Why has MARC become a bad four-letter word among some Johnson County conservatives?

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During a January meeting of the Northeast Johnson County Conservatives, Sheriff Calvin Hayden brought up climate change conspiracies, violent crime, affordable housing grants and communists.

His comments came after a question about what the sheriff will do “to stand in the way” of the Mid-America Regional Council, or MARC, the Kansas City region’s metropolitan planning organization that has become increasingly controversial among some Johnson County conservatives.

“It’s a bunch of non-elected, appointed people. There’s some elected people on there, but they don’t hold any power, don’t wield any power at all,” Hayden told the crowd of MARC, which is governed by 33 locally elected officials across the metro.

“And their goal is regionalism. ‘I want to be just like Kansas City, Missouri,’ stacking up bodies like they are at a rate that’s never been seen before.”

MARC, formed in 1972, is the Kansas City region’s metropolitan planning organization, an entity required by the federal government in urban areas over a certain population size. Such organizations are required to coordinate decisions and delegate federal transportation funding across a metro region.

The nonprofit also acts as the coordinating body for area municipalities — a lesser-known entity that helps jurisdictions across state and county lines access funding for and organize public safety, health, economic and environmental planning efforts.

Notably, it oversees the regional 911 system, coordinates disaster planning, and assists municipalities in planning for and securing grant funding for transportation and environmental projects. This winter, for example, MARC facilitated a large-scale emergency response when patients at Liberty Hospital were moved to other facilities as its computer system went down due to a cyberattack.

While MARC is more widely viewed as an innocuous organization, a group of conservative Johnson County politicians and voters have been voicing growing concerns and skepticism about its reach — an increasingly common talking point this election year. Its climate resilience and affordable housing initiatives, for example, have partly fueled the opposition.

“The agenda on MARC is very much a liberal agenda,” Johnson County Commissioner Charlotte O’Hara told The Star. “I think it’s a poor way of representation for the folks in this area. Regionalism is not my cup of tea.”

Johnson County Republican Party Chairwoman Maria Holiday accused MARC of making “financial and policy decisions” without enough public input or oversight.

“MARC appears to be both a shadow government and a shell game where tax dollars are concerned,” she said in an email. “The Republican Party supports smaller government and full transparency. MARC is neither.”

Other Johnson County officials, as well as leaders of the organization, say the skepticism goes beyond reasonable scrutiny and is built on misinformation that some worry could hinder a key piece of regional collaboration. One elected official warned against building a “fence around Johnson County.”

MARC Executive Director David Warm said, “simply trying to describe the reality of it: We are a mechanism that local governments have created and used because it is helpful to them to be more effective by working together.

“There is more skepticism in every corner of the community when something is not understood. Because we are an intermediary, we are not as well understood,” Warm said. “I also believe there is probably some association with MARC with federal programs that people may or may not agree with. But I think the closer you can get to what is happening at MARC, the more you realize that it is your local leaders driving the agenda.”

Johnson County Commission Chairman Mike Kelly, who serves on the MARC board as the county’s top elected official, said he is, “disappointed by the vocal minority of folks jeopardizing this opportunity for collaboration and trying to bring extreme politics into what otherwise is a positive, meaningful source of collaboration. I think the majority of people see it that way.”

‘The technical support is important’

At a commission meeting last month, a handful of residents came to voice concerns about a new transportation study aimed at evaluating infrastructure improvements to facilitate the expansive industrial growth coming to western Johnson County.

They asked why unincorporated townships weren’t being brought in during this early phase of the study, which is a joint effort among Johnson and Douglas counties, as well as several cities. They asked when the public would get a chance to weigh in on potential road changes.

And they asked why MARC was involved.

“MARC has no business influencing our land decisions in our counties and our cities. Elected officials from the counties and townships and cities within the study areas should be relying on their own information and not on information from MARC,” Gaylene Vanhorn, a Lenexa resident, told the commission.

O’Hara jumped in, saying rural residents should have a “seat at the table, rather than MARC.

“And MARC’s at the table because of federal funding, that’s why they’re there. They’re the conduit for the federal bucks to come into this area.”

Because MARC oversees transportation planning and federal funding for the region, Warm said it provides expertise and support for municipalities undergoing such studies. Local governments, he emphasized, “remain in control of policy decisions and community priorities.”

Warm said MARC is involved in Johnson County’s western transportation study, for example, because it involves multiple municipalities. He said it will provide data, such as traffic modeling, based on long-term population and job projections in the region.

