The overwhelming majority of Kansas Citians think the politicos at City Hall fight too much and that it’s holding the city back, according to a poll released recently.

The Mayor and City Council deserve a lot of the blame for this. But there are also culprits behind the scenes who work tirelessly to keep them at odds with one another.

One of the most notorious is Steve Glorioso.

For those of you who don’t know him, he’s one of Kansas City’s most ferocious political animals. He’s been in the game since the 1970s, operating mostly behind the scenes. He was former Mayor Kay Barnes’s top aide when she was saddling the city with billions in debt to build her legacy projects downtown.

And he’s not the most pleasant fellow on earth. Numerous people who work the local political scene have told me, in no uncertain terms, that they hate Glorioso’s guts. They describe him as a two-faced hypocrite.

I recently filed an information request for all of his emails to and from City Hall accounts, and these documents would seem to underscore this sentiment.

They also show quite clearly that he very deliberately works to pit the Mayor, City Council members and top city officials against one another.

Worse, they raise serious ethical concerns.

Glorioso works for Trozzolo Communications Group, a PR firm that has a contract with the city. Several of his emails show that some of his duties with Trozzolo are related to this contract. Other emails, however, reveal that he has provided individual PR services for the former City Manager and at least one member of the City Council.

This coupled with his attacks on other members of the Council and staff — all of whom are ostensibly supposed to be served by the Trozzolo contract, because it’s a city contract — suggest a disturbing level of publicly funded politicizing of City Hall that is, at very least, causing the very problems the public is most concerned about.

But enough delay of gratification. Let’s get into those emails shall we?

First up: Glorioso the two-faced.

When Glorioso has need of someone’s services, he can be very polite and solicitous. For instance, during last year’s budget process, he sent a number of emails to Council Member Deb Hermann, who, as chair of the Finance and Audit Committee, was quarterbacking the process. In each of them he was friendly and supportive. He wrote things like “Congratualtions” (sic),  “good luck,”  “Thanks for your thought response” (sic)  and, months later, “Hope you will have a relaxing 4th.”

But then, right around the same time, Hermann made a big show of abruptly canceling a meeting when former City Manager Wayne Cauthen was a minute late. Glorioso sent several emails to other City Council members in which he likened her action to a “lynching.” (Cauthen is black.)

And here’s one to Cauthen in which Glorioso suggested reading “two letters ripping Deb” in the Star. Interesting, because “Deb” was one of Cauthen’s bosses.

(There’s also a curious email he sent to Cauthen not long after this in which he wrote, “You will never get change out there with that women running uncontroled. (sic) What she did was dishonest. And she fights and undermines reforms and morale.”  It’s not clear which “that women” he was referring to. But I bet it’s one he’s nice to when he needs something out of her.)

Last item in the two-faced column: a little dig at Mayor Pro Tem Bill Skaggs.

Among the recipients of the earlier emails regarding Hermann was Skaggs. In it, Glorioso referred to an earlier phone conversation with Skaggs, which it is probably safe to assume was amicable. Indeed, Glorioso once described Skaggs to me in rather glowing terms.

But then, months later, in response to a mass email from Skaggs’s aide alerting folks that Skaggs was in the hospital due to a “bowel obstruction,” Glorioso wrote: “Always knew he was full of sh....t.”

Ha ha! Good one, Steve.

Now, on to hypocrisy.

In an email dated January 19 of last year, Glorioso offered Council Member Cathy Jolly some suggestions about what to do with an email I forwarded to her. The email in question is a rather awful one written by my former co-worker Kendrick Backwood, who is now the Mayor’s chief of staff. (I sent it to several Council members in a fit of rage, which I've already written about here.)

In the email, Glorioso said my email “raises the question of them using non-city hall email addresses to conduct public business.”

Yet this is something Glorioso does constantly.

For instance, he began a message sent early last February to Council Member Beth Gottstein with: “I hope this is still your private email. Just wanted to lobby you (I am not a paid lobbyist !) on the ordinance you are considering on the dress code for P&L District.”

In another to Jolly, he wrote, “I have been sending these two emails below to your private email.”

What’s that old saying about how it takes one to know one?

Anyway, all this is piddly stuff compared to the larger governance and ethical questions Glorioso’s emails raise.

Let’s look a little more deeply at some of the emails I’ve already posted.

The emails to Council members in which Glorioso insinuated that Hermann had orchestrated a “lynching” of Cauthen were obviously designed to rile her colleagues against her. He even enlisted the help of a Council member’s aide — Jim Giles, who works for Gottstein — to do it (more about him on my blog later this week).

Similarly, the purpose of the emails he sent to Jolly’s “private address” was to conspire with Jolly on ways to discredit Chief of Police Jim Corwin and the top brass in the Police Department.

