The wealthy, backbiting, litigious, renegade-cop-hiring residents of Lake Lotawana keep things churning

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• Angela C. Bond

  

  Bill Kostar

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Lake Lotawana in Pictures

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Lake Lotawana, Randy Poletis, Terry Reed, Anthony Barber, Bill Kostar

A caution light bounces in the wind as Terry Reed sits in the driver's seat of a black Chevy Trailblazer.

He's parked on the shoulder of East Langsford Road, one of the entrances to Lake Lotawana, a small community in southeastern Jackson County. The back of his SUV holds campaign signs for an election that's 10 days away. Reed hopes to unseat an incumbent on the board of aldermen.

Reed is a husband, a father and a business owner. Entering city politics was never an ambition. "The last thing I need to be doing is running for alderman," he says. Eventually, however, he came to believe that the city suffered from chronic mismanagement and would benefit from a new perspective.

On this overcast and windy Saturday morning, Reed is planting signs with help of his wife, Janis, and a few friends. Reed's signs feature a stork trying to swallow a frog. The frog, symbolizing waste and conflict, has its fingers wrapped around the neck of the stork, which represents the city.

Developed in the late 1920s as a genteel resort for Kansas City's upper crust, Lake Lotawana has a mere 2,215 residents. Some visit only on weekends. Owners of second homes in Lake Lotawana include billionaire and philanthropist James Stowers, Americo Life Chairman Michael Merriman and corporate lawyer James Polsinelli.

But to view Lake Lotawana as simply a place where captains of industry wear sailing clothes would be a mistake. A convicted drug dealer lives on the same street as a city alderman. A suspected methamphetamine lab caught on fire the night of a police raid. One resident accused the former police chief of tossing him in a psych ward because he was gay.

The lake has attracted people of means since before the Great Depression, but wealth hasn't always brought wisdom. Recent city initiatives have led to costly court battles. "We can hold our heads high and say we've never filed a lawsuit we didn't lose," Reed jokes.

At present, the city is dealing with a lawsuit filed by its former police chief, George Randy Poletis.

Poletis became police chief after he had been run off his two previous jobs. In Lake Lotawana, he developed a reputation for building empires and nursing grudges. Some residents compare him with Dr. Jekyll and J. Edgar Hoover. Others call Poletis a pro. "He solved every crime across his desk," Alderman David Needles says.

The board of aldermen fired Poletis a year ago. He maintains that he was a consummate professional. His lawsuit draws a direct link between his dismissal and his complaints that a city administrator acted inappropriately around his officers.

The administrator is gone, and the mayor who wanted Poletis fired decided not to run for re-election.

As Reed sits in his SUV, a pickup truck turns onto Langsford Road from state Highway 7. Reed waves at the driver, a large man with a full head of silver hair. It's Poletis, driving to his lakefront home.

A blond woman seated at a table squeezes a lemon into her wheat beer. Tonight's entertainer, Lucas Bingham, performs Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" on an acoustic guitar.

It's a Thursday night at the Canoe Club. Customers jam the tables in the dining room and on the patio. The restaurant's young co-owners — Andy Manz and Nick Calkins, friends who met at the University of Central Missouri — bus tables and remove trash in an effort to help the waitstaff concentrate on the guests.

Manz is a fourth-generation resident of Lake Lotawana. The restaurant's décor reflects his heritage. Manz salvaged wood from old cabins to create a lodgelike feel in what had been a hair salon.

An old, ink-drawn map of Lake Lotawana that hangs under a stuffed deer's head lists some of the playful names — Bandit Bay, Quantrill's Cove — assigned to different parts of the lake.

Milton Thompson, a Jackson County parks commissioner, established the Lake Lotawana Development Co. in 1928. He and his partners sold it as a place where the city's elite could enjoy the water without having to travel too far. "A development so unusual and so conveniently located as Lake Lotawana is bound to attract quickly the better class of the outdoor-loving populace," promised a company brochure.

The damming of Sni-a-Bar Creek began at daybreak on March 27, 1929, and by noon, "the stream was lapping impotently against the new impediment," according to an account in the lake's official newspaper.

The dam created nearly 1,000 lakefront lots. Early settlers included Chet Keys, an assistant U.S. attorney, and Lou Holland, the head of the Chamber of Commerce. John Thompson, who built the Chevrolet plant in the Leeds section of Kansas City, employed an American Indian to hew the logs of his lodge.

Before it was a city, Lake Lotawana was just a homeowners' association. To this day, the Lake Lotawana Community Association controls the lake (it's shaped like a map of Italy) and the streets that surround it. The city was not incorporated until 1958.

Over the years, the lake's "better class" took steps to preserve its way of life.

Tobacco wholesaler Anthony Barber owns a large amount of property adjacent to Lake Lotawana. In the late 1970s, residents fought his attempt to build a feedlot for a thousand head of cattle. Their protests prevailed, despite Barber's substantial political connections. (Harold “Doc” Holliday, who represented Kansas City's East Side on the Jackson County Legislature, was an especially ardent Barber supporter. Barber contributed heavily to the black political club Freedom Inc.)