Jackson County Executive Candidate Q&A: Hear from Stacy Lake

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — KSHB 41 reporter Tod Palmer covers sports business and eastern Jackson County, including Independence. Share your story idea with Tod.

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Jackson County residents will elect a new county executive on Nov. 3.

The recent history of the job hasn’t exactly been distinguished, and county residents remain angered over the 2023 reassessment process among other ongoing issues.

Alan Rohlfing was the only Republican to file for office, while Stacy Lake emerged from a crowded field for the Democratic Party nomination.

KSHB 41 Jackson County Reporter Tod Palmer sat down with both candidates.

— Watch our conversation with Lake —

Here is a transcript of the conversation with Lake that has been lightly edited for clarity:

KSHB 41 Jackson County Reporter Tod Palmer: Take me back to the primary. You know, you had you're going up against some gentlemen — in particular, Dan Tarwater and Bill Baird, who had some experience, some name recognition. I think there were a lot of people who felt like your best path toward the nomination for the general election was if they kind of split the vote, and you were able to rally enough support from the more progressive side to end up with the highest total. But you ended up pulling more than both of them combined at the end of the day. Were you surprised at how much support you had in the primary?

Stacy Lake: Honestly, I wasn't really that surprised. My ultimate goal was to surpass the numbers that I achieved in 2022, which was 29,000 voters.

My primary base was in Kansas City, but this last primary, I focused a lot of attention on going out to Eastern Jack, speaking to eastern Jackson County voters, listening to their concerns, and telling them about my plans and policies to improve their lives in Jackson County.

So I was actually very moved that my message reached out to eastern Jackson County, so that my totals compared to 2022 actually increased by 10,000 voters.

Palmer: What differences did you find between a voter in the city and a voter in eastern Jackson County? We've heard some talk about secession and stuff like that, which I'm not sure that's realistic at this point, but having grown up in Raytown, kind of straddling both areas, it's a little bit different, isn't it?

Lake: Yes, a lot of people in eastern Jackson feel ignored. They don't feel like the county government is actually focused on improving their lives, and specifically the people that live in the unincorporated areas of Jackson County.

That's why it was so important for me to reach out to those voters to make it known that I care about their concerns, and I am going to be focused on improving their lives in Eastern Jack and also the lives of the people in Kansas City.

Palmer: What made you want to run for county executive in the first place?

Lake: The reason why I wanted to run for Jackson County executive basically starts in the 2019 property tax crisis — when property values, primarily in the Kansas City area, were significantly increased and caused a full-blown crisis.

Since I live in Hyde Park, our neighborhood was especially impacted by these property assessed value increases.

After helping our neighbors navigate through this horrific situation, I then took a focused look at Jackson County government and I found out that Jackson County government hasn't been operating efficiently or effectively for years.

So, I went out to the community and tried to find a person to run against Frank White in order to prevent another property tax crisis from happening again, but nobody in the Democratic Party at that time wanted to challenge Frank White.

So, I decided at that moment that I was going to challenge Frank White and represent my community so that we could actually change our community for the better.

Palmer: That's the 2022 election, correct? Came close in the primary, but then obviously Frank has subsequently been recalled. Obviously, there was another issue with the Jackson County assessment in 2023.

I think a lot of people in the county, and this particularly in eastern Jackson County, but within Kansas City, too: Look, they recalled the county executive. Right, the interim county executive is now under federal indictment. The county legislature has been beset by infighting and inefficiency for decades.

I think people want a functional government that doesn't embarrass them. How can you restore the public faith in an institution that has lost so much in the last few decades?

Lake: The “A” in my Jackson Plan stands for auditing Jackson County government. One of the hallmarks of the Jackson Plan is my promise that, within the first year, I'm going to conduct the first-ever deep-scale audit of Jackson County government, so that we can find out the issues that are going on in our departments and in our county government and fix them, and also find out where people's tax dollars are being spent, so that each tax dollar is being properly utilized in our government.

