Even the divided Clay County Commission agreed: County Counselor Kevin Graham needed help reducing the backlog of Sunshine Law requests.
But the commission – and several office holders – are split on whether the county should continue employing a Kansas City attorney who charges $373.50 an hour.
Graham had been handling the requests on his own, he said, until the load multiplied.
According to logs kept by the county clerk’s office, twice as many information requests were made in 2016, an election year, than in 2015. That prompted the commission to hire Spencer Fane, a Kansas City, Mo., law firm to handle the backlog.