Like the managers of baseball teams, city managers are often hired to be fired.
When Kansas City Manager Brian Platt was unanimously fired by the City Council on Thursday, he joined the ranks of six other city managers who have been ousted — either removed or forced to resign.
That might not sound like many, but Kansas City has had only 15 city managers since the job was created in 1926 (not including the interim city managers who held the job between firings and hirings).
In all, city managers are almost as likely to be ousted as they are to leave on their own terms.
In big cities, the mayor tends to get all the attention — they’re directly elected by the people and represent the city at public events.
The city manager is akin to the city’s CEO. They oversee the day-to-day operations of City Hall, and in weak-mayor cities like Kansas City, the city manager is the most powerful government official — with the power to hire and fire city staff, cut deals for major projects and manage preparations for events like the upcoming FIFA World Cup in 2026.
Now that Brian Platt is out, Kansas City finds itself at a crossroads.
To understand the role of the city manager, The Beacon turned to the past, looking at historical archives of The Kansas City Star and speaking with local experts about the history of the job.
A look at Kansas City managers
In total, Kansas City has had 15 permanent city managers, including Brian Platt.
Some, like Henry McElroy and L.P. Cookingham, served for well over a decade in that role. They were the first and second city managers and served for 13 and 19 years, respectively.
Others were in the job for less than a year.
In one four-year period from 1959 until 1963, Kansas City cycled through four permanent city managers and six interim city managers as remnants of the corrupt Pendergast political machine grasped for power.
Out of all 15 permanent managers, nearly half were ultimately forced to resign or fired by the City Council.
That includes McElroy, who resigned when the Pendergast machine fell in 1939, Dave Olson in 1993, Larry Brown in 1997 and more recently, Wayne Cauthen, who was fired in 2009.
Another two — Reed McKinley in 1959 and Robert Weatherford in 1962 — resigned less than a year into the job amid intense conflict with the City Council.
When Weatherford quit his job before the council could fire him, one councilmember told The Kansas City Star, “It’s too bad that we didn’t get a chance to confer that honor on him.”
Not all city managers left on bad terms. Bob Collins resigned in 2002 for personal reasons, Troy Schulte resigned in 2019 to take a job in Jackson County and John Taylor left in 1974 to become city manager of Berkeley, California.
Brian Platt’s tenure of just over four years places him in the middle of the pack when it comes to longevity. The average tenure for city managers in Kansas City is around six years.
The shortest was Harry Fleming, who took a medical leave eight months after he was hired and died less than a year later. In the 1980s, A.J. Wilson lasted 14 months before he was ousted and took a hefty severance package.
Corrupt beginnings
Kansas City hired its first city manager after voters approved a change to the City Charter in 1924, according to Michael Wells, a special collections librarian at the Kansas City Public Library.
At the time, the measure was intended to root out corruption by placing someone with a professional background in charge of City Hall, rather than a mayor who may not have the management expertise.
But it quickly backfired.
“They actually ushered in the most corrupt period of Kansas City government that we’ve ever seen,” Wells said.
The City Council hired Henry McElroy in 1926. McElroy would enable the corrupt machine politics of the Pendergast era, when City Hall was controlled by “Boss” Tom Pendergast.
McElroy “was definitely a willing participant in the machine,” said Elijah Winkler, a special collections associate at the library. His style of bookkeeping enabled City Hall to siphon public dollars to Pendergast’s businesses.
But in spite of the corruption, Winkler said, McElroy was very popular and set the model for what a city manager could do.
Under McElroy, Kansas City undertook the “Ten-Year Plan” of massive public projects that put people to work in the thick of the Great Depression, including art deco buildings like the Municipal Auditorium, Kansas City Hall and the Jackson County Courthouse. McElroy used those projects to line his and Pendergast’s pockets.
“It was a good idea to support Pendergast during that time,” Wells said, “because of Pendergast’s ability to get jobs for his supporters.”
Despite all the corruption of the Pendergast years, part of McElroy’s legacy was creating a vision for city planning and public works projects.
Winkler gave McElroy credit for “having a long-term plan for public works and what the city would look like in 10 years” that wasn’t swayed by a new City Council changing the partisan lines every two years.
Pendergast’s machine quickly fell apart in 1939 once he and McElroy were indicted by the federal government. McElroy resigned in April and died shortly afterward.
Cookingham set a new standard for what the city manager should be
Once McElroy resigned and Kansas City voters elected Mayor John Gage, the newly hired city manager, L.P. Cookingham, overhauled City Hall to root out Pendergast corruption.
“In Cookingham, Kansas City got the city manager that they thought they were getting in 1926,” Wells said. “Slashing the payroll, getting rid of some of these political patronage jobs that had been given out by Pendergast.”
One marker of Cookingham’s legacy was making plans for the eventual construction of the downtown highway loop and U.S. 71.
Today, those projects are not remembered as fondly. Urbanists complain that the downtown loop strangled the economic activity out of downtown, and the construction of U.S. 71 resulted in the demolition of countless homes owned by Black families in Kansas City’s redlined neighborhoods.
But at the time, they were massive construction projects that were seen as ways to modernize Kansas City for the automobile.
Together, McElroy and Cookingham stand out to Wells and Winkler as the most influential city managers that Kansas City has had.
“You walk around downtown and it’s just a mix between those two guys,” Winkler said. “The downtown loop and the old art deco concrete structures, and that’s what survived in the city.”
Who will replace Brian Platt?
Now that Brian Platt has been removed, Kimiko Gilmore will continue to serve as the acting city manager until the council hires a replacement.
After the vote on Thursday, Mayor Quinton Lucas said the hiring discussions will begin over the course of upcoming City Council meetings.
The council will likely either appoint a long-term acting city manager until 2027, when his and the rest of the council’s term ends, or they could hire someone as a permanent replacement.
“I don’t expect necessarily the level of process that we might have seen in our last search,” he said, “given the time window and the types of folks we would have apply. But I would expect that we’ll do all that we can to evaluate the best folks to work at the city, whether they be internal or external.”
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
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