But also, if we look at our budgets compared to other county government budgets, I believe that Jackson County is very much behind.

For instance, Jackson County government has a revenue stream of around $490 million a year, while our neighbor Johnson County has a revenue stream of around $1.9 billion a year.

That's not just primarily because the property values in Johnson County are higher. It's because we are literally not trying to go out and find grant opportunities or other opportunities for revenue streams to increase the revenues in our county government.

It's basically utilizing that to increase our services, but also to make sure that our tax-dollar utilization is being appropriated properly.

Palmer: If you get elected? What would be three priorities you would look to immediately institute to improve the county?

Lake: First, as I stated: Audit Jackson County government.

Second, I need to appoint an assessor because right now our assessment department. We haven't had an assessor in — upcoming November, it will be a year that we haven't had an assessor, which I believe is completely appalling.

With that, and this also goes with No. 2, we need to audit the assessment department and make sure that the assessment process in 2027 is complying with Missouri law, and that we won't go back into what happened in 2023 and 2025 with the property tax crises.

Third, we really need to look at our county buildings. The majority of our county-owned buildings are not ADA-compliant, and they're behind hundreds of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance.

So we really need to look at our county building infrastructure and start moving money towards making those critical repairs to make Jackson County government accessible for us all.

Palmer: How worried are you about the 2027 assessment cycle? As we've seen in 2019, then again in 2023 and in 2025 with the commercial side, there were significant issues. So, how concerned are you about the 2027 assessment cycle? And how do you think the fact that it's going to become an elected position in 2028 impacts what needs to be done with that assessment department?

Lake: I am very concerned with the upcoming 2027 property tax cycle because the number one function of the Jackson County executive is to collect taxes in Jackson County so that we can utilize those tax dollars for our communities.

But currently in Jackson County, we don't have a director of assessment, we don't have a director of finance and purchasing, we don't have a director of collections, we don't have a director of HR, and we don't have a director of the Recorder of Deeds.

So, when we look at the assessments of 2027, the assessment department, the collections department, the financing department — we don't have any leadership currently in those departments, so I am essentially coming into a situation, when I'm elected in November and when I'm sworn in in January, where I have to essentially rebuild our finance department from the ground up.

So, yes, I am very concerned about the 2027 assessment process, but this is just what the reality is, and I'm ready to face it head-on.

Palmer: Do you like the fact that whoever you appoint, in theory, would either face an election or would be replaced by someone elected by citizens in the county two years from now?

Lake: Yes, I'm very much a populist, so I tend to favor what people support. The people overwhelmingly supported an elected assessor, and so I look forward to that election. But in the meantime, I am going to appoint a new assessor in 2027.

Palmer: What's your long-term vision for the county? Because some of the things that you're describing, I don't think can get fixed in the first few months here in office, so what's the course you want to set for the county that you feel hasn't been set in recent years?

Lake: I've been running on a plan that I call my Jackson Plan for the past six years.

Just to quickly go over the Jackson Plan with you, it's a seven-prong acronym that stands for:

• Justice system reform;
• Auditing Jackson County government;
• Investing in Countywide infrastructure improvements;
• Keeping our property taxes affordable, so that we will never have another property tax crisis again;
• Supporting our small-business community in Jackson County that has historically never been supported by our local governments;
• The O stands for an ownership initiative for single-family households, which is my promise to promote single-family home ownership in Jackson County;
• and the N stands for a neighbor-to-neighbor transportation plan, which is my promise to create the first countywide public transit system that'll connect the majority of the cities together through a rapid bus transit line. 

Obviously, I will not be able to institute the Jackson plan within the first year or the first four years, but what it does provide is a roadmap of what I envision a reformed and modernized Jackson County to look like in the next 10 to 12 years.

In my opinion, Jackson County government is behind at least 20 years in terms of infrastructure. For instance, we don't have a public transportation system, which is a critical issue in our county.

