Troy Wonder

Troy Nash is the man.

Since the March election, when five City Council seats turned over, 34-year-old Nash, now in his second term, has ascended to what’s arguably the most powerful position on the council.

Controversy, which has dogged him since before he was first elected in 1999, has followed him to the top.

In May — sweeps month for TV ratings — viewers across the city saw him cast in the role of the weasely politician, racing down City Hall’s back stairs while Dave Helling and a cameraman pursued him with tough questions about the $150,000 in campaign money he had raised in spite of having no opponent.

Some of his colleagues on the City Council whisper that he’s the next Kansas City scandal in the making. Rumor is, he’s being investigated by the FBI or the IRS. In one version of recent events, he raised more than $150,000 to get re-elected to the City Council by exchanging favorable votes for contributions. In another, he’s running a kickback scheme with his former office assistant, to whom he paid $16,000 to do consulting work for his uncontested campaign.

Now there’s the box of Eggos.

The package of toaster waffles appears on a long receipt from Costco, along with eggs, bacon, dish soap and paper towels. The Pitch found the receipt, along with others like it, in Nash’s personal campaign finance files, the ones that aren’t made available to the public.

Missouri campaign finance laws state that campaign contributions “shall not be converted to any personal use.”

Nash insists that everything is cool with the Eggos, though.

The state’s campaign finance laws, he points out, allow politicians to spend campaign money on “any ordinary expenses” related to campaigning or serving in office.

“Boy, that’s a huge net,” he says. Big enough to cover groceries for dinner, lunch and breakfast meetings at his house. His constituents and supporters wolfed down the Eggos, he explains.

Joe Carroll, the Missouri Ethics Commission’s director of campaign finance, tells the Pitch that Troy’s interpretation of the law is correct, though the agency would investigate whether a single package of Eggos qualified as an “ordinary” expense if someone filed a formal complaint.

But Carroll says the way Nash reported the Eggos purchase is “problematic.”

In the public files, which any citizen can browse at the Kansas City Board of Election’s offices, the Costco expenditure shows up on the forms as part of a “reimbursement” to Nash’s wife, Sherrie.

There are many such reimbursements to Sherrie — seventeen in all. Nash also recorded ten reimbursements to other friends and family members.

Some of these reimbursements might seem dubious to anyone who’s ever shopped for groceries. Many are for improbably round figures — such as one for $1,100 paid on April 21, 1999, and another for $1,000 dated September 26, 2000. Typically, expense reimbursements end up being for unrounded sums — such as $476.06 or $721.82.

Nash tells the Pitch that early in his first term, he frequently used the family credit card to pay for things he needed in the course of his political duties. Money would sometimes get tight, he explains, and his wife would get on him to pay down the card. So he’d often just cut reimbursement checks for campaign purchases made with the card.

Nash’s most recent reimbursements to his wife, most of them made during the late summer of last year, are for amounts one would expect to see on a cash register, such as $649.62 and $454.02. “We’ve learned over time,” he admits.

Yet Nash wrote his close friend Stan Counts two such reimbursement checks — one for $800 on November 9 of last year, the second for $1,000 on December 12. (Counts works for the Economic Development Corporation, which receives city funds. Early in Nash’s first term on the City Council, Counts won a contract to help with an urban redevelopment initiative Nash had championed.)

Odd figure. Even figure.

It doesn’t matter, Carroll says.

“Reimbursements” to third parties are against the rules.

“The expenditure report should be a listing of the actual items paid for, not simply reimbursements,” he explains. “Otherwise, you could pay for an entire campaign through a credit card, and the public would not know what you actually spent your money on. It’s a disclosure issue.”

Nash insists there’s nothing scandalous about his files. Candidates write “reimbursement” all the time, he says.

Besides, it hasn’t held him back yet.

Troy Nash is the man, and the mayor knows it.

After the March election, when Kay Barnes dispensed committee assignments like a hostess handing out party favors, Nash ended up with one of the most coveted.

He chairs the council’s Planning, Zoning and Economic Development Committee. The chair of Planning and Zoning (or P and Z), most people who are familiar with city government agree, is the most powerful seat on the council.

