As voters cast ballots in the special Sept. 30 election to recall Jackson County Executive Frank White Jr., a question that’s rarely been openly discussed lingers.
If White is removed from office, who will be selected to replace him?
The Jackson County Legislature would be tasked with nominating and voting to confirm his replacement to serve out the rest of his term. That person would steer the county government for the next 14 months. If they choose to run for reelection in 2026, they would have a leg up as the incumbent to hold on to that position as long as they keep running.
It’s an important question. And it’s one that several elected members of the county Legislature are hoping that voters will ignore — at least for now.
Legislator Sean Smith, a Republican who represents southeastern Jackson County, wants voters to remain focused on White’s performance as the county executive.
“The vote is only about one thing. Is Frank doing a good enough job that he should stay in office?” Smith said.
Smith said it would also be disrespectful to White to name his replacement before he’s even been removed from office. He compared it to introducing someone to their replacement before they’ve even been fired.
“We’re not supposed to select somebody and then have them have a competition (against White),” Smith said. “We as legislators shouldn’t be manipulating the vote.”
White disagrees. He has called for the legislators to be more transparent about their intentions.
“I must speak plainly: what troubles me most is the Legislature’s refusal to answer the most basic question — if a vacancy were to occur, how will the next County Executive be chosen?” White said in a written statement. “That silence speaks volumes. It suggests there is no interest in a fair and open selection — only in backroom deals and political favors.”
Publicly, the legislators are tight-lipped about whom they might pick.
But behind the scenes, the campaign for the next county executive is already underway.
The secret race to become Jackson County executive
Two candidates have publicly expressed their desire to replace White if he is recalled: Phil LeVota and Dan Tarwater.
LeVota is an attorney who worked in the county prosecutor’s office for a decade.
Tarwater served on the Jackson County Legislature for 28 years before running for Kansas City Council in 2023. He lost to KC Tenants organizer Johnathan Duncan.
County Legislator Manny Abarca IV also has been rumored to be in the running to replace White, but he told The Beacon that he is not seeking the position.
“I have no interest in seeking that role,” he said. “I’m usually looked at as the aggressive one of the bunch, and no one wants to put me in that seat, so I’ll gracefully step back from the opportunity there.”
DaRon McGee, who represents the 4th District and chairs the Legislature, wants voters to trust legislators to make the right decision if the recall is successful and they vote for White’s potential successor. The votes of at least five of nine legislators are needed to approve a replacement for White.
“We elect members of Congress to cast votes on our behalf,” he told The Beacon. “You trust these representatives to represent your best interests. And that’s all I can say. We have to trust the process.”
The Beacon asked McGee if he was willing to share any other candidates he was aware of aside from LeVota and Tarwater, and he responded, “No, not at this time.”
McGee didn’t say he also is a candidate to succeed White.
Abarca confirmed that McGee has joined Tarwater and LeVota as a third candidate to replace White. (This had already been shared with The Beacon by four other people involved in county politics who did not want the information attributed to them.)
Even some of McGee’s colleagues have been kept in the dark as to who is in the running to replace White.
If McGee is a candidate to be county executive, County Legislator Megan Smith said, that has never been communicated with her.
“No names have been presented to the legislature (that I am aware of) as nominees to consider seriously,” she told The Beacon in a text message.
She represents the 3rd At-Large District, which covers the southern third of the county.
‘No clearer violation of the ethics standards’
McGee didn’t address the possibility that he could vote for himself as county executive. In theory, though, he said he didn’t believe it would be a conflict of interest for a legislator to vote for themselves.
“We vote for appointments for ourselves all the time,” he said. “So for example, I’m on the Mid-American Regional Council board, I’m on the zoo board, I’m on the Starlight board, representing the Legislature, and I vote for those resolutions for myself.”
The difference is that those board appointments he listed are unpaid. The county executive, in contrast, made nearly $130,000 in 2023 — more than three times the salary of a county legislator.
At least one of McGee’s colleagues in the Legislature said that voting for yourself to succeed White would not only be inappropriate, but also a likely violation of the county’s code of ethics.
“As legislators, we make 36 grand a year, and as county executive, they make 140 or something,” Sean Smith said. “There could be no clearer violation of the ethics standards than to vote for yourself.”
Notably, White faced a similar situation in 2016 when he was nominated to replace former County Executive Mike Sanders.