This raises serious issues.

For one, crime is one of the top concerns for Kansas City residents, according to annual surveys. Those same surveys also reveal that citizens are generally satisfied with the job the Police Department does.

As such, it’s very important that City Hall officials strive to build a strong working relationship with the Police Department.

Indeed, Jolly chairs a committee — Public Safety and Neighborhoods — which was created by the Mayor specifically to strengthen the relationship between City Hall and the Police Department.

Yet there’s Glorioso, working with her to make the Police Department look bad and intensify the discord between the cops and City Hall.

Glorioso has written many emails like this. He seems to have issues with the police and their Chief.

Here’s one to Hermann.  Here’s another to Jolly and Council Member Ed Ford in which he wrote that the Chief “lied.”

And here’s one he sent to Council Member Terry Riley via Blackberry during a public meeting, urging him to ask a tough question about the Police Department’s budget.

Glorioso also spends a lot of energy getting Council members pissed off at the Mayor.

In an early August missive, he alerted several Council members of some boneheaded comments Funkhouser made on TV (It worked; Council member Cindy Circo responded, “He is an evil man!!!”)

In another from last February, he enlisted Gottstein’s aide Giles to “see that all the right people see this link ??” — the link being dirt on Funk’s newly hired aide, Mark Seittman.

And there’s another to Riley saying that the Mayor “just gave a political speech not a budget letter” and that it “was a jeff roe written speech. All politics and no policy.”

And during the height of the drama last summer when the Mayor narrowly missed facing a recall vote, Glorioso assisted Ford and his aide in writing memos to the City Clerk in an effort to get her to count the signatures to increase the odds of recall petitioners’ success.

Jolly also sent Glorioso some information about the recall petitions. She was apparently not proud of having done so, because she implored him: “please do not forward this.” (I’ve been told that Jolly has been quite nervous about what I might write ever since she learned that I requested and received these emails.)

If you care about this city, if you care about our elected officials and city workers banding together to find solutions to the problems that plague us all, you have to agree that all of that is pretty bad stuff.

But what’s worst of all is that Glorioso is getting paid with our tax dollars.

As I said earlier, he works for Trozzolo Communications Group, a PR firm that has a healthy contract with the city. This contract has always been described to me as “no bid.” And it’s my understanding that they got it when Barnes was mayor, Glorioso was her top aide and Cauthen was her handpicked city manager. I don’t know these things for certain, because the city refused to honor my information request for the contract and other related materials (and, yes, I will be alerting the state attorney general of their transgression).

But this much is certain: in several of the emails Glorioso is very clearly working as part of the Trozzolo contract. 

And in another similar communication he is doing work on an aspect of city government that is directly under the purview of his wife, Regina Chandler.

This series of emails has to do with public relations about the city’s 311 information line and how it coordinates with the Water Department. Chandler just happens to be the Water Department’s 311 liaison.  (Here’s another.)

I’m not sure how this all shakes out with the whole nepotism thing.

(At any rate, it’s kind of funny because at one point Glorioso wrote an email to Chandler complaining that he’d been on hold with 311 for upwards of 20 minutes. (I guess that’s why they need PR — if the city doesn’t work, they can at least send a press release saying it does.)

A bigger issue than nepotism, though, is that many of Glorioso’s emails reveal that he has been doing political PR work for certain members of the City Council and, above all, the former City Manager — who had a lot of sway in getting Trozzolo their contract.

Here he advised Cauthen “you should be doing some ‘hands on’ with the Star editorial board.”  Here he told Cauthen to “claim victory” on a minor bit of good news AND pimped for Trozzolo.  And in this one he said he worked over a reporter who was writing a long article about Cauthen.

He even nudged Cauthen via Blackberry during a public meeting.

And Cauthen wasn’t the only one who received Glorioso’s professional assistance.

Glorioso also helped Jolly write press releases and formulate media strategies. In this email to the City’s communications director, he said right up front, “Wayne and Cathy Jolly asked that I send you some talking points for a news release they would like to go out early tomorrow morning.”

So, without a doubt, Glorioso has been working as a political flak for at least one member of the City Council and the former City Manager (who is supposed to be apolitical). He has also been doing political sabotage of other members of the Council and other top city staff. AND he’s been lobbying and offering policy advice.

Now I ask: Is this ethical? Is it good for the city? Is it all part of his paid work for Trozzolo? If not, how are we to differentiate? If so, is this the kind of thing taxpayers should be funding?

Rather than ask these questions directly of Glorioso, the Council and the folks at Trozzolo, I’m just going to put them out into the world in hopes that people who are more powerful than me will ask them.

Meantime, be sure to visit my blog throughout the week. I’ve got more emails to share and more questions to raise.