Planning and Zoning is where the power is because it’s where the money is.

Want to build a business on a vacant swath of land? Go to Planning and Zoning. Want to divide up a cornfield and sprinkle it with $250,000 homes? P and Z. Want a tax break to turn an abandoned downtown warehouse into hoity-toity lofts?

As of this past March, nobody gets anything until Nash slams down his gavel.

Developers and their lawyers, who stand to make or lose a lot of money based on Planning and Zoning decisions, tend to contribute a lot of money to the committee members’ campaign trusts.

“That’s part of the American way,” says Dan Cofran, a former city councilman who now works as a development attorney. He says developers and their representatives offer such contributions to ensure access or returned phone calls, or to level the playing field. By contrast, neighborhood leaders have the ability to amass boisterous crowds in the council chambers, exerting tremendous influence against development proposals they oppose.

Nash meets often with neighborhood leaders. But, like his colleagues, he also gladly accepts developers’ loot — more than $50,000 over the past four years.

“Troy is a very good fund-raiser,” says Ed Ford, Nash’s predecessor as chair of Planning and Zoning.

Ford brought in just over $18,000 running unopposed for re-election in 1999. Nash raised more than $150,000 for this spring’s election — though he didn’t have an opponent, either.

“Once I found out I wasn’t going to have an opponent,” Ford says, “I just quit fund raising, because I didn’t want to have the appearance that people had bought me.”

For his re-election this spring, Nash began fund raising in earnest two years earlier. By the end of 2001, he had raised more than $36,000. In 2002, when the city’s campaign season began really heating up, he brought in another $84,000.

He had reason to bulk up. His neighbor Wesley Fields, a promising newcomer to the Kansas City political scene, initially planned to oppose him. But before the campaign got going, Fields moved to the 5th District to take on Becky Nace (“Nace Baiting,” February 13).

Nash kept raising money long after Fields made the switch. Even after the filing deadline on January 28, past which it was legally impossible to have an opponent, Nash raised more than $50,000. He says he needed this money to retroactively pay people who had worked on his campaign when there was a threat of opposition.

At the time, City Hall insiders believed that Mayor Kay Barnes would appoint Nash chair of P and Z. (Nash was already serving on the committee under Ford’s leadership.) According to a rumor that circulated among Nash’s colleagues on the council as well as various council candidates and an array of politically involved citizens, Nash’s P and Z chairmanship was part of an intricate deal the mayor had cut with her predecessor, Emanuel Cleaver, in exchange for his support in the election. Nash categorically dismisses this interpretation of events as fanciful City Hall gossip.

It makes sense that Cleaver would make such a request, though. Nash was once the former mayor’s aide, and the two maintain a strong alliance. Being chair of P and Z allows Nash to strengthen his support and money base for a possible run for higher office.

But this raises questions of loyalty. If Nash depends on developer cash to build his political career, will he always have the public’s best interest in mind on Planning and Zoning issues? Helling’s sweeps-month news report suggested that Nash had been bought by developers. It offered two apparent cases of quid pro quo, developers offering money and shortly thereafter winning council approval for their projects.

Ford defends Nash against these allegations. One of Helling’s examples focused on a downtown parking garage that won tax breaks approved by a council committee on which Nash doesn’t sit. The other needed a council majority to pass. Nash, Ford says, was just one vote. “After [KCTV] Channel 5 talked to me, I said, ‘Troy, I don’t know why the press likes to pick on you,'” Ford recalls.

Nash’s most ardent supporters have their theories.

“Anytime you have reasonably young people in an elected office who are perceived to have a political future, there are going to be people out there intent on knocking them down,” says Councilman Jim Rowland, who has been Nash’s closest ally since each first ran for office in 1999.

“This is a black man,” adds Rosemary Lowe, who lives in Nash’s district and has been involved in Kansas City politics since the days when blacks couldn’t rent a hotel room in town. “He has no business [raising] this kind of money. So they’re going to go after him. This is a known fact with the media. They say, ‘We’ve got to go after a black man when he’s about to succeed.'”

