Independence Square

"I love practicing law, and I love trying cases, but I might not have the urgency to continue to try as hard as I do if there wasn't the great need to do so many projects," he says. "When you are under the most pressure ... your emotions and feelings are at the highest. This has kept me sharp, kept me focused."

Jack Cardwell, a real estate appraiser who has worked for McClain, acknowledges that it takes more motivation than just dollars to justify investment in Independence Square. "I think it's a labor of love that he wants to help the city that's been good to him," Cardwell says.

McClain seems to think that the city could be better to him.

If he ran the town like some say, he says he'd get more tangible results. There would be more park benches on the square. The city would not have approved a CarMax dealership for the TIF district at Interstates 70 and 470, which has drawn more retail energy from Noland Road. And there would be more attention paid to the hesitant rebirth of the square.

McClain says that Independence doesn't advertise about its transformation, further proof that he doesn't always get his way.

But some in town are convinced that McClain pulls the town's strings.

"He's done good things with my [tax] money," says Cecil Vaughan, a former Jackson County legislator who lives only a few houses from McClain.

But Vaughan says McClain acts like he's the only one who has ever done anything for Independence.

"Ken's kind of sometimes his own worst enemy," says auto dealer Galen Boyer. "He's bright. He's brusque. He's not very diplomatic all the time. It comes across as sort of arrogance that doesn't sit so well with some people."

Jerry Banark has that impression, and he's never met McClain.

Banark's McClain story may be typical.

Banark says he got crosswise with McClain after a storm a couple of years ago when, for the first time ever, he got water in his basement when the sewer backed up through his basement floor drain. "This was dirty water. This was toilet water."

Two feet of toilet water meant a $9,000 cleanup bill to replace the saturated carpet and repair other damage, not counting the guns. "I lost some pretty doggone good guns."

He says the city assessed the problem and blamed it on a poorly designed sewer line. But Banark is convinced that the problem was caused by McClain. He believes construction debris from a McClain project nearby floated into an open manhole and caused the backup.

Banark didn't call McClain, who is listed in the phone book. Instead, he posted signs on his fence and appealed to the City Council.

"I put signs on my fence calling him a zero as far as character goes," Banark says. "I was hoping that McClain ... would knock on my door or have one of his people knock on my door. It would have been settled."

Instead, Banark has held a grudge, one that caused him to quit the county historical society when it honored McClain as its Hometown Hero in 2003.

"When you make the biggest crook in Independence the man of the year, it's time to get out," he says.

A couple of years ago, John Pennell started hearing that McClain was behind on his property taxes for several buildings, including the Central Professional Building, an office building just off Independence Square that holds Humphrey, Farrington & McClain. The building legally is owned by McFarr Realty LLC, of which McClain is a partner.

Pennell called Mike Mansur of The Kansas City Star, who would go on to write a story in December 2003 about how some influential Jackson County landowners were not required to pay penalties or interest on overdue property taxes.

Though he wasn't the only one getting special treatment, McClain became the poster child for the phenomenon. County collector Michael Pendergast had forgiven McFarr Realty more than $21,000 in penalties and interest for overdue taxes for 1999 and 2000.

The exposé earned Mansur another scoop from Pennell four months later.

That's when Pennell started hearing complaints about massive earth-moving vehicles damaging the roads of Saddle Ridge. Pennell checked and found that McClain had permission from the state Department of Natural Resources to move the dirt. (He would later learn that McClain's permit had actually expired in 1997.)

McClain eventually worked out a deal to pay part of the city's repair work on the roads. But Pennell kept getting calls, specifically about where McClain had been removing dirt.

In the spring of 2004, Pennell and a friend, Bill Wilcox, went to the excavation site with a tape measure. They carried plastic bags to justify a cover story that they were hunting for mushrooms. They were going to be on park land but had to cross private property to get there.

Sure enough, the pit McClain's contractor had dug for a pond in the development was partly on county parkland. Pennell called county Legislature member Robert Stringfield. Then he called the Star.