Mayoral spokesman Joe Miller called recently with corrections to this Plog item from May 11. That article listed the donors to Mayor Mark Funkhouser’s inaugural gala. We got the list from City Hall, but Miller said there were two errors on it.
First, the name of the contact at the lawfirm Blackwell Sanders, one of the $10,000 donors, was incorrect. It’s actually David A. Fenley.
Second – and this gets interesting – the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce was not a donor, although they were listed as being in for $10,000. Miller explained that the Chamber erroneously landed on the list because it had done another favor for Funkhouser. And this one’s a lot better than simply putting in some dough for a party.
Back on April 24, the Chamber’s political action committee, BizPAC, held a reception for Funkhouser to help pay off debt from his campaign. The breakfast buffet meet-and-greet was held from 7:30 to 9 a.m. at Benton’s Steak & Chop House, Chamber President Pete Levi tells us. About 35 people attended the invitation-only event, where attendees dropped $52,000 to pay off the Funkhouser campaign debt.
This is the first time the Chamber has hosted such an event. If former mayors Kay Barnes and Emanuel Cleaver needed such a fundraiser, it wasn’t done through the chamber, Levi said.
Asked whether the attendees expected a favor for the mayor for help bailing out his debt, Levi tells us: “There were a lot of people who gave to the campaign, and if he repaid favors to everyone who gave, that would be all he would do.”
Because the event was held by a political action committee, the list of attendees and how much they gave is not yet a public record. Eventually, they'll show up as campaign contributions in forms that the Funkhouser campaign must file with the state. But for now, Levi says he won't make the list available. “Funkhouser would have to release that,” he tells the Pitch.
This morning, the Pitch asked Miller to release the list. When he sends it our way, you’ll see it here. – Eric Barton
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