Yet there’s ample evidence that developers enjoy special privilege at City Hall. Since 1998, numerous reports from City Auditor Mark Funkhouser’s office have revealed that developers essentially control the city’s tax-incentive program, which has diverted hundreds of millions of tax dollars into projects ranging from a new drugstore on an inner-city corner to a parking lot on the Country Club Plaza to an enclave of mansions north of the river. In an audit last year, Funkhouser cited developers as one of the most powerful forces in city government — more powerful than voters and taxpayers who are active through their neighborhood associations.

Several nights each week, Nash appears at community gatherings where folks share their gripes and hopes about the city. But on a typical Wednesday at City Hall — the day when the Planning and Zoning Committee meets — Nash offers development lawyers a level of access that most Kansas Citians don’t enjoy.

One recent Wednesday, he stepped into the express elevator on his way to the council offices on the 24th floor, crowding in beside Jerry Riffel, a former councilman who now works as a development lawyer at Lathrop & Gage, one of the city’s most powerful firms.

“See, people think I’m in the pocket of the developers because I used to work for his firm,” Nash said of the summer he spent as a student clerk at Lathrop & Gage. “But let me tell you what this guy said to me. He comes up to me and says, ‘You know, your work’s not very good.'”

Riffel laughed, adding, “Then he goes and becomes a City Councilman, and I said, ‘Oh shit!'”

The two stepped off the elevator, and Nash opened the gate leading back to the council members’ offices and ushered Riffel through. Unlike most visitors, Riffel didn’t have to sign in and clamp an access badge to his lapel. (Riffel has contributed $300 to Nash’s campaigns; his firm has donated $1,400.)

“Do we need to meet about something?” Nash asked the lawyer.

“No, I just need to talk with Terry Riley real quick,” Riffle said, referring to Nash’s 5th District colleague on the council. “I’ll call you later. I’ve just got a couple of things to go over.”

Patricia Jenson, a former city attorney who now works for White Goss Bowers March — another firm stacked with high-powered development lawyers — was waiting outside Nash’s office. She wanted to talk with him in private before the public meeting that was scheduled to begin in less than five minutes. (Over the course of Nash’s career, Jenson’s firm has contributed nearly $5,000 to his campaigns.)

Meanwhile, two floors up, people were filing into the council chambers, taking seats in the gallery, waiting for the meeting to start so they could hear what Jenson was willing to tell the public about the project she represents.

Troy Nash is the man Mayor Kay Barnes trusts to carry her agenda through the City Council’s next four years.

As chair of the Planning and Zoning Committee, he’ll help decide how to rebuild Kansas City — most notably, its downtown. Barnes has made no secret of the legacy she’d like to leave after her eight years in office. She wants to bring Kansas City’s rotting core back to life.

During her first term, she championed a plan to spend $16 million in bond money on downtown improvements. She drafted legislation that would allow Missouri cities and towns to use state tax money to revitalize their downtowns; lawmakers in Jefferson City passed the bill this year. She created a new public body — the Greater Downtown Development Authority, or GDDA — to make recommendations to the City Council about where to spend public funds in the commercial core. And she’s teased the public with vague plans of building a sports arena downtown.

Early in her first term, members of the Civic Council, a politically active and secretive klatch of the city’s top CEOs — many of whom ran businesses that stood to profit directly from downtown revitalization — got together and decided downtown was their top priority. Barnes received numerous campaign contributions from members of this group (“Money Changes Everything,” July 25, 2002).

Many of those business leaders gave money to Nash, too.

Four years ago, he and Barnes clashed over the now-extinct mammoth of downtown redevelopment: the Power and Light entertainment district. That scheme would have funneled nearly half a billion dollars into the area around the Power and Light building and the decrepit Empire Theater, but its complicated financing package imploded in a cloud of litigation.

Now Nash meets with the mayor several times a week in her office to discuss her vision for Kansas City. He sits on her GDDA. He also serves on the executive boards of the Downtown Council, a consortium of business leaders and developers; and the Economic Development Corporation, a quasi-public agency that administers the city’s tax incentive programs. And he’s on the City Market Oversight Committee, the Bartle Hall Expansion Advisory Council and the Jazz District Redevelopment Committee.

He’s right in the middle of everything.