“The county and cities are in charge of what the decision is and what the land uses are. But we help them figure out what road configurations move traffic in the most effective way, so that it is well-coordinated and planned,” Warm said. “That technical support is important in making sure that when there’s money that cities spend, or developers spend, or the federal government spends, it’s spent in a way that creates a system that is connected.”

The nonprofit manages a massive data hub, pulling information from the U.S. Census, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, area hospitals, emergency management systems and geographic mapping, to compile reports on the state of the Kansas City region and inform long-term planning.

“If you’re trying to figure out how many roads you need and where they should go, you need a lot of data about what’s on the ground: Where people are trying to travel, where the growth is occurring, where building permits are being issued,” Warm said. “We help to coordinate that with all counties and the states in the metro area so everybody has access to the same information.”

Kelly said that support is especially helpful for smaller city governments — such as in De Soto, which is getting the $4 billion Panasonic battery plant that’s a catalyst for the study — that would struggle to afford such resources on their own.

‘Can’t arbitrarily put walls up’

Some of the public speakers at last month’s commission meeting repeated the same language, asking why MARC, a “nonprofit, non-governmental, un-elected body” was involved in the study.

Similar phrasing was echoed by Hayden in January, and has been repeated across Johnson County in the past few years, including by state Sen. Mike Thompson, a Shawnee Republican, who in a Facebook post previously called MARC a “group of non-elected unaccountable people.”

MARC’s governing board is made up of elected officials who serve in each of the area’s nine counties and dozens of cities. Top elected officials, including commission chairs and mayors of the largest cities, automatically serve on the board. City councils and county commissions appoint members from their boards to serve as well.

“This is a board of elected officials that comes together and convenes to discuss regional opportunities and to address regional challenges,” Kelly said. “We can’t put our head in the sand and expect that Johnson County would be the same success story that it is by not having a keen understanding of what’s going on in our neighboring jurisdictions.”

“They are non-elected,” O’Hara said. “I know it’s the electeds who are on that board, but it’s not really talked about.

“Twenty years ago, some of my friends started talking about it, and I realized I didn’t know anything about MARC. Therein lies the problem,” she said. “No one knows anything about MARC. Few people know about what’s going on at the county or city level. Then you add another layer of bureaucracy they don’t even vote on and folks don’t even know it exists.”

She argued against the regional approach, saying it hasn’t served municipalities including Kansas City with, “their crime rate just skyrocketing, especially murders.”

Kelly countered that it’s necessary to work alongside the rest of the metro region, and that “we can’t just arbitrarily put walls up.

“Our ability to collaborate and share best practices with other jurisdictions makes everyone stronger,” he said. “I don’t know about the fear mongering that comes out about our adjacent jurisdictions, but without a true understanding of what MARC does, it’s pretty easy to throw stones.”

Conspiracies and skepticism

Johnson County Commissioner Janeé Hanzlick, incoming MARC board chair, said she occasionally receives emails from constituents with concerns about the organization.

She couldn’t pinpoint when the comments started coming in more frequently, but said misinformation about the organization “rears its ugly head often enough.”

The pandemic resulted in MARC being a more commonly known name, as it provided daily reports on hospitalizations and illnesses, combining data from area health departments and hospitals. Elected officials used the data to make contentious decisions on mask mandates and health orders.

“It was a controversial time. Local leaders had to make some controversial decisions,” Warm said. “We were able to support them by getting information and insight so they could make decisions.”

Conservatives’ skepticism around MARC has stuck around, including since the organization has coordinated affordable housing efforts, plus supported Kansas City’s climate protection and resilience plan, which includes goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving sustainability in a variety of ways. MARC has secured grant funding and helped coordinate several environmental initiatives.

Thompson, a former meteorologist, in his Facebook post at the time, called it a “Marxist” plan and that is the “final link in the chain of your enslavement.”

Hayden, responding to a question about MARC at the event in January, falsely called climate change “your next big conspiracy theory.”

“God controls this Earth,” he said.

“We have people of all political stripes on the MARC board,” Hanzlick said. “That doesn’t mean we don’t have differences of opinion, but it is extremely rare that we don’t have support for these climate-related actions.”

She pushed back against the opposition toward taking a regional approach on such issues. And she encouraged residents to attend the board’s public meetings.

“There are times where I may not agree with something because I look at it from the point of view of Johnson County. But I also look at what’s going to be best for the region. It’s not an either/or,” she said. “I don’t believe that we should put a fence around Johnson County and only worry about ourselves. I think we can work with the rest of the metro. We have to.”

Warm said the opposition “comes up from time to time,” and he wouldn’t attribute criticism about the regional approach to those in Johnson County alone.

But he emphasized the organization is federally required, and if it didn’t exist, “another one would be created.”