efforts were known to the general public. The second set of email exchanges took place from June 28 to 29, 2023, and were sparked by a Post reporter’s request for comment for a story about the recall efforts, which were then coming to light.
All four email exchanges involve Mikkelson, Jordan and Nancy Mays, a freelance contractor doing work for Shockey Consulting.
Here’s what the email exchanges describe.
The June 7, 2023 email exchange
At the start of last June, the recall attempts against Mikkelson were playing out beyond the public eye.
The unsuccessful recall petitions — three at that point —against Mikkelson in 2023 made multiple accusations against Mikkelson, including an allegation about how a former police officer, Rolando Swaby, was allowed to stay on the Prairie Village police force “for 19 months after department officials were alerted that he had asked a woman for sex after arresting her,” The Kansas City Star reported at the time.
Recall attempts against Mikkelson last year — all of which Howe rejected — alleged, in part, that in failing to fire Swaby, Mikkelson failed to perform his duties as mayor. In an email obtained by the Post, Jordan said that hiring and firing decisions for police officers ultimately rest with himself as the city administrator.
On June 7, 2023, Mikkelson sent an email to Jordan about the district attorney’s findings on one of the ultimately unsuccessful recall petitions.
“It looks like they are getting closer on the Swaby allegation. I suggest we prepare in advance the PVPD and City public responses just in case. Another task for Shockey?” Mikkelson writes to Jordan.
Jordan then forwarded that email to Mays, the freelance consultant, and Sheila Shockey herself.
Greim told the Post via email that this June 7 email exchange between Jordan, the city administrator, and Shockey shows “that a city employee and city-paid consultant were explicitly working on a response to a ‘new recall effort’” for Mikkelson.
Mikkelson, for his part, told the Post that the city was working to counter “disinformation” amid the divisive issues impacting the community at the time.
“In all cases we were discussing how best to effectively, efficiently and professionally communicate with our residents on city issues, including through the media,” Mikkelson said.
Additionally, Shockey told the Post that her consulting firm does not work on political campaigns.
“If the accusation is that Shockey Consulting Services, LLC acted as a political consultant, that accusation is absolutely false,” Shockey said.
See the June 7, 2023, email below.
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Open in new tab The June 28 to 29, 2023 emails
Three weeks later, media outlets — including the Post — had gotten wind of the failed recall efforts against Mikkelson and had begun asking city officials questions.
A second email exchange that took place from June 28 to 29, 2023, between Mikkelson and Mays shows the two discussing and trading drafts of a statement for Mikkelson to send to the Post in response to an inquiry. Jordan, Deputy City Administrator Lee and Erin Winn, a Shockey consultant, were all copied on the conversation.
In a separate email sent on the morning of June 29, Jordan then asks Mays to draft a statement for the city in the event that there are any media requests made about the recall petitions.
Greim said the email exchange between Mays and Mikkelson from June 28 to June 29, 2023, shows that the mayor worked with Mays “on his own personal statement attacking the recall supporters.” The statement Greim references is one that ran in a Post article about the rejected recall petitions published on June 29, 2023.
Greim said Mikkelson’s statement attacked the recall supporters by suggesting they had “lied,” sought “to ‘overturn a recent election,’” and were “‘wast[ing] taxpayer resources.’” Greim said the suggestions in Mikkelson’s statement “were far from neutral, educational.”
“Again, every minute of those conversations with Mays pushing the mayor’s recall opposition was billed to the taxpayers,” Greim said.
But Shockey told the Post that her firm did not bill the city for the email exchange between Mays and Mikkelson on June 28 and 29. That is because the exchange took less than 15 minutes of Mays’ time, Shockey said.
Shockey added that none of the roughly $20,000 the city paid her consulting firm went toward work on the recall petition efforts against the mayor (invoices here and here). Shockey said the firm did not produce any “deliverables to help explain” the failed mayoral recall petitions, such as a handout.
For his part, Mikkelson said the parties in the emails were discussing how to “communicate with residents on city issues, including through the media.”
“There is no misconduct, no misuse, no wrongdoing, no private benefit,” Mikkelson told the Post. “Instead, all those city emails show good government in action, from the inside of the sausage factory.”
Additionally, Shockey and Mikkelson have both separately told the Post that at the time of some emails in question, there was no recall issue before the electorate because all attempts had been rejected by Howe. Therefore, they didn’t consider the email exchanges to be political or campaign-related in nature.
See the June 28 to 29 emails in the embedded document below.
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League of Kansas Municipalities weighs in
The issue at the heart of the recall petition is centered around this question: Can an elected official use a consulting firm hired by the city for city-specific issues to craft a response to counter political efforts seeking to remove him from office? The answer is unclear.
John Goodyear, general counsel with the League of Kansas Municipalities, told the Post via email that he is unable to comment on specific information that pertains to allegations against any one city or individual. However, he indicated that the use of consultants to craft city or mayoral messaging on an issue could be considered a public purpose.
Goodyear noted that a 1984 Kansas Supreme Court case, Ullrich v. Board of Thomas County Commissioners, found that there is no exact definition for what constitutes a public purpose for public funds.
Generally, courts defer decisions regarding what is considered a public purpose to the governing body “unless their decision is entirely devoid of a rational basis,” Goodyear said.
“It would not be uncommon for a city to seek help in crafting a message that engages the community to reach a broad audience,” Goodyear said.
The only other time a recall petition has been cleared by the Johnson County District Attorney’s Office in the past 15 years was in an ultimately successful effort in 2009 to recall two Gardner councilmembers.
Petition organizers in that instance alleged that some councilmembers violated the Kansas Open Meetings Act in order to rewrite city code and also went against the will of residents by voting to de-annex BNSF Railway’s intermodal facility, for which the railway eventually struck an agreement with neighboring Edgerton.
Next steps:
Petitioners have 90 days to gather the requisite number of signatures — or 40% of the votes cast for all candidates for the mayoral office in the last general election, per K.S.A 25-4325.
The last general election in which Mikkelson was elected was in November 2022. There were 10,035 votes cast for the office of mayor in that race. (Mikkelson ran unopposed.) Forty percent of that total would be 4,014.
Signature gathering events started over the Memorial Day weekend and are scheduled for every day until at least June 4, according to organizers who post frequently on social media.
The petitioners will need to submit the petition to the Johnson County Election Office, which has 30 days to review and verify it. If the petition meets the requisite number of signatures, then it will go before voters on a future ballot.
Meghan Buum, assistant city administrator, told the Post via email that the city is aware of the recall petition effort and is “evaluating this matter as it relates to city operations.”
Prairie Village itself “must remain neutral on matters that are political in nature,” Buum said.
Read last year’s Prairie Village petitions news: JoCo judge’s final ruling reinstates initial decision on Prairie Village petitions