Troy Nash is the man, and Jim Rowland knows it.

Were it not for his good friend, Rowland would probably be chilling with 5th District at-large Representative Becky Nace in the relative Siberia of the council’s Aviation and Operations committees. Instead, after the March election — and his own years spent in the Barnes-imposed deep freeze of those lowly committees — Rowland was suddenly back in the mayor’s favor. The mayor appointed him to chair her new Budget and Audit Committee, which she charged with solving Kansas City’s financial crisis and making City Hall more efficient. Next to Planning and Zoning, it’s the committee from which a council member has the best opportunity to affect the city.

Nash and Rowland became friends during the 1999 campaign. After one particularly tough candidate forum in Waldo, the two hung around in the parking lot talking about the city’s issues and their own lives. They realized that, in spite of their obvious differences, they had a lot in common. They decided to form an alliance, which they symbolized, in part, with One Kansas City, a race-relations initiative that took the pair to area schools in an effort to dispel stereotypes.

After taking oath in 1999, both scored seats on the Planning and Zoning Committee.

They immediately threw opposition in front of the Power and Light District revitalization plan, which had been approved by a public vote years earlier and which Barnes was championing mightily in her first term. Rowland was particularly outspoken. “The plan makes absolutely no sense,” he told The Kansas City Star at the time. Nash raised concerns about how the scheme would affect existing businesses.

“We got blamed for Power and Light’s failure,” Nash says.

To make matters worse, Rowland acted like he was running for office. He showed up at neighborhood forums, shops and bars, pumping hands and talking about how Kansas City needed change.

Before the end of his first year in office, the mayor banished him from the coveted Planning and Zoning post to Aviation and Operations.

Nash speculates that Barnes didn’t mete out similar punishment for him because he’s black and has a broad support base. Had the mayor demoted him, she would have angered black voters (as well as her powerful predecessor).

“Jim’s tall and white,” Nash says.

“I fit the role,” Rowland says.

Over the ensuing four years, Nash worked first to mend his own relationship with the mayor. He met with her and urged that they look at the many issues they agreed upon rather than the few over which they clashed. Then he played the diplomat on Rowland’s behalf. Whenever Barnes, Rowland and Nash found themselves alone between meetings, Nash would casually strike up a conversation. In time, he persuaded his colleagues to work out their differences behind the scenes.

In the days following the March election, both Rowland and 5th District Councilwoman Becky Nace made no secret of their desire to chair the committee in charge of the budget. Rowland professes a natural fondness for numbers; Nace had served for four years on the Finance and Audit Committee, which previously hashed out the city’s budgetary concerns.

When Barnes doled out her assignments, the story was about how Nace got screwed. After soundly winning re-election in a race against a lawyer at a firm with close ties to Barnes, Nace found herself exiled to the Aviation Committee, which oversees the millions of dollars going into KCI’s rehab, and Operations, which signs off on sidewalk and sewer projects. All without so much as a vice chair to affix to her name.

Nace doesn’t hide her bitterness. “The difference is, I didn’t cut a deal to get back in the mayor’s good graces,” she says. “They cut a deal to get their chair positions.”

The deal, Nace says, was to give the powerful firefighters union whatever it wanted come contract negotiation time. As Election Day drew near, Nace had been openly critical of the department’s abundant use of overtime. During one public meeting, she raised the issue, only to be cut off by the mayor, who preferred to discuss the matter in a closed, executive session (“Secret Society,” November 14, 2002).

Both Rowland and Nash deny Nace’s allegations. Rowland says he had no clue what the committee assignments would be. But Nash could see Nace’s misfortune coming. “It’s a style issue,” he says. “The mayor doesn’t want to be embarrassed in public.

“It might be a gender issue,” he adds. “Kay was our first woman mayor. And it’s almost like the first black mayor. Black folks say, ‘He didn’t do this, he didn’t do that.’ He was held to a higher standard by black people. I think the same can be said for the first woman mayor.” (Through a spokesperson, Barnes declined comment.)

Now Nash and Rowland play good cop, bad cop as vice chair and chair, respectively, of Budget and Audit.

