As Overland Park Sen. Greg Smith seeks re-election, his daughter and his politics stay inextricably linked

Michael Czerniewski is running for Kansas Senate District 21 for one reason: to oust Greg Smith.

Smith has been in the Legislature since 2010, first as a House Republican and, since 2012, as a senator. He sought political office following the high-profile murder of his daughter, Kelsey Smith. (Senate District 21 covers major portions of Overland Park and Lenexa.)

Kelsey Smith was 18 when she was abducted from a Target parking lot in Overland Park. She was found dead near Longview Lake in southern Jackson County. Edwin Hall, a 26-year-old from Olathe, was convicted of killing Kelsey Smith. He’s in a maximum-security prison in Hutchinson, serving a life sentence with no chance for parole.

Following Kelsey Smith’s abduction, Verizon had taken four days to provide coordinates of her location, based on signals from her cell phone. In 2009, the Kansas Legislature passed the Kelsey Smith Act, proposed by Greg Smith and his wife, Missey Smith. The law compels telecommunications companies to cooperate quickly with law enforcement to track the whereabouts of someone reasonably suspected to be in grave danger. It also led Greg Smith to seek public office.

Since he arrived in Topeka, Smith has pursued a number of pieces of legislation that he has publicly traced back to his daughter’s death. The latest, in this election year, is Senate Bill 376. It would require law enforcement to file a missing-persons report with the state within two hours of learning that an individual is unaccounted for. (The existing law lays out an “as soon as practical” timeline for submitting such reports to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.) The measure cleared the Senate Corrections and Juvenile Justice Committee, of which Smith is chairman, on February 15.

Smith told WDAF Fox 4 that his daughter had guided his vote. “She’s on my mind every day,” he told the television station. “And all the time when I’m in Topeka. I mean, that’s my driver. That’s my passion.”

That’s what bothers Czerniewski.

“Each time he’s run, he’s done so using the death of Kelsey Smith as a political prop,” Czerniewski tells me on a frosty Thursday morning at Lenexa’s Black Dog Coffee. “He continues to push it for his political gain, and I have no problem calling him out for that.”

Smith calls Czerniewski’s charge offensive. A schoolteacher, he has said he never intended to run for office before his daughter’s death. “I would say what happened to my daughter affected my life profoundly,” he tells me. “Because of that is the reason I ran for office.”

Czerniewski’s own previous political experience is limited to losing a 2007 Overland Park City Council race. A video-production freelancer, he filed last year to run as a Democrat, though he has been openly critical of some aspects of the Kansas Democratic Party.

“I have a feeling Kansas Democrats focus way too much on education,” Czerniewski says. “Yes, it’s important, but it’s not the only issue.”

Political analysts have said 2014 Democratic gubernatorial nominee Paul Davis lost Johnson County to Sam Brownback because Davis pressed on the issue of education at a time when school districts still performed relatively well in the prosperous and Republican-leaning county.

Czerniewski says he will accept campaign donations but doesn’t plan to hold events to raise contributions. He describes himself as a “terrible” fundraiser.

But Smith’s bigger problem may be Dinah Sykes, a potentially formidable primary opponent. He has faced GOP opposition before; he beat Joe Beveridge by 291 votes in 2012. Unlike Czerniewski, Sykes has received campaign contributions that indicate she has the support of Johnson County’s moderate Republican establishment — which is trying to put more centrist candidates in a statehouse dominated by deeply conservative Republicans.

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Among her contributions so far: $250 from Lathrop & Gage governmental relations coordinator Mary Birch (the law firm itself donated $500), $200 from the Kansas Families for Education Political Action Committee, $100 from longtime Johnson County political kingpin Dick Bond, and $250 from the Olathe National Educators of America Political Action Committee.

Sykes is also a political novice, save for a stint as a PTA president. The Knoxville, Tennessee, native says it was the quality of life in Johnson County that prompted her to want to start a family here after her husband completed his graduate studies in the region. But she says she’s alarmed at policies she believes now threaten that quality of life.

Sykes says many politicians in Topeka don’t seem to listen to constituents and support policies that contradict the values of Kansans who put them into office.

“There’s a bigger voice they’re hearing,” Sykes tells me. Specifically, she says, those voices come from the American Legislative Exchange Council, a powerful nonprofit that pushes pro-gun, anti-immigration and strict voter-identification laws to state lawmakers. Its annual confab is well attended by Kansas and Missouri elected officials.

Sykes puts Smith in that group.

“I don’t think he listens to the people of Overland Park and Lenexa,” she says. “As I knock on doors, I hear that over and over again.”

Since the 2013 tax cuts that were pushed by Gov. Sam Brownback, Kansas has sunk into a financial morass, cutting funding to various programs to meet a structurally unbalanced budget. Smith supported the cuts.

“Greg Smith has said I’m not a true Republican — I think I can throw that back at him,” Sykes says, referring to tax policies that have unbalanced Kansas’ checkbook. “I don’t see that as being fiscally responsible.”

“It’s been mixed,” Smith counters. “There’s been some pieces of it that have done a lot of good. It’s helped in the creation of new jobs and new companies in Kansas. On the other side, there’s pieces of it that would probably need to be adjusted.”

