Why is KC mayor’s top aide leaving after 5 years? (No, it’s not for reality TV) | Opinion
Friday is Morgan Said’s last day as chief of staff to Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas, and as the rare communications professional who while never saying a disloyal word about her boss has also never lied to me, I’m sorry to see her go.
She understands our job as reporters, and has done hers so well that you have probably never heard of her.
So how could 31-year-old Said, the youngest woman ever to take on that role in Kansas City, possibly be stepping away after almost five years of 24-7 duty that included the George Floyd protests, COVID-19, year after year of record-breaking gun violence and getting 17 calls from newsrooms across the country while still hiding in a Union Station closet with a bunch of Chiefs players after the Super Bowl rally shootings started?
Mysterious, I agree. In an interview at City Hall on her penultimate day on the job, she said reporters had asked if, as they’d heard, she might really be leaving to do a reality TV show, or because she’s of Palestinian descent, and so must have been furious that the Kansas City Council didn’t vote last week to condemn Israel’s war in Gaza. Well, no and no. Five years in a job like hers is a lifetime.
She actually gave notice last August, but the mayor asked her to please give him another year, and she agreed. Now, though, with Lucas and his wife expecting their second child on June 15 — and Mr. Mayor, I hope you’re going to model good policy and practice by taking a real paternity leave — this seemed like the right moment to step away.
“If I waited for a quiet week to depart,” she said, “I never would. It was time.”
She intentionally hasn’t lined anything else up, other than planning to stay with Lucas in some as yet undefined advisory capacity. Because her immediate goal is to take the summer off, visiting every single public pool in Kansas City and also taking a real vacation, to Italy.
In her last day on the job, she will be at the White House with the Kansas City Chiefs, then will turn her office over to Reid Day, now the mayor’s deputy chief of staff.
In one of her first days on the job, I met her at the first First Friday arts event after 25-year-old Erin Langhofer was fatally shot by a stray bullet fired in a fight Langhofer had nothing to do with in the summer of 2019.
Since then, she’s become a policy adviser Lucas gives enormous credit. In the memo announcing her departure, he said “her work helped saved lives during the pandemic; attracted billions of dollars of economic and infrastructure development to our city, particularly in long-overlooked areas such as East Kansas City, the West Bottoms, and the Riverfront; built an undefeated track record of success in Kansas City ballot initiatives supporting affordable housing creation and homelessness prevention, parks, convention and tourism improvements, and sustainable public transit investment, and crafted Kansas City government’s successful efforts to land and organize major events such as the 2026 FIFA World Cup.” No wonder she wants to keep working with him, and vice versa.
She grew up in Shawnee, went to St. Teresa’s Academy and was student body president at KU. Before coming to work for the city, she had spent the previous five years working in Washington for Kansas Republican Sen. Jerry Moran. Lucas met her in Moran’s office.
She was proud to work for Moran, she said, noting that along with Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, he launched a multiyear investigation into the Harvey Weinstein of USA Gymnastics, Larry Nassar, and worked for paid maternity leave for women in the military.
Though “I would classify myself as a Democrat,” the political switch was no big deal, she said, since Republicans like Moran and retired Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt “were able to pull down millions of dollars for our communities.” Anyway, “I’m not interested in the kind of absolutism that exists in many places in politics,” which is why she appreciates working on the city level.
Her father was murdered in a restaurant parking lot — a killing that was never solved — when she was 12, and a 15-year-old step-sibling took his own life when she was 24, so the trauma of gun violence was never an abstraction for her.
The Super Bowl rally shooting she was trapped in hit her harder than she realized at first. As the rally ended, “I said, ‘Thank God’” nothing had gone wrong, and then it did. In the months since then, she’s kept having nightmares about that day.
I hope she really does take the summer off, even if, as she says, “I don’t think I’m all the way off the ride.” Then if she does, as planned, stay in public service in our city, lucky us.
