KC says records prove ex-civil rights director wasn’t fired for pushing minority hiring

Kansas City officials stepped up their efforts to prove the city’s former director of civil rights and equal opportunity was not forced to resign over her push to increase minority hiring at a major Northland construction project.

Andrea Dorch has said City Manager Brian Platt used her alleged violation of the city’s requirement that employees live in the city as a pretext to get rid of her last month for what she said was her aggressive stance on enforcing minority hiring goals.

Those allegations prompted City Councilman Lee Barnes to propose a rule that the council be consulted before future dismissals related to residency rule violations. A council committee that Barnes chairs discussed the proposal with the city’s attorneys for an hour in closed session Wednesday afternoon, after which Barnes said further action was being put on hold until next week.

Also Wednesday, Assistant City Manager Melissa Kozakiewicz provided The Star with evidence the city says supports its claim that the investigation of Dorch’s residency status was not triggered by her job performance or interactions with Platt, as Dorch alleges, over the city’s lack of minority contracting goals on the $800 million Meta data processing project. Meta is the parent company of Facebook.

Rather, the city began its investigation last fall, Kozakiewicz said, before Dorch says she began getting pushback from Platt over her interactions with developers of the Meta project.

To back that up, Kozakiewicz provided The Star with copies of an email exchange that began on Nov. 22 between Assistant City Manager Kelly Postlewait and Nick Spencer, chief operations officer of Strategos International, a security and investigations company. The city hired the company to investigate Dorch’s residency.

In the email exchange, Spencer references an earlier conversation with Postlewait and asked that Postelwait send him “all information you have regarding the Person of Interest (POI)” so that he could set up a schedule and assign investigators.

Kozakiewicz said the person of interest was Dorch. Records show that nearly two months later, on Jan. 13, three licensed investigators with a Strategos subsidiary, Clarence M. Kelley & Associates, began taking turns staking out a house that Dorch owns in Lee’s Summit.

An invoice from Clarence M. Kelley shows that the investigators were outside the house for four to five hours each morning and four to five hours each afternoon and evening for 14 days straight.

At least four times during those two weeks, the records show that two of the investigators separately followed Dorch to or from the house she owns on Northeast Quartz Drive to the parking garage across from City Hall in downtown Kansas City where she worked.

Kozakiewicz emailed the invoice to a Star reporter after The Star published an article Friday reporting Dorch’s claim that her alleged violation of the residency rule was an excuse to get rid of her.

“I feel I was targeted for doing my job,” she said in that article.

Platt asked for Dorch’s resignation on April 7, one day after she released a report to the Fairness in Construction Board recounting the months of resistance she’d gotten from Platt to her efforts to advance the hiring of more minority contractors on the Meta project.

Participation goals for minority and women subcontractors are generally imposed on large projects receiving substantial tax abatement. But the Meta project had none, most likely due to an oversight by the city council, Barnes and others have said.

Representatives of Meta and the general contractor, Turner Construction, had complained about Dorch’s attempts to monitor the project after the companies agreed to a voluntary compliance plan.

Kozakiewicz said the release of Dorch’s April 6 report bore no connection to her meeting the next day with Platt where, according to Dorch, she was given a choice: resign or be fired for violating the residency rule. Her resignation from her job, which paid $182,000 a year, was effective April 21.

The January stakeout began three days after Platt sent Dorch a written reprimand for writing the mayor and city council asking them to reverse a decision approving a trail construction project without what she considered the applicable minority contracting goals.

In the email, which Platt said was unprofessional and inappropriate, Dorch also claimed that some city officials have long tried to skirt rules that impose minimum goals for including minority and women business enterprises.

But Kozakiewicz said the reprimand and the onset of the surveillance shortly afterward was also coincidental, as Clarence M. Kelley & Associates had been on the case by then for nearly two months and the city’s own investigation began even earlier.

“We started the investigation in October,” she said.

The probe began, she said, after the city’s law department accepted a subpoena on Dorch’s behalf last fall in connection with a legal action that was unrelated to her job. The home address on the subpoena was for the address of the house that Dorch owns in Lee’s Summit.

“That’s why we started the investigation,” Kozakiewicz said, “not because of any email that she wrote, or any document that she claims spawned it. We started the investigation because she was served at work with an address that had a Lee’s Summit address.”

Dorch maintains that her address of record for city employment was her mother’s house in Kansas City and had been for many years. Dorch said she did not know she had been under surveillance in January until a Star reporter informed her on Sunday.

“I thought someone was following me but people told me I was crazy,” she said in an email. “I’m reliving all of that feeling paranoid. I am literally shaking right now.”

She also disagrees with the city’s timeline. She says the city’s law department received the subpoena with the Lee’s Summit address on it last spring, not last fall, and that the city was aware of the house in Lee’s Summit when she was hired as a department director in 2021 because the city did a background check at that time.

Last fall is when she began asking questions about the Meta project, she said.

Kozakiewicz said the city’s human resources department is obliged to investigate whenever there is suspicion that an employee is flouting the requirement that all city workers live within the city limits.

Private detectives are not always hired to investigate, but she said the city decided to do so in this case because of what officials believed was the possibility that Dorch might sue if she were asked to resign her position. The city has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars settling similar lawsuits, so the city felt it was important to engage in surveillance.

“Sometimes we do it. Sometimes we don’t,” Kozakiewicz said. “In this case of a high-profile nature, we thought we better make sure we have our ducks correct here. So yes, we did surveillance. Have we done it before? Yes.”

Clarence M. Kelley & Associates billed the city nearly $11,000 for the two weeks of surveillance.

A decade ago, the city spent $72,000 investigating Municipal Court Judge Elena Franco to see if her principal residence was that of a home she owned in Kansas City or her husband’s house outside the city limits.

But a judicial commission found that no credible evidence existed to remove her from the bench. Franco alleged in a complaint to the Missouri Commission on Human Rights that the investigation was retaliation for her opposition to a prosecutor’s office restructuring.