Why was Mike Sanders so eager to get Brittany Burke a Jackson County paycheck?

It’s good to be the Jackson County executive — as long as you don’t stick around too long.

Mike Sanders, who has been executive most of the past decade, presumably knows this well. His two predecessors, Katheryn Shields and Bill Waris, became the subjects of federal probes tied to their work in Jackson County politics. Waris was popped by the feds after leaving office for lying to FBI agents in connection with a bribery investigation involving both him and Shields. Shields was never charged as a result of that investigation but later was indicted on mortgage-fraud charges. (A jury acquitted her.)

After serving visible and well-regarded terms as Jackson County prosecutor, Sanders rode into the Jackson County Executive’s Office in 2007, elected on the strength of his lawman credentials. He promised to clean up county government — a task guaranteed to keep him busy — and has been lauded for getting the county’s financial house in order.

Sanders’ political life so far has been charmed enough to ward off what might have damaged a less well-liked figure. When the county botched its property assessments — one of its core functions — Sanders emerged from the affair largely unscathed. He went on to the chairmanship of the Missouri Democratic Party in 2012, giving rise to speculation about what office he might seek next, and he drew no serious opposition on his way to re-election as executive in 2014.

But his third term is off to a rocky start. The FBI is investigating his office’s involvement in awarding a $75,000 county contract to Brittany Burke, a former adviser to Gov. Jay Nixon.

The Kansas City Star broke news of the investigation on June 23, and The Pitch has learned new details about it and about how Burke received the contract:

• Sanders and Burke met about a year ago to discuss her obtaining a paid-consultant contract with Jackson County.

• An attempt to award Burke a health-care consulting contract, worth $75,000, without competitive bidding, was stopped by a county attorney.

• That same county attorney expressed reservations about how much Burke would be paid for the work she said she would perform.

• One county legislator who has been quizzed by the FBI about the contract tells The Pitch that the probe may be looking into whether the contract was influenced by former Missouri House Speaker John Diehl, with whom Burke had a romantic relationship.

An FBI investigation isn’t by itself a rarity for public officials, and many such inquiries fizzle out without formal charges or official consequences. But the stench of such probes can linger enough to cloud a politician’s prospects, as Shields learned. She finished near the bottom of a crowded Kansas City mayoral primary field in 2007; only this year had she regained enough of a foothold in local politics to have been elected to Kansas City, Missouri’s City Council.

Nothing seemed amiss when Burke appeared before the Jackson County Legislature’s Finance & Audit Committee on November 24, 2014.

She was seated alongside Cathy Jolly, a senior adviser to Sanders, who presented the county staff’s recommendation that Burke receive a $75,000 contract to carry out health-care consulting for the Jackson County Executive’s Office. Burke had submitted a bid that was presented by county staff as lower than an $85,000 bid for the same services from a consultant in California.

Burke described how she planned to spend the next year “auditing or assessing” Jackson County’s relationships with health-related outfits such as the county’s Health Department and Medical Examiner’s Office and Truman Medical Centers. She said her credentials included working as an adviser to Nixon on Medicaid expansion, hemp-oil legislation and expanded prescription-drug care for seniors.

Theresa Garza Ruiz and Crystal Williams, who both lauded Burke’s expertise, were among the legislators who said they knew her previous work. Burke’s contract passed unanimously through the committee and the full county Legislature later that afternoon. It would pay her $6,250 a month for a year, the full $75,000.

What legislators didn’t know was that Sanders’ office had tried to grant Burke that contract without first seeking competitive bids for the consulting that the county sought.

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Records obtained by The Pitch through a Missouri Sunshine Law request indicate that Burke had a June 25, 2014, meeting with Sanders at the county courthouse in downtown Kansas City. A month later, Burke sent an e-mail to Jolly outlining “[a] list of my services, a proposal for the Jackson County Executive Office and a description of the agreement we discussed.”

That agreement, as specified in that e-mail, was to pay Burke $75,000, in 12 monthly installments of $6,250. The proposal was to evaluate the county’s relationship with Truman Medical Centers, Medicaid expansion and the Affordable Care Act. It was substantially similar to the contract she would eventually receive.