Our technological infrastructure within the county is outdated, and as I mentioned before, our county buildings are currently crumbling.

There are a lot of things that we need to fix within Jackson County, so that's why in the first four years, I'm going to be primarily focused on fixing the internal issues that are weakening the functions of Jackson County.

Once those are fixed, we can then look into the other issues, like our public-transit system issues, investing more money into our county infrastructure projects, but the first a priori issues that need to be fixed are the internal issues, because if those aren't fixed, then our county government is not going to be able to operate properly.

Palmer: When you say some of those things, I see dollar signs in my head, right? How do you balance the “K” portion of your plan, keeping taxes affordable, with some of those priorities? Because improving the 911 dispatch system, for instance, would be expensive. A countywide transportation system would be expensive. Roads and bridges can be expensive. So, how do you balance those two things?

Lake: I think the audit is going to be revealing, because I think it's going to showcase how some money is being spent in departments that are ineffective. That could be moved to other departments to increase efficiency.

But when it comes to other projects, as I said before, Johnson County's revenue streams are nearly five times larger than ours, and it's not just because of property tax revenues that they are able to achieve.

But for instance, Jackson County government really doesn't invest in grant opportunities to go out to the state government or to the federal government and ask for money to support their infrastructure projects, which I think would be able to help us achieve these bigger goals.

Palmer: Affordable housing is an issue. Lots of people have talked about it. There have been a variety of studies, whether it's the way the real estate market operates or deregulation that has allowed AI companies to collude, perhaps illegally, to set rents in markets. I think people are starting to get their head around some of that stuff that's gone on. But from a county perspective, do you have any specific plans that you think can make housing more affordable and make single-family ownership more realistic?

Lake: The “O” in my Jackson plan stands for ownership initiative for single-family households.

In my opinion, the increase, the rapid increase of property values in Jackson County, is somewhat artificial. There has been a trend over the past years of outside corporations coming into Jackson County and buying 1,000s of single-family properties and basically holding them in their portfolios.

When we look at Economics 101, what we learn is that when supply is low, demand increases, right? But when you're withholding that supply, what's going to happen? The remaining houses that are on the market, the prices are going to skyrocket because of the number of sellers that are looking for that single-family home.

So you have that situation coupled with the property tax crisis, which was found to be illegally done. They were not complying with Missouri state statute.

They told some people that their property values were going to be increased by 100%, 400%, 500%, 1,000%. Many people were unable to afford those increases, and some people actually sold their homes because they believed that they wouldn't be able to pay their taxes in the upcoming years.

That again is a barrier to single-family home ownership, and it's a barrier to affordable housing. So as the next Jackson County executive, I'm going to do my best to promote policies to stop those from happening ever again.

One thing is, I'm going to reform the assessment department to make sure that our assessment department is complying with Missouri state law, so that we won't have these significant increases in property values all over Jackson County. But I'm also going to promote policies to prevent that practice in Jackson County that's occurring right now, where corporations are essentially stealing our single-family homes in order to just increase their portfolios.

Palmer: Speaking of the assessment department, I studied it looking back in like a 20- to 30-year window, and it was true what Gail McCann Beatty and Frank White said in 2023 that Jackson County property values had lagged for decades.

Obviously, passing along a blanket increase without inspecting the properties and doing the constitutionally required steps was illegal. But is part of your plan to beef up the assessment department so it can do a better job of assessing properties fairly to make sure that the process produces accurate market values and that people are paying what they should?

Lake: Yes, one of the issues besides the, in my viewpoint, intentional non-compliance with Missouri state statute that the old assessment department was doing is the fact that we took out half of our assessment department functions and gave it to a corporation called Tyler Technologies, and we paid them $17.9 million to conduct this assessment.

We have people that don't even live in Missouri, don't even live in Jackson County, telling us what our property values are. We're relying on their algorithms to basically use to evaluate our property and assess values.