Minutes before a recent meeting, Nash’s aide Micah Kubic, a nineteen-year-old who favors bow ties and has worked with Nash for four years, sticks his head in Nash’s office and says, “John Sharp from MAST wants to talk with you.”

“Why do I need to talk with him?” Nash asks. “I read the audit.” He raises a thin, spiral-bound document. “It’s bad. What more do I need to know?”

“He has an appointment,” Kubic says.

Nash waves his hand dismissively. Kubic closes the door behind him. A few moments later, Rowland knocks on the door. Nash waves him in. “John Sharp wants to talk to me,” Nash says in a hushed tone, almost giggling.

Both Nash and Rowland have pored over the audit, which reveals that the metro area’s ambulance system is not financially viable. Without an infusion of money — such as a couple of million dollars from the city — the emergency service will go broke. MAST leaders have provided reasons for this state of affairs, but after examining the data, auditors have concluded that MAST’s explanation is incorrect.

“If he starts whining,” Rowland says of Sharp as the two exit the office and head toward the council chambers, “I’m going to tear him apart.”

They climb the back stairs to the 26th floor and take their places behind the bench. Sharp moves to the front and sits before them. He takes issue with Funkhouser’s findings. MAST’s problems, he says, are because of the sluggish economy and the federal government’s gouging of Medicare reimbursements for ambulance rides.

Rowland shifts in his seat and folds his hands in front of him, locking Sharp in his sights, apparently waiting for the bureaucrat’s spiel to end so he can lay into him. But fellow committee member Terry Riley raises his hand and cuts Sharp off. “Now is not the time,” he says.

The next day, Sharp is in Nash’s office apologizing, asking if Rowland hates him. Nash plays the conciliatory good cop, soothing Sharp’s bruised feelings by maintaining Rowland’s stance that changes have to be made quickly.

Troy Nash is the man, and the people of the 3rd District know it.

The 3rd District covers a sizeable chunk of Kansas City’s predominantly black east side. It also suffers myriad problems: a high concentration of abandoned buildings, vacant lots and rotting rental properties owned by distant landlords; pockets of high crime; widespread poverty; predatory lenders; few job opportunities; a dearth of quality businesses; and, above all, a longstanding lack of real power at City Hall.

Nash is a kid from the neighborhood who made good. On any given day, he can take off his tie and step into an east side liquor store, where the folks know him as “Little Nash” — the kid with the older brothers who were ballers. He refers to his childhood stomping grounds as the “ghetteau,” affecting the snobby voice of a sommelier.

His single mother shuffled the family in and out of housing projects and Section 8 shacks. All around him, friends and relatives fell prey to drugs and violence. In the late 1980s, he fled the crime of Kansas City with his high school sweetheart, Sherrie Lockhart, to join the Air Force. She helped him build the image of a perfect military man, creasing his slacks and polishing his buttons. He nabbed Airman of the Month, then Airman of the Quarter, then Airman of the Year. He passed on a career as an officer, though, and returned to his hometown for law school. Then he took a job as an assistant to Councilwoman Mary Williams-Neal. Then as assistant to Mayor Emanuel Cleaver. Then as a council member.

Now the people of the 3rd District have the mayor’s main man on their side.

In addition to filling leadership positions on the two committees that are the key vehicles for the mayor’s agenda, he sits on the Neighborhood Development and Housing Committee, which oversees how federal funds are spent in struggling areas of the city — “Po’ fo’k dolla’s,” he calls them.

Sitting beside him on that committee is Saundra McFadden-Weaver, the 3rd District in-district representative. Together they offer their constituents something they haven’t had for at least four years: a cohesive team.

During his first term, Nash was out of step with his fellow 3rd District rep, Mary Williams-Neal. Those resentments still fester.

“I was a little disturbed, because I was the one who brought him to City Hall,” Williams-Neal tells the Pitch. “Once he got [elected to office], he started acting like he didn’t know who I was. He didn’t give me any respect.”

Nash claims that his falling out with Williams-Neal began long before he got elected, when he was still working for her. “She would always schedule meetings with neighborhood leaders and then not show up,” he explains. “But I always did. After a while, people started saying I should be their councilman. That made her jealous.”