Jolly tells The Pitch that she first met Burke in late July 2014.

“Mike introduced me to her and spoke really highly of her,” Jolly says. “He said he had known her, they had worked together when he was chair of the [Missouri] Democratic Party, that she’s very smart, and we had all these issues with Truman [Medical Centers] and she was probably someone who could help us.”

Jolly, a former Kansas City, Missouri, councilwoman and Missouri representative, started working in Sanders’ office in 2013. She works as senior policy adviser to Sanders on COMBAT [Community Backed Anti-Drug Tax] and some aspects of the county’s relationship with Truman Medical Centers and other public health initiatives.

Jolly tells The Pitch that Sanders had initial conversations with her about getting help sorting out the county’s relationship with Truman Medical Centers, the Affordable Care Act and other public-health matters. These discussions occurred long before she met Burke.

“It [seeking outside help] really wasn’t my call,” Jolly says. “That was something the county executive felt. His conversation was that they should see if there’s somebody who could advise us on these issues.”

County personnel sought conversations with local health-care executives before Burke entered the conversation last summer.

On August 19, Chief Deputy County Counselor Jay Haden e-mailed Jolly to tell her that if Jackson County wanted to pay Burke more than $5,000, the contract would have to go through competitive bidding. (Jolly forwarded this e-mail to Sanders.)

That mandate for bidding on contracts worth more than $5,000 was Sanders’ idea. Shortly after he took office as Jackson County executive, he successfully pushed for the stipulation in order to stem the perception that Jackson County was the place to go for patronage contracts.

A request for proposals was sent out by the county in September, with a deadline of October 14 for responses.

Fred Pilot, a health-care consultant whose office is in California, submitted his bid on October 10. Burke sent hers in on October 14, the same day that county staffers reviewed the submitted bids. (Burke bid under her firm’s name, Tactas, which wasn’t registered as a business with the Missouri Secretary of State until October 21.)

By November 3, it became clear that Burke would win the contract. A week later, on November 10, Jolly sent an e-mail to Burke and Haden, introducing them so that they could discuss items from Burke’s bid, including a revision of Burke’s statement of work (her bid’s description of how she intended to carry out the consulting contract).

Burke sent her updated statement of work to Haden on November 11. The following day, Haden e-mailed Jolly about it, writing: “It’s pretty vanilla with no mention of specific agencies. Still a little short on specific deliverables for $75k in my view, but we can live with it.”

Pilot, the other bidder, says he received no communication between the time he submitted his bid and December, when he learned that he hadn’t received the contract.

“There were no questions from the county,” Pilot says.

Pilot says he has been contacted by the FBI. He tells The Pitch that he understood the agency’s line of questioning to suggest that Sanders was under investigation.

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Several others contacted by The Pitch also say they’ve had conversations with FBI agents about the contract.

Garza Ruiz, who last year was a county legislator, says she has spoken with the FBI, which asked her about the process through which contracts are awarded in Jackson County. She says she was unaware that the County Executive’s Office had sought a contract for Burke without bidding.

“That’s news to me,” she tells The Pitch. “I think that’s interesting because when Mike first took office, he put in place a county executive order that any contract over $5,000 had to go to bid.” She adds that when she voted in favor of Burke’s contract, “There were no red flags at the time.”

When contracts come before the County Legislature, the body is supposed to choose from among all qualified bidders. The county’s staff makes recommendations to the Legislature based on whichever is the “lowest and best” bid.

In this case, Pilot’s bid was presented to legislators as an $85,000 contract. Burke’s was presented as one that would cost $75,000. But legislators were not given any information about Pilot’s background or details from his bid, only the $85,000 figure.

According to Pilot’s bid, however, $85,000 represented the maximum amount he said he would bill for his services. His bid’s pricing laid out a $100-per-hour rate for his work, as well as a $150 hourly rate for a subcontractor who would work with him; the cap for their work was $85,000, but the results of their consultancy might have come in for less money, depending on the number of hours actually billed.

Burke’s pricing laid out a monthly retainer of $6,250 for one year, with no breakdown of hourly billing or other itemizations.