Specifically, he refers to a measure proposed last year that would tax wages on limited liability corporations. “We tried to do it last year and we didn’t get enough support and we were told that if it did pass, it would be vetoed,” he says.

Smith also supported the block grant funding program for K-12 education, which replaced a complicated funding formula that had been in place since the early 1990s. He says it gives school districts more flexibility on how they can spend their state allotments, whereas the old formula dictated specific channels where state aid had to go.

Jim Hinson, the superintendent of the Shawnee Mission School District, where Smith works, seemed ready to withdraw his initial support of the block grant idea last week. He warned the school board that the district would likely lose millions in funding, leading to consequences that would include larger class sizes.

Smith is also a public-safety advocate, but law enforcement officials say the state’s financial situation has interfered with their duties.

Kansas Bureau of Investigation Director Kirk Thompson told KCUR 89.3’s Sam Zeff in January that it declined about 20 percent of the felony investigations forwarded to the agency because it didn’t have enough agents to cover the necessary ground. The report said KBI has 71 agents when it should have 93.

Smith says KBI has been historically shorthanded. If the KBI was shorthanded before, it has become more so since Smith and Brownback reached office. An examination of the state’s public-employee database shows that key KBI positions (administrative, special agents, forensic scientists) totaled 177 in 2009. That’s down to 167 in 2014, the most recent year from which data are available.

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Still, Smith, a former police officer, has the support of some local law enforcement figures. Johnson County Sheriff Frank Denning is one of Smith’s campaign donors.

Other campaign contributions may become an issue for Smith during this election cycle.

Smith on a few occasions has sent donor funds from his campaign account to the Kelsey Smith Foundation, a nonprofit from which he draws a salary. On July 20, 2015, Smith’s campaign donated $1,137 to his foundation. He had also sent contributions to the foundation the preceding two years.

Campaigns are allowed to donate money to nonprofits, but whether those funds can go to a nonprofit that pays the candidate is a murkier question.

“Candidates are permitted to donate campaign funds to any organization which is recognized as a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization or any religious organization, community service or civic organization but only if the candidate receives no goods or services unrelated to the candidate’s campaign as the result of the payment of such donations,” says Carol Williams, director of the Kansas Ethics Commission.

The Kelsey Smith Foundation promotes safety-awareness seminars, advocates for using wireless technology to locate missing persons and gives away free safety whistles, among other things. In 2010, the last year the foundation filed a full tax form, it paid Smith a salary of $8,258. Since then, the foundation hasn’t reported enough revenue to require that a detailed tax form be filed with the IRS.

Smith says he works in excess of 40 hours a week on the foundation for less than $10,000 and doesn’t see his campaign funds going to the foundation as a problem.

“The only campaign funds that go to the foundation go for sponsorships for charity golf tournaments or things like that,” he says.

The foundation’s biggest fundraiser is an annual golf tournament called the Kelsey Smith Classic, at the Falcon Ridge Golf Course. Last year, it was attended by U.S. Rep. Kevin Yoder.

Smith also reimburses himself well for campaign-related travel. In 2013, he paid himself $2,377. In 2015, he paid himself $3,131. Campaign finance laws allow candidates to reimburse themselves at the IRS rate of 55 cents a mile.

Other politicians pay themselves less. Jeff King, vice president of the Kansas Senate, from Independence, Kansas, paid himself $2,914 in 2015 for travel-related expenses. Of that, $1,856 came from mileage reimbursement.

Rob Olson, the Olathe senator who helped shepherd the Kelsey Smith Act, filed for $615 in mileage reimbursement last year. Julia Lynn, another Olathe senator, spent $1,805. Her campaign reports are detailed, showing where she traveled and how much she spent. Smith’s are compressed into one line item.

“The travel is for trips back and forth from Topeka and various events,” Smith says.

Smith says he’s not worried about having two candidates opposing him this year.

“It’ll be a campaign of ideas,” Smith says. “Ones that Kansans think are worthwhile, that’s where the votes will go.”

Last November, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported that Kansas’ gross domestic product was growing at half the national rate — a distinct turnaround from the pre-Brownback era. The center noted that Kansas’ economic growth outpaced the national average in five of the six years before 2012.

Smith doesn’t see things that way. “Our growth has been really good in Kansas,” he tells me. The state, he adds, “has taken several steps in the right direction.”

Many in the state aren’t so bullish. In recent polling by the Docking Institute of Public Affairs at Fort Hays State University, 53 percent of Kansans said they were “very dissatisfied” with Brownback. President Barack Obama is today more popular in this Republican-leaning state — a result which suggests that Kansans aren’t big fans of what has happened since Brownback enacted his tax cuts, the signature legislative achievement of his administration.

Smith earned headlines during the last legislative session when he called taxes “legalized theft,” and his website takes his otherwise unnamed “progressive challenger” to task for favoring “big government, big taxes and big brother [sic].” Smith’s career path, however — from his time in the military to his tenure as a police officer to his paychecks these days as a schoolteacher and a lawmaker — has been supported entirely by taxpayers. And, though his campaign verbiage steers clear of mentioning this detail, he voted in favor of a tax package in 2015 that increased sales taxes.