When he took them up on their suggestion in his 1999 bid for office, Nash had to survive a fierce battle with McFadden-Weaver. The campaign got nasty at times, but early on, the two had met for breakfast and vowed that come 7 p.m. on Election Day, the loser would join forces with the winner.

During the most recent campaign, when McFadden-Weaver was running against former councilman and current Jackson County Legislator Ron Finley, Nash met with her again in the home of Rosemary Lowe, the east side political matron. Lowe asked Nash to come out in support of McFadden-Weaver, but Nash declined, citing his need to maintain a positive relationship with Finley. But when Lowe asked if he could work with McFadden-Weaver, Nash said yes. Then Lowe, whom Nash says is like a mother to him, made the two shake hands. Privately, Nash says now, he was “praying” for McFadden-Weaver to win.

On a Wednesday morning in late June, McFadden-Weaver knocks on Nash’s office door and asks him to come next door to sit in on a spur-of-the-moment meeting with a city staffer who’s working on the redevelopment of Prospect, the beleaguered thoroughfare that bisects their district. Early in his first term, he camped out on the corner of 39th and Prospect — then one of the most notorious drug corners in the city. Since then, several decrepit buildings have been torn down. Crime rates have plummeted. But new buildings and businesses have been slow in coming.

The agenda for the brief, impromptu meeting seems mundane. The city staffer wants the council members’ guidance in forming a Prospect Corridor Evaluation Committee. According to city ordinance, the body needs to have three church officials appointed to it. McFadden-Weaver and Nash bat around a few names, most of them from small congregations near Prospect, and the staff member jots them down before heading off.

After she leaves, Nash turns to McFadden-Weaver and says, “I’m glad we met with her. If we hadn’t, you know who would have been the top two people on the list?”

McFadden-Weaver mentions two prominent African-American preachers.

“That’s right,” he says. “And here’s what they would have been after.” He picks up a document describing the project and circles its budget figure — $85,000.

“We’re breaking down the old guard,” McFadden-Weaver declares.

“We have to dismantle it piece by piece,” Nash says. “And it’s thirty years of crud.”

Nash tells the Pitch that he and McFadden-Weaver are working up new City Hall policies that will change the way such projects are handled. He’s stingy with details, but it’s not hard to find clues in the council members’ recent actions.

The pair has generated buzz around City Hall and the urban redevelopment community by requesting detailed information about the city’s use of Community Development Block Grant funds — those po’ fo’k dolla’s overseen by Nash and McFadden-Weaver’s committee.

To describe their plans, Nash offers vague but tough-sounding statements. “It’s going to be a broad, sweeping legislation to do real, systemic change in the way business is done on the east side,” he crows. “[It’s] a tactical nuclear weapon. It’ll kill people but leave the buildings and infrastructure in place.”

Troy Nash is the man local Democrats are talking about.

He steps into the elevator on the 26th floor, on his way to a lunch rendezvous with his wife, and hears the question he’s been asked a lot lately. This time it’s from a community activist. “So, are you going to run against Karen McCarthy?”

McCarthy, who has represented much of Kansas City in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1994, has been looking vulnerable ever since she cut her head after slipping on an escalator in a Washington, D.C., office building and checked into a treatment center for alcoholics. Nash is on the short list of viable challengers (“Party Crasher,” July 19).

Nash hasn’t hinted publicly where he’ll go after term limits force him off the council in 2007. Already, though, the gossip has grown vicious. Among Jackson County Democrats, sources say, the running joke has been that such a race would be “the drunk versus the wife beater.”

On October 22, 2001, Sherrie Nash went to the Jackson County Courthouse and filled out a statement with a harrowing story about how her husband had harassed, physically abused, sexually assaulted and imprisoned her.

“[Troy Nash] verbally threatened me while holding his fingers on my nose,” she wrote. “He has repeatedly told me … that he can be pushed too far & if he is he will lose it on me & he won’t just half do it he will do it right, all the way & then he would call the police afterwards.”

Nash says the allegations are untrue. A month after Sherrie Nash filed her report, Troy Nash filed for divorce. But by late March of 2002, he and his wife had apparently worked out their differences — both agreed to end the divorce proceedings. In April of that year, they filed a motion to have the record sealed.