“How are we proposing to pay her max?” county attorney Haden wrote in a November 3 e-mail to a Sanders assistant. “Is that based on an hourly rate, per task completed, or just a flat lump sum price? If lump sum, unless we can pay her upon completion of all work, we’ll need some basis upon which she can submit periodic billings. Again, that could be an hourly rate, tasks completed, or percentage of total work completed.” (No written reply to Haden’s e-mail is among the records that The Pitch reviewed.)

Determining which bid is “best” is more subjective than which is (or appears to be) “lowest.”

Pilot works exclusively as a health-care consultant, having previously worked for the California Health Benefit Exchange, the nation’s first state exchange under the Affordable Care Act. Among the credentials cited in his bid, Pilot lists a study he completed for the Utah Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing. His subcontractor, Fred Forrer of Public Momentum LLC, helped 14 states implement health-care exchanges under the ACA, according to Pilot’s bid.

But Jackson County staff, according to county records, favored Burke over Pilot because of her pricing and because she was based in Missouri.

Burke had been Gov. Nixon’s point person for health issues such as Medicaid expansion.

What was Burke supposed to do for the county?

That depends on who is being asked.

County materials describe the contract that she won in broad terms: “developing a strategic plan for public healthcare in Jackson County” for how the county spends its public-health money, and how it manages federal health-care services and Medicaid expansion.

That description reflects what Burke outlined in her bid materials.

Looking back, Jolly seems unsure of Burke’s role.

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“I don’t know what conversations she had with the county executive,” she tells The Pitch. “It was my thought that she would give us a report: Here are some issues, here are some ways to work it out. The issues were very dispersed. They ran the gamut from budget issues to space to public-health issues.”

Shortly after Burke’s contract started, Jolly described it this way in an e-mail: “She is here to assess and evaluate our finances and relationship with TMC [Truman Medical Centers] and related health care issues. Ultimately, she will give us a recommendation on how to finance and what health care items the County should be responsible for.”

That description suggests Burke was brought on to examine the county’s relationship with Truman Medical Centers. Which makes sense, given that Jolly’s role in Sanders’ office is overseeing policy for COMBAT and TMC. (Some COMBAT funds go to TMC, making the two fairly intertwined.)

TMC leases much of its property on Hospital Hill and its Lakewood facility in Lee’s Summit from the county. In return, TMC acts as the county’s safety-net provider and essentially as the public health department for places in the county lacking their own such offices. (Kansas City and Independence are the only cities in Jackson County with their own public health departments.) TMC also tends to inmates in county prison and jail facilities.

TMC’s relationship with the county has sometimes been tense. Two years ago, TMC sold four buildings to Children’s Mercy Hospitals and Clinics. That property included the Jackson County Medical Examiner’s Office. The county wasn’t aware of the deal ahead of time and was surprised to receive an eviction notice for the medical examiner.

Burke herself seemed lost about what she was supposed to do.

On January 13, 2015, she wrote to Jolly: “My biggest obstacle so far is I don’t have a clear understanding of the goals and objectives are [sic]. I have an abundance of information with a lot of dead ends. Before I put a strategic plan together, I need a better understanding of what you would like to see ultimately accomplished.”

A few weeks later, Burke suggested trying to place Sanders in local media stories about the measles outbreak from earlier in the year, to generate positive stories about the executive. That idea went away faster than most rashes.

By February, not yet three months after Burke began cashing checks as a consultant, her relationship with county employees had begun to wear thin.

Burke frequently e-mailed county staffers about meetings, parking spots, requests for guidance — making her seem less like an independent contractor and more like a county employee. These persistent e-mails annoyed her county recipients.

When she sent a complaint about scheduling snafus to Sanders assistant Miriam Hennosy, Hennosy sent an e-mail to Sanders:

“I am beginning to feel like Jane Fonda in ‘They Shoot Horses Don’t They?’…I am the last person who will be helping Brittany…I can’t seem to help myself.”

Weeks later, Burke made suggestions to county executive staffers for how to better organize which parking spot she could occupy on county property.

