Jackson County officials are staring down a budget crisis.
They’re not running out of money. They just can’t agree on how to spend it.
Every year, the Jackson County Legislature must pass a budget by Dec. 31. And it did — legislators narrowly approved a $506.5 million budget on the day of the deadline by a vote of 5-4.
But then County Executive Frank White Jr. vetoed that budget on Jan. 9, and the Legislature never passed a new one.
Four legislators — Manny Abarca, Sean Smith, DaRon McGee and Venessa Huskey — have sued White, arguing that his veto was illegal. They believe that the county should be using the budget they passed in December.
Meanwhile, White counters that the Legislature hasn’t successfully passed a budget at all.
As a result, one the area’s largest local governments has been operating without an approved budget since the previous one expired at the end of 2024. Over the three months since that veto, county business has ground to a halt.
A growing number of county ordinances have been held until the issue is resolved. The county can’t hire umpires for summer softball tournaments or food service for inmates at the county jail. The prosecutor’s office has been unable to distribute public safety sales tax dollars for substance abuse treatment or violence prevention.
The conflict came to a head on Friday, April 18, when the legislators’ attorney asked a judge to stop all spending at the county, aside from salaries.
“County services are being withheld,” said County Legislator Megan Marshall, who disagrees with the lawsuit, “but citizens are still paying their taxes.”
It started with a veto
Every year, the one thing that the Jackson County Legislature is required by law to do is to pass a budget by Dec. 31.
The budget process starts when the county executive submits a proposed budget to the Legislature no later than Nov. 15.
The Legislature has a month and a half to hold hearings and consider amendments to that budget.
This year, amendments included significant cuts to the legal department and moving the budget department under the county Legislature, as opposed to the executive.
Smith, who represents southeastern portions of the county, said the cuts to the legal department were intended to free up money for the Legislature to have its own legal counsel, in addition to the county counselor.
The other amendments were intended to clean up accounting practices around salaries, he said.
In previous years, the budget has included a “salary savings” line, which is an adjustment to the salary budget to account for extra money due to projected job turnover and vacancies.
“The salary line says $17 million, but then you’re going to save $1 million in salary savings,” he said. “So I’ll just take that million out of the salary number because that’s what you’re really telling me you plan to spend.”
The Legislature voted narrowly to pass the budget, with Marshall, Jalen Anderson, Charlie Franklin and Jeanie Lauer voting against.
Caleb Clifford, White’s chief of staff, said they were blindsided by the budget changes.
“On the last day of the year, they introduced one very large amendment that would have stripped millions of dollars out of multiple departments,” Clifford said. “There was no discussion publicly, or even (not) a lot privately, in regards to budgetary changes.”
So the county executive vetoed the entire budget on Jan. 9.
In his veto letter, White wrote that moving certain departments — including the budget office — under the Legislature’s control was a “dangerous precedent that cannot stand.”
“It prioritizes political gamesmanship over public safety, economic stability, and the well-being of our residents,” he wrote. “As your County Executive, I cannot and will not accept a budget that fails to serve the people of Jackson County.”
A tale of two budgets
White vetoed the budget 10 days after it was passed. If the Legislature wanted to override the veto, they would have needed to recruit one more “yes” vote.
The Legislature never mustered the extra vote to override the veto or make any compromises to appease White.
When the Legislature hit a stalemate on the county budget, White’s administration decided to use last year’s budget as a temporary blueprint for county spending.
That, Clifford said, is in line with years of precedent, and the temporary budget would keep the county afloat while the Legislature puts together a new budget.
But some of the legislators objected. Abarca, Smith, Huskey and McGee filed a lawsuit against White on Feb. 26, arguing that White’s veto was illegal.
The legal drama is playing out while several legislators, including Smith and Abarca, support an ongoing recall effort against White.
They say that state law requires the Legislature to approve a budget by Dec. 31, so White would have needed to veto the ordinance before the new year — within hours after the budget was passed.
“He normally has 10 days (to veto),” Smith said. “But in this case, he doesn’t get 10 days because the higher authority, state law, says that it has to be done by Dec. 31. So for him to wait nine full days and then to never propose an alternative is egregious.”
Clifford said those arguments are baseless. He pointed to previous years when the county executive vetoed certain line items of the budget after the Dec. 31 deadline.
“It’s not even close to being true,” he said. “Just go back to 2023 … They thought then that he had the legal right to do it, but not now?”
The lawsuit also argues that White only has a line-item veto when it comes to the budget and therefore is not allowed to veto the entire budget.
Clifford said that White vetoed the entire budget, rather than specific line items, specifically because so many of the amendments were cuts rather than additions.
Essentially, he said, if the budget does not include spending for a program, there’s no line item in the budget for the executive to veto.
The only way to reverse the cuts, he said, is to veto the entire budget.
