Inside a small KC-area fire district’s descent into infighting, recalls and lawsuits

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Petty arguments. Dueling lawsuits. A recall election. For two years, political warfare has engulfed a little-known small rural fire district south of Kansas City.

Board meetings have turned acrimonious while allegations of malfeasance are traded in court. The dysfunction has left area residents with a nagging fear: what happens when a big fire comes?

The Western Cass Fire Protection District – led by a five-member elected board of directors – services about 2,500 people across 16 square miles in western Cass County. Despite its small size, it has confronted big problems.

Nearby fire departments canceled their mutual aid agreements last year, opting to steer clear of the ongoing turmoil. The compacts ensure agencies share resources in the event of a large emergency and the cancellations have left some residents uneasy.

A 2021 state audit found significant recordkeeping shortfalls. Budgets didn’t have all the information required by law. Debit card receipts weren’t kept. Open meetings laws weren’t always followed.

More recently, some board directors alleged the board still fails to follow basic financial management practices and improperly closes meetings to the public. Others have said the directors raising concerns were themselves causing havoc. In August, voters ousted those directors in a contentious recall election.

The fire district had no qualified firefighters for several months in 2022, a lawsuit alleged, after a handful quit rather than agree to new district policies. The district has since brought on new personnel, but the gap left lingering doubts about the district’s ability to respond to a major building fire or other emergency.

Gary Miller lives near one of the district’s two fire stations and said fire personnel are rarely present. He fears in an emergency he would have to rely on firefighters from Belton about four miles to the north, even though the station sits just down the road.

“We pay these guys here,” Miller said of the fire district. “We ain’t got nothing.”

After receiving several tips about the fire district, The Star interviewed local residents, fire district board members and area officials, and also reviewed hundreds of pages of court documents and other records. What emerged is a portrait of dysfunction and mudslinging that has shaken the area and called into question the district’s ability to effectively carry out one of the most basic functions of local government – fighting fires.

The upheaval within the Western Cass Fire Protection District illustrates how political and personal differences within even the smallest units of government can quickly spiral out of control, dividing communities and leaving neighbors suspicious of each other.

“It’s kind of like a leaderless ship to a certain degree,” George Poulignot, who briefly served as chief of the fire district for several months in 2021, said of the board. “There’s a lot of distrust.”

Residents have largely divided into two camps – each blaming the other.

One camp is led by Kerri VanMeveren, who became interested in the fire district after a brush fire spread onto her property in 2018. She won election to the board of directors in 2020, after promising reform, and then became its treasurer. She

said she found shoddy to non-existent bookkeeping.

The face of the other camp is John Webb, a longtime area businessman known for mounting longshot bids over the past decade to unseat then-U.S. Rep. Vicky Hartzler, a hardline Republican who Webb said wasn’t conservative enough.

Webb joined the board in early 2022, originally with VanMeveren’s support, but the two soon began to butt heads.

“He has to be in control of everything. And I didn’t care about that, but he wouldn’t listen to the fact that you’ve got to follow the law and you can’t just make these off-the-hip decisions,” VanMeveren said.

Webb said he quickly realized VanMeveren was “manipulative.” Late last year, his wife, Mary, filed paperwork to trigger the August recall election that ousted VanMeveren and another board member allied with her.

VanMeveren was “causing a calamity,” Webb said, saying she wanted to “cause havoc and destroy the fire district.”

“While some things she may speak of have a fragment or an element of truth to them,” Webb said, “most everything she ever talks about or says is totally fictitious.”

Infighting among board

VanMeveren said that after Webb joined the board, she was asked to sign off on payroll expenses for contractors that didn’t match their timesheets. Webb also asked her to authorize contracts not approved by the board and that he had authorized a lawn mowing contract without board approval, she said.

Poulignot, the former fire chief, called the lawn mowing contract a huge source of contention.

“You get so locked up on getting this stupid invoice for your lawn, you can’t accomplish anything else,” Poulignot said. Still, he acknowledged VanMeveren was “not wrong.”

VanMeveren resigned as treasurer in May 2022 but stayed on the board, even as a majority of directors turned against her and ally Darvin Schildknecht. The board’s minutes during this period paint VanMeveren as a disruptive and unruly presence, underscoring the depth of animosity toward the two directors.

Minutes from June 2022 say VanMeveren “went on some long posturing diatribe” during one discussion. Minutes from May 2022 say VanMeveren and Schildknecht “harangued John for setting up both the lawn service and the inventory.”

The board’s descent into acrimony and recrimination came to a head at the Aug. 3, 2022, meeting, where board members asked VanMeveren to resign. After she refused, the board voted to approve filing a lawsuit seeking her removal.

By the end of the month, both sides had filed dueling lawsuits in Cass County.

The board’s lawsuit alleged VanMeveren gave orders to firefighters responding to calls, a claim she denied, and that the district’s previous accounting firm parted ways with the district because of difficulty communicating with VanMeveren while she was treasurer. VanMeveren denied she was the reason for the termination.