That's why, as a campaign promise, I've told people that I'm going to sever the relationships with Tyler Technologies, so that we can bring our assessment department back fully in-house, so that we can have full control over the assessments in Jackson County, so that I can go out and tell people that their properties have been properly assessed and that the assessment department is fully complying with Missouri law.

Palmer: I don’t want this to come off as judgmental, but you strike me as young, and you've never held county office before, right?

This is a county of 750,000 people with a budget of nearly $700 million all told. That's a big job.

Does it intimidate you, and what makes you feel like you're prepared to take over an apparatus that you know of that scope and scale and manage it effectively?

Lake: I'm actually very young presenting, but I've been an attorney for 12 years.

Before that, I was a Chinese translator. My undergraduate background was in finance, and I have a minor in Chinese languages and cultures.

I've lived abroad for three years. I've run my own small business for eight years. I have a lot of experience when it comes to law and management, so I actually look forward to the challenge.

I'm actually in a unique position to solve a lot of the problems coming out of Jackson County because of my background as a civil litigator. I have investigated corporations in the past for financial compliance, so I understand how a business, when it comes to the law, needs to be run properly.

I believe I'll be able to provide a fresh new perspective into Jackson County government, and I look forward to becoming the next Jackson County executive.

Palmer: Speaking of business, data centers have been a big issue. I know it's becoming an issue in parts of unincorporated Jackson County as well. We've seen the fight in Independence. We've seen the fight in Kansas and other parts of the metro. What are your thoughts on data centers and battery energy storage systems and things like that, which present an opportunity to grow the tax base, but also present challenges from an environmental perspective and from a use perspective that are deeply unpopular right now?

Lake: Yes, I believe that Jackson County is bigger than AI data centers or battery storage plants.

As I stated before, I am a populist, so I believe in actually listening to the constituent concerns. Many people in Jackson County just abhor the idea of us utilizing our taxpayer dollars to support these industries that, one, are terrible for the environment; two, are a burden on our energy grid; and three, don't really have any significant benefit long-term to our communities.

That's why I believe I'm one of the only candidates who have made the promise that I'm not going to provide any taxpayer incentives, public funds, or taxpayer money to incentivize AI data center industries in Jackson County.

Palmer: As you said, there's a lot of department leadership you would need to hire. Do you have an idea of who you would want to bring in there, and how important do you think it is to surround yourself with people who have experience and can lead the departments?

Lake: Right now, I'm not focusing on hiring people for those positions because first I have to be elected first, so I'm focused on winning the race in November.

However, once I become the nominee-elect, I'm going to go through the process to be able to find the most qualified person to fulfill those roles.

It's not going to be based on friendships or who you know. It's going to be based on the person's qualifications and background.

Every person that I appoint is going to be the person that can 100% do the job, and they're going to have a background that cannot be challenged.

Palmer: The legislature has historically had some challenging personalities, and it's been a foil to the county executive office in the past. How would you work with the legislature to make county governance more effective?

Lake: One of the biggest proponents, I believe, that deeply affected Frank White's tenure was his failure to communicate properly with the Jackson County Legislature.

As the next Jackson County Executive, I am going to listen. I am going to collaborate with the new Jackson County Legislature because I believe that a lot of the issues just stemmed from not even giving them the opportunity to be listened to, to be heard, and to be understood.

But that's going to be different once I become Jackson County executive.

Palmer: Last question for me: It seems like you and Alan actually agree on a lot of things — whether it's infrastructure, whether it's the need for an audit, whether it's affordable housing, whether it's reforming the tax-assessment process. What differentiates the two of you?

Lake: My Jackson Plan was created six years ago.

A lot of people like to steal ideas from my Jackson Plan, so while I am flattered that a lot of people agree with the initiatives that I've been campaigning on for the past six years, I have to remind people that I am the original and that I 100% plan to implement the Jackson Plan for our county's future.

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