No resolution three months later
Three months later, nearly half of the Jackson County legislators, plus the county executive, say the county has no official budget. The rest of the Legislature says that the budget they passed in December is the legitimate budget they should be using.
Meanwhile, the county Legislature can’t allocate money for any programs that weren’t already in last year’s budget.
But that’s not because the law forbids it, Marshall said. She’s one of the four legislators who believes that White’s veto was legal and that the county hasn’t properly passed a budget.
The other five legislators, a controlling majority on the nine-member Legislature, “take the position that no county spending should happen because it’s not being done within the 2025 budget that they believe they approved,” she said.
For example, one resolution is to hire softball umpires for tournaments at Jackson County parks over the summer. That resolution has been held for nearly two months.
Another resolution would renew a contract for the county jail’s food provider. Without taking action, inmates could soon find themselves without meals. That resolution has also been held for nearly two months.
(Clifford said that in the case of the jail’s food service, the executive would likely take emergency action before inmates start skipping meals.)
It’s getting to the point, Marshall said, where some departments won’t even bother asking the Legislature to approve spending requests.
“It’s just, ‘hold, hold, hold,’ all of these essential county business operations,” she said, “without even trying to find a compromise and a way forward.”
Jazzlyn Johnson, a spokesperson for Jackson County Prosecutor Melesa Johnson, told The Beacon that COMBAT funding is also on pause.
COMBAT, or Community Backed Anti-Crime Tax, is a 1/4-cent sales tax that funds crime prevention and substance abuse treatment programs. In 2024, it paid for grants to organizations like Hope House, the Mattie Rhodes Center and the AdHoc Group Against Crime.
It also helps fund the Jackson County Drug Task Force and anti-violence education programs.
From gridlock to crisis
Right now, the county is basing its spending on last year’s budget for operations and maintenance. But that could change soon.
At a hearing on Friday, April 18, the attorneys representing the four legislators and White met to discuss the legislators' motion for a temporary restraining order.
No decision was made yet, however. White's attorneys will have an opportunity to respond to the motion by April 25, and the legislators' attorney will be able to respond to that by May 2.
A hearing may be held on the subject June 20.
If the judge grants the temporary restraining order, the county will no longer be able to work under that Band-Aid solution.
Instead, the county would only be able to spend money on salaries. Clifford said that could mean the county would not be able to pay for its contracts or debt service.
Clifford is concerned that if the budget crisis continues, it could hamper the county’s ability to borrow money in the future.
“There are programs and people being impacted by this, and we can’t lose sight of that,” he said.
Smith thinks that kind of situation would be urgent enough to bring the county executive to the negotiating table.
“Things are in a bad spot, and they should be,” he said. “He’s supposed to be restricted to salaries only, and on Jan. 1, we should have all been sequestered and come to a budget agreement.”
Smith said it’s a problem that the county is still treating this situation as business as usual when three months have passed without a budget.
“No buying cars, no paying for fancy steak dinners,” he said. “Salaries, gas for cop cars, those are OK. But this other stuff that’s not mission critical should not be business as usual.”
The path forward
Stacy Lake, an attorney who unsuccessfully ran against White in the 2022 Democratic primary, sides with White, Marshall and the other three legislators in the budget fight. She said White’s veto is fully compliant with the Jackson County Charter.
“Look, I don’t like Frank White either,” she said. “But at the end of the day, he’s completely right on this.”
She believes that the lawsuit will ultimately fail for that reason, but also because the opposing legislators did not ever vote to override the veto and therefore did not seek relief.
Lake hosts an online show where she rewatches clips from legislative meetings and talks about them on Facebook Live and Twitch. She said the only way to move forward is for the opposing legislators to compromise with White.
“The Legislature right now has all the power to propose a budget and to pass it, and they’re not doing it,” she said. “And they’re blaming Frank White for it when it’s not his fault.”
But part of the problem is that, because this lawsuit is working through the court, one of the two sides would need to admit they were wrong.
White could concede that his veto was, in fact, invalid and propose an amendment to the budget the Legislature passed on Dec. 31.
Alternatively, the legislators suing White could concede that his veto was valid and make a compromise to the budget he, in that case, rightfully vetoed.
Smith said that in any case, White needs to make the first move by proposing a new budget because he has been told that the Legislature doesn’t have the power to introduce a spending proposal.
“I place it firmly at Frank’s feet,” he said.
Ordinarily, Clifford said, that would be true — the Legislature cannot introduce a spending proposal without the support of the budget office.
But the yearly budget is one of the exceptions to that rule. In fact, he said, a budget ordinance always has to be introduced by a legislator, even when it’s submitted by the county executive.
That, he said, puts the responsibility in the Legislature’s hands for getting out of this situation.
“They have to, at some point, pass a budget that can withstand a veto or that won’t get vetoed,” he said. “That’s just how a bill becomes a law.”
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