“You are wearing me out with these type of demands,” Jolly wrote back. “I believe YOU are working FOR the county.”

Missing in all of this is any direct feedback or input from Sanders about what Burke was supposed to do.

Burke was starting to understand that her role with the county was more limited than she had thought. In a March 24 e-mail to Jolly, she wrote: “When we discussed yesterday, you requested that I focus solely on appropriations and lease agreements. I went through the plan I sent and some of what is included is now not applicable to my current scope of service….I will wait to hear from you or Mike about whether or not to proceed with any health care policy issues or assisting with communication structure.”

By June, the FBI was asking about Burke. Barbara Casamento, an employee in the county’s Finance & Purchasing department, sent an e-mail to her colleagues on June 2, letting them know that Bob Shaeffer, an FBI agent, had called to discuss Burke’s contract.

For now, Burke continues to work on the contract, with the county paying its monthly fee. She declined to be interviewed for this story.

Burke has been well-known in Missouri politics for years, first as a broadcast journalist and then as a community-relations coordinator for trade unions. In 2012, she was communications director for the Missouri Democratic Party at the same time that Sanders was its chairman.

That job propelled her into Nixon’s office, where she rose from deputy press secretary to public-affairs adviser. Her work for the two-term governor also included a stint as his liaison for Medicaid expansion.

But Burke wasn’t widely known outside political circles until last month, when the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a story about a police report she had filed in April regarding being the victim of a possible sexual assault. Among the story’s revelations was that Burke had conducted an affair with Missouri House Speaker John Diehl while she worked in Nixon’s office. (Diehl resigned in April, after sexually charged text messages that he had exchanged with an intern became public.)

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Why did the FBI care about Burke and her contract with Jackson County? Dan Tarwater, a longtime Jackson County legislator, tells The Pitch that when the FBI interviewed him, the line of questioning suggested that Burke’s work with the county was connected to Diehl and to state funding for the Truman Sports Complex.

“They seemed to think there may be an issue that was tied to the [Jackson County] Sports Authority, the $3 million that comes from the state,” Tarwater says. “I said, ‘I think that all may have been handled before all this.’ He said, ‘Oh, no, it wasn’t.'”

Missouri, as part of a larger pact for keeping the Kansas City Chiefs and the Kansas City Royals at the Truman Sports Complex, is supposed to chip in about $3 million annually to the county. But Nixon left that money out of his initial state budget proposal in the midst of an attempt to cobble together cash for a new football stadium for the Rams in St. Louis.

The Truman Sports Complex funding was one of two initiatives that Jackson County lobbied hard for in the last legislative session. The other was a last-ditch Hail Mary to exempt the COMBAT tax from being affected by tax-increment financing, a move that went nowhere.

Diehl, the Republican House Speaker for a party with a veto-proof majority in the Missouri General Assembly, was arguably the most influential person in Show-Me politics before he resigned in disgrace. Now the FBI, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, is asking Jefferson City insiders about Diehl’s relationship with — and possible influence on — Burke.

Tarwater adds that the FBI also asked him questions about whether Burke was qualified to receive the county heath-care consulting contract. “The line of questioning from the FBI is that she didn’t have any credentials,” Tarwater says. “They were all made up.”

Crystal Williams, a Jackson County legislator, counters that Burke’s bona fides may not be out of order. “Let me be clear: It’s not rocket science,” Williams says of Burke’s contract. “She’s compiling data.”

Williams confirms that she received a call from the FBI but says she told the agent that she didn’t have anything to add to an investigation.

For Sanders’ part, he’s keeping himself and his staff off-limits to any discussion about Burke or the FBI probe.

“Due to the ongoing federal inquiry, Jackson County employees cannot comment on our contract with Tactas,” says county spokesman Mark Siettman.

According to Siettman, the FBI has not asked to speak with Sanders.

Such a stance leaves several questions lingering:

• What did Sanders see in Burke?

• How did he not know that she couldn’t receive a $75,000 contract without competitive bidding?

• How much, if at all, did Sanders follow up with Burke once she started working with the county?

• What did he want her to achieve, and did he think she was meeting those goals?

But perhaps those are questions that the FBI will pin down.