White was a legislator at the time, representing the 1st At-Large District, and he abstained from the vote to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. He was confirmed by an 8-0 vote by his colleagues on the Legislature.
Chris Crawford, the director of Jackson County’s Ethics, Human Relations & Citizen Complaints Department, would not speculate on a hypothetical scenario in which McGee would cast a vote for himself.
“I definitely can see the justification of why it could be considered a violation,” he said. “But the ethics code does have some ambiguous language in it and interpretation in it as well.”
Abarca said he can also understand the opinion that voting for oneself could be considered a conflict of interest. But he said he has asked the county counselor to provide specific guidance as to whether it would be illegal.
The Beacon spoke with Tarwater and LeVota, who didn’t believe that it was a conflict of interest.
An alternative method to select White’s replacement
The three main candidates for county executive are working with legislators to recruit the five votes needed to win confirmation.
That’s how the nominating process worked in 2016 when White was voted in to replace Sanders. But it’s not the only option.
In 2011, Jim Kanatzar was named a circuit judge and resigned from his position as Jackson County prosecutor. Sanders, who was county executive at the time, was tasked with naming his replacement.
He could have selected someone on his own. Instead, he created a five-member independent nominating committee, containing no members of the Legislature.
The committee kicked off with a community listening session with members of the public. Tony Miller, an attorney from Lee’s Summit, was one of the five committee members. Miller would later become a county legislator four years later.
At that listening session, he said, they had a blackboard and asked the audience to help brainstorm characteristics they were looking for in a future prosecutor.
The Mid-America Regional Council provided support to the county and helped oversee the entire process.
“Although not legally required, it seems to be the most democratic thing you could do,” Miller said. “To get community input through a nonpartisan outlet such as MARC, to convene something like this and include even members of the academic community … to give a different perspective than just self-interested politicians.”
The committee solicited a large pool of applications, then held public interviews with the top eight candidates.
They narrowed it down to three candidates, who met privately with Sanders for the final interview. Then he appointed Jean Peters Baker, who would be reelected in 2012, 2016 and 2020.
The county used a similar process in 2018, when then-Sheriff Mike Sharp resigned from office, to select Darryl Forte as the interim appointee.
Could Jackson County do the same thing if White is recalled?
McGee, chair of the Jackson County Legislature, is not interested in following that process. He believes that the county should do what it did in 2016, when White was appointed without a formal application process.
He said that the people who are interested in running are circulating their resumes and talking with legislators, and he doesn’t think it would make a difference to solicit applications.
McGee also doesn’t want to deliberate on the merits of each nominee at a public meeting.
“What I’m going to do is provide a forum or a process that will allow members to nominate someone, and then we will cast a vote,” he said.
Tarwater and LeVota both said that they would be open to having a public interview during the selection process.
Under his preferred process, McGee said, the public won’t get a vote on the county executive, so the candidates only need to make their case to the legislators — not to the general public.
“The reality is, this election (to replace White), if he is recalled, is not an election of the public,” he said. “This is a vote of the Legislature. So the audience is much smaller, and so you’re speaking to nine individuals.”
At least two of the three potential candidates have political baggage that could come up in a public forum that may not come up otherwise.
In 2022, Tarwater made enemies with KC Tenants, the citywide tenant union, when they said he behaved disrespectfully towards tenants at a mobile home village who were displaced by the Jackson County Detention Center.
That grudge led the union’s political arm, KC Tenants Power, to ask Johnathan Duncan to run against him in the Kansas City Council’s 6th District race to prevent him from winning the seat.
Meanwhile, McGee resigned from the Missouri House of Representatives in 2018 amid allegations of sexual harassment.
McGee was accused of pursuing an unwanted relationship with an employee for 10 months. He was then accused of obstructing an ethics committee investigation related to the allegation. The ethics committee ultimately recommended stripping him of his committee assignments, and he resigned before it could come to a vote on the floor.
Sean Smith and Abarca disagree with McGee about how the nominating process should go. Abarca said he wasn’t sure the 2011 process should necessarily be the model, but he believes transparency is critical to restore trust in the county.
Smith told The Beacon that he had been unaware of the 2011 process, but having learned about it, he thought it was an interesting idea to consider.
“For one thing, you’d let people get familiar with someone,” he said. “After people have watched the video, they would have the opportunity to give us feedback. So as a legislator, I’d love that, because they might observe something that I didn’t notice.”
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