The lawsuit cited four resignations of district directors it said were related to her conduct, including the October 2021 resignation of Poulignot, the former fire chief.

“Defendants’ conduct and behavior in meetings and in public has demeaned the reputation and standing of the district, such that it has lost the respect of neighboring entities and individuals,” the lawsuit read.

VanMeveren and Schildknecht filed their own lawsuit under the name Citizens for Transparency and Accountability. The group alleged the fire district had been without any qualified firefighters since April 2022 and relied on mutual aid from surrounding departments.

The board minimized the need for financial controls, the lawsuit read, accusing Webb and another director of moving and commingling funds and other banking changes without board approval. Open meetings laws were routinely violated and the board’s minutes included commentary intended to discredit VanMeveren, it alleged.

The mismanagement and improper handling of meetings, the lawsuit read, “create the perfect storm for embezzlement, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer funds.”

Mutual aid cancellations

Nearby fire departments started keeping their distance.

In the late summer and early fall of 2022, three departments in Belton, Dolan-West Dolan and West Peculiar canceled their mutual aid agreements to help the district out with resources and respond to fires.

An attorney for the Dolan-West Dolan fire district wrote in an October 2022 letter that it would be happy to consider a new mutual aid agreement if Western Cass “becomes a functional fire department” at some point.

The lack of a mutual aid agreement doesn’t necessarily mean the fire departments wouldn’t respond to a major fire in the district, but it means the departments likely wouldn’t receive compensation and would have no expectation of reciprocal assistance.

Webb and Sue Hosterman, the current board president, place the blame at VanMeveren’s feet, claiming the nearby districts did not want to work with her. “They wanted nothing to do with the fire district while she was on the board because she is so irrational,” Webb said.

As Hosterman put it, “nobody wanted to deal with us.”

Belton Mayor Norman Larkey refuted this characterization in an interview, saying that VanMeveren had nothing to do with his city’s decision to cancel the agreement. The agreement was canceled, he said, because the city wasn’t getting any help and the taxpayers of Belton were essentially supplementing the fire district.

Larkey, who briefly served as interim chief of the Western Cass district from late 2020 to early 2021 said real issues exist within the current board and how they run meetings.

“Kerri is kind of process driven and … dots her I’s and crosses her T’s, where I don’t see that coming from the other side,” Larkey said.

But Poulignot, the former fire chief, said some people need to lower their expectations of what a small, rural fire district can accomplish — “this is small town USA.”

“This is not a large international, global Fortune 500 company,” he said.

Push to dissolve district

After a bench trial in June 2023, Cass County Circuit Court Judge Michael Wagner ruled in favor of the fire district in the lawsuit brought by Citizens for Transparency and Accountability — a win for Webb and the board and a defeat for VanMeveren and her supporters.

Wagner’s written decision offered no explanation of his reasoning. Transcripts aren’t yet available, so it’s unclear what comments he made from the bench.

Two months later, voters in western Cass County recalled VanMeveren and Schildknecht. The recall passed with about 65% in favor of recalling each director (the board’s lawsuit seeking VanMeveren’s removal was dismissed after the recall).

But VanMeveren and her supporters aren’t giving up.

Now off the board, VanMeveren and Schildknecht intend to appeal the ruling. In mid-October, Citizens for Transparency and Accountability also filed a petition in Cass County Circuit Court asking a judge to call an election on dissolving the district.

Dissolving the district would require a two-thirds majority of voters, an uphill climb given the recall. If dissolved, a judge would appoint a trustee to oversee the district, potentially leading to its operations merging with nearby fire departments.

The petition says the district may be able to respond to most calls, such as brush fires, but cannot handle the threat of big calls, such as a house or structure fire.

The petition also includes a June 30, 2023, letter from the Missouri Attorney General’s Office informing the fire district that it had received complaints about alleged Sunshine Law violations and stating that the office is “reviewing these matters to ensure compliance with the Sunshine Law.”

Madeline Sieren, a spokesperson for Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, said in an email the investigation remains ongoing.

The petition also says the U.S. Department of Labor has been investigating the district since August 2022, but doesn’t detail the allegations under investigation.

A U.S. Department of Labor spokesperson told The Star the investigation found “minor record-keeping violations” that the fire district agreed to correct. The agency closed the investigation in August and did not issue any civil penalties.

Webb said the fire district has no issues warranting dissolution. The district, he said, has made 100% of its calls for service since last year – a statistic that critics say indicates nothing about the speed or quality of service.

“If a public entity is doing its job, why would you dissolve it?” Webb said. “You dissolve it when it fails to meet the requirements.”

Citizens for Transparency and Accountability has gathered the signatures of 218 registered voters calling for an election. As of August, the district had 1,783 registered voters.

Under Missouri law, the petition must be signed by at least 100 voters in the district. The law gives a judge the authority, after hearing evidence, to order an election.

A hearing is scheduled for Dec. 12.

“Whether or not I’m on the board, I have a right that my tax dollars are being spent properly and that they are being used for the services that they are supposed to be going for,” VanMeveren said.

“And I’m not going to be bullied into shutting up.”