Clerks may disappear but secrecy doesn’t
The last thing Marion County needed was another secrecy-shrouded scandal to weaken public trust in institutions of government.
Unfortunately, that’s just what it got last week in Peabody when it was disclosed that a convicted financial felon, promoted from dogcatcher to city clerk and behind in his court-ordered restitution, had vanished.
Clearly, Peabody never should have hired Jonathan Clayton any more than Marion should have hired Police Chief Gideon Cody, who was facing demotion in his old job amid allegations of impropriety.
To make matters worse, just as happened with Cody’s raid of the Record newsroom and two homes, responsible officials have kept the public in the dark about the case.
They have said Clayton had no role in city finances, but their own documents indicate he was paying bills with a city credit card issued in his name.
Rather than launch a widely publicized investigation, notifying the media so citizens could be on the lookout, it took five days before anyone in the general public was alerted, and that alert came not from officials but from the Peabody rumor mill.
Rather than immediately call in the sheriff, the county attorney, and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation to make sure Clayton had not taken off with city money, the case supposedly has been referred to a new unit of the highway patrol, which responded to inquiries only by saying they were working on a missing person case.
Meanwhile, perplexing disclosures keep leaking out. Clayton apparently neglected to file proper paperwork so Peabody business owners could be reimbursed by grant money for repairs they undertook.
Days after his disappearance, Clayton also supposedly sent mysterious emails to various townsfolk implicating the director of the State Department of Commerce, where he formerly worked, should anything happen to him.
The case is downright bizarre, but Peabody officials continue to be incredibly closed lipped about it despite the public’s clear need to be reassured that tax money has not vanished, and that the city has been exercising sound judgment.
Coming on the heels of a massive purge of appointed officials in which the police chief, city clerk, public works director, and others either quit or were fired, confidence in City of Peabody government is at an all-time low.
Rather than reassure people, however, city council members apparently met illegally in secret after adjourning Friday night and said absolutely nothing about the case at a meeting Monday.
Such deafening silence has not been heard since Marion and Marion County officials declined for more than a year to clear the newspaper or to talk about the raid on the newspaper and two homes.
For democracy to work, government must be much more open and much less cliquish than what we have seen from both Marion and Peabody.
When officials shroud the goings-on of government in secrecy, the garden of democracy cannot flourish, its fruits replaced by fungi that give rise to authoritarianism.
Sunshine is the best disinfectant. It’s time to brush away the scum of secrecy that have despoiled Marion’s and Peabody’s reputations and prove to the rest of the world that the towns aren’t filled with the types of bullies and hicks that others think they are because of the behavior of handfuls of officials.
— ERIC MEYER