The following letter to Tom Bogdon, Editor/Publisher of KCTribune, was received this week from Crispin Rea, assistant to Mayor Mark Funkhouser and a member of the Media Relations Team in the Mayor's Office. Mr. Rea also apparently is a student at Park University as he sent the letter on a Park University e-mail account, not on his Kansas City, Missouri e-mail account. His letter is followed by a response from Tom Bogdon.
Mr. Bogdon:
I was surprised to see my name mentioned on your blog. Although you are frustrated, you are wrong in mentioning me as giving you the "run around." This last week I was out of the office tending to a personal matter and received one call from you. In that single call, you asked that I locate Kendrick Blackwood--you mentioned nothing about water bottles. You are incorrect in claiming that I ignored you regarding an issue you failed to ask me to address. I understand you are frustrated. However, I ask that next time you take your frustrations public, you do so in a fair and accurate manner.
Crispin Rea
Response from Tom Bogdon:
First, Mr. Rea, I'm not frustrated; I'm angry--angry at you and your Boss, Mark Funkhouser, for turning the Mayor's Office from a business office and a place of public service into--excuse the expression--a Funhouse.
My editorial in KCTribune last week about the "run around" from you, Joe Miller, and Kendrick Blackwood was not simply in regard to the "run around" I received over a two-day period in trying unsuccessfully to get a comment from Funkhouser about his refusal to sign on as a co-sponsor to Councilwoman Beth Gottstein's resolution to ban economically and environmentally wasteful plastic water bottles at City Hall. No, it was the overall lack of responsiveness and even arrogance with which I have been treated by the Mayor's Office over the time Mark Funkhouser has administered this public trust.
Mr. Rea, KCTribune welcomes letters from readers. But we are not going to print your ignorant letter without a response. You deny that you gave me the "run around" when I spoke to you on the phone and asked, politely, if you could help me locate Kendrick Blackwood. And, no, Blackwood never got back to me despite numerous calls I made to him. He was always "in a meeting" and never did return my call. Neither did Joe Miller. The reason I wanted to speak to Blackwood was because I had already asked him for either an interview with Funkhouser about the water bottle issue or a summary of why the mayor is reluctant to rid City Hall (and Kansas City landfills) of plastic bottles.
Mr. Rea, I undererstand that you earn $2,812 per month, and that you are sort of the junior member of the "Communications Team." Joe Miller, whose title is Director of Communications, and Kendrick Blackwood, Media Relations Officer, are paid $80,000 apiece per year, I understand. With all that high-priced communications firepower, it looks like one of the three of you could break loose from all your important duties to return a phone call from what we consider to be a fairly important news service.
But what really makes me mad, in retrospect, is that the letter we received from you was not from Ed Wolf, the quarter-million-dollar-per-year Chief of Staff, or even Mayor Funkhouser himself. If the editor of one of the city's main sources of news was as "frustrated" as you seem to think I was when I wrote about the Mayor's Office last week, if I were a ranking figure in the office, I would have at least brought it up at a staff meeting and tried to get the situation corrected. Instead, the offended editor gets more abuse from a junior press staffer who doesn't even know the difference between a blog and an on-line news source.
My theory when I wrote last week was that the constant controversy that seems to pursue this Mayor's Office, including Funkhouser's stubborn insistence on having his wife, Gloria Squitiro, as an office volunteer, interferes with the effective and courteous functioning of the office. I have known and covered Mayors Ilus W. Davis, Charles B. Wheeler, Richard L. Berkley, Emanuel Cleaver and Kay Barnes, and never have I seen such a circus or been treated with such arrogance.
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