Then, last October, just as the campaign season was kicking into gear, Sherrie Nash filed another petition to dissolve the marriage. In it, she declared that there was “no reasonable likelihood that the marriage … can be preserved, and, therefore, the marriage is irretrievably broken.”

Two days earlier, she had fled the family’s home in Renaissance Place, a suburban-style development a mile or so east of 18th and Vine, with their daughter. The case quietly made its way through the county courthouse before the couple agreed to drop the matter on December 12.

Part Mexican and part Irish, Sherrie met Nash in high school, and the two married young — just a year after Sherrie’s 1988 graduation from Van Horn High School. At first, her parents disapproved of her intention to marry a black man. They sent her away to camps and to live with her grandparents. Her mother, who is Hispanic, was particularly opposed to the idea. “She wanted me to marry up,” Sherrie explains.

Ten years passed before the Nashes had their first child, who was born early in Troy Nash’s first term in office. Nash’s daughter is not quite four years old, but she’s already enrolled in the preschool of a local private school. Sherrie doesn’t work; the family’s only income is Nash’s $45,000 salary as a councilman.

In general, Nash declines to comment about family matters. In casual conversations he sometimes mentions the financial demands of his job — all the lunch and dinner meetings. But he says his work doesn’t strain his marriage. He points out that the demands of City Council membership have destroyed several marriages. The prevailing wisdom among people who’ve served on the council is that it’s possible to make it through a term or two while preserving a family or maintaining a private-sector career, but that it becomes impossible to do all three. Nash is trying to buck the trend. In addition to serving on the council and raising his family, he says he’s finishing his dissertation for a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Sometimes he comes home at night after a day of government work and academic research too tired to focus on his wife’s needs, he says. They have to squeeze in time where they can — during lunch dates at the 13th Street Grill and Bar a block south of City Hall, for instance.

One recent Wednesday afternoon, Sherrie Nash already has a table when her husband arrives late. He leans over and kisses her lips, then takes a seat beside her.

Before the waitress has time to bring the check, he’s running late again, this time for the 2 p.m. Planning and Zoning Committee meeting. He leaves his credit card so Sherrie can pay the bill.

One afternoon, Troy Nash steps out of his office and summons McFadden-Weaver and a few staffers for a spontaneous meeting. They head to his favorite power-lunch spot, the Peach Tree at 18th and Vine. Leaving City Hall, they’re charged with energy, laughing and carrying on about a rally for union nurses the night before in Mill Creek Park.

“Saundra was up there preachin’,” Nash says. “She got her head shakin. ‘ She started really slow, and then she built it up. That’s what preachers do to manipulate your senses.”

Jermaine Reed, one of McFadden-Weaver’s young aides, shouts, “In the mo’nin’!”

McFadden-Weaver — an ordained Methodist minister — doubles over, laughing. “The mo’nin’ is before noon!” she bellows, pointing at the sky the way she had done the night before. “It’s not 12:20!

“I had to do something,” she adds, hinting that the other speakers at the rally were comparatively dull. “I was about to go to sleep.”

In the lobby, on the way out of City Hall, they’re met by Mayor Pro Tem Alvin Brooks. “Al Brooks deserves the credit,” McFadden-Weaver says. “Al Brooks got the preaching started. Al Brooks got the crowd goin’.”

Brooks flashes a grin as he steps into the elevator. “You folks got to remember,” he says, “I was part of the movement.” He says that if you can step in at the right moment and shout out just the right word, you can whip a crowd into a frenzy. “I can make even bad speakers sound good,” he brags.

“Not me,” Nash says. “I’d be up there — ” He switches into the whiny voice of TV nerd Urkel. ” — Now, there’s the morning,” he whimpers. “And it’s not, um, night.”

But the truth is, Nash can make a stand just about anywhere — at a union rally, at a board meeting full of CEOs, at an east side liquor store.

This mutability, he complains, “perplexes the system” and attracts unusually intense scrutiny of his campaign finances and personal life. People are gunning for him, he says, trying to take him down.

In reality, it’s the reason Nash is high and still rising. It’s why he’s the man.