Kirkwood’s 6-1 Republican Majority

In a Friday evening news dump the week before Thanksgiving, Kirkwood City Council announced that they would be parting ways with city administrator Russ Hawes. There would be no formal transition to a named successor, no transfer of institutional knowledge, and no grand send-off. Instead, the end for the man who had managed the city’s day-to-day operations for more than a decade would come abruptly and without sentimentality. The move, which had been telegraphed for weeks, was perhaps the most potent example of norm-subversion from a Council seemingly intent on consolidating its power, but it was not to be the last.

A Conservative Council Coup

It’s hard to explain how radical a departure this newest iteration of the Kirkwood City Council is from those that preceded it. The job has never been a sexy one. You work hundreds of hours a year, basically for free, and the expectation is that you will pursue little more than the responsible, cautious stewardship of the public’s resources. But this Council has departed from that norm and oriented itself towards a much more overtly political project.

Despite running as ostensibly nonpartisan candidates, the slate that now governs Kirkwood has had numerous and direct ties to the broader national Conservative Movement from its inception. On Election Day, April 2nd, 2024, regional Conservative activists circulated an email pushing a slate of local school board and municipal government candidates as a single unified ticket:

By the next day, the political coalition that had mobilized to eradicate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion from the Kirkwood School District had quietly and successfully installed their partisans in six of Kirkwood’s seven Council seats.

A Local Government with National Aspirations

There has been a long and storied history of responsible, community-focused Conservative leadership in Kirkwood, and I believe that history has, on the whole, made us better off. But whereas previous Kirkwood Conservatives have sought to help the community fulfill its potential, this crop of elected leaders seems far more interested in using their power to punish their Democratic enemies and reward their Republican allies.

For some members, the connections are direct. Council Member Gina Jaksetic ran as the Republican nominee for state house in 2014. Mayor Gibbons’ husband, Mike Gibbons, served as a Republican state representative and President Pro Tem, and ran for Attorney General in 2008. But pre-Trump Republicanism was a fundamentally different endeavor. Maybe their politics had evolved?

To answer that question, I searched through the FEC political donation data for each individual Council Member and compiled them into a publicly accessible spreadsheet. In total, I found contributions from four current members: Mayor Gibbons, and council members Rheinnecker, Luetzow, and Jaksetic:

Of these four donors, only Council Member Luetzow consistently donated to Democratic candidates, having donated a total of $200 to 2024 Senate candidate Lucas Kunce. Meanwhile, Council Members Rheinnecker, Gibbons, and Jaksetic have collectively donated more than $30,000 to Republican candidates since 2016:

Amongst the causes they’ve collectively championed:

• $250 to Jason Smith, Republican Chair of the House Ways & Means Committee and chief congressional architect of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill
• $20k to MAGA-aligned Senator Eric Schmitt
• $600 to Georgia Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in the 2020 Senate runoff—both of whom narrowly avoided indictment related to their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election
• $125 to Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.

Because contributions are reported at the individual level, I also searched for donations from council members’ spouses. The pattern holds: Council Member Luetzow’s spouse donated $5 to Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton in 2019. Mr. Rheinnecker’s spouse made seven donations totaling more than $1,300 to Trump-affiliated PACs. And Mayor Gibbons’ husband—the former Republican state legislator turned lobbyist—has donated nearly $7,000 to Missouri Republican causes since 2016.

In short, this donor history suggests a genuine commitment to the Trump-era Republican project. But if they were able to separate their personal political priorities from their official public activities, I still think the situation might be tenable. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case.

Seeing Red

When Mr. Rheinnecker was first elected, I hoped he would utilize his business acumen and conservative instincts to benefit Kirkwood. A year ago, still hopeful, I emailed Council Members Rheinnecker, Schaefer, and McLean a link to a story about adding flexibility to the city’s plumbing code to bring costs down.

Instead of engaging with this idea on its merits, Rheinnecker dismissed it out of hand because it was from the New York Times, asking, I hope rhetorically, “Is this article written by the same people who told us that Biden was vital and healthy for the past four years?”

The irony is hard to miss. Kirkwood residents have watched water rates climb steadily in recent years. I had shared an idea that might help reduce infrastructure costs. Rheinnecker dismissed it because he didn’t like the newspaper. Yet as we’ll see, this same Council has been actively pursuing the sale of Kirkwood’s water utility—a move that would increase costs further while generating one-time revenue for the city. It’s the same sort of short-term thinking that got us into our current financial mess unfolding anew.

I was genuinely surprised by such a dismissive response. I know this piece is direct, and I don’t come to an overtly political approach lightly. I sincerely don’t want Kirkwood’s politics to become polarized or nationalized. But I also don’t want us to be naïve, as I was when I sent that email. National politics are already here, whether we like it or not.

When you’re so committed to partisanship that it blinds you from considering alternatives, you corrode the fraternal spirit that has made Kirkwood special. And when council members donate $30,000 to Republican candidates and dismiss ideas based on their source rather than merit, it’s reasonable to expect they’ll enact conservative priorities in their official capacity.

Next on the Agenda? Privatize Public Services

That dismissiveness about water policy takes on new significance in light of this Winter’s water privatization push. My biggest fear is that with the Council having removed meaningful resistance from City Staff—ousting both the Chief Administrative Officer and the Director of Kirkwood Electric—they’ll now pursue even more radical and permanent actions, especially the privatization of city utilities.

Once you sell a municipal utility to a private monopoly like Ameren or Missouri American Water, there’s no getting it back. And yet that seems exactly what the Council is gearing up to do.

In January, the City formed a “Water Committee” to determine the future of the department. The first purpose of that committee, as Schaefer and Rheinnecker —both themselves members of the Water Committee— noted in a joint letter to the Webster-Kirkwood Times, “we need to figure out what the water system is worth. Without knowing the market value of an asset, it is impossible to make an informed decision about whether to keep it or sell it.” Throughout the letter, privatizing the utility is presented as the only reasonable option the city has left.

This push for privatization comes not in a dying industry—like the Trump Administration’s toying with privatizing the US Postal Service—but in what may prove to be two of the most critical sectors for determining which communities thrive over the next several decades. As the electric transition intensifies, as the region grapples with infrastructure needs, and as the data center buildout reshapes demand for power and water across the St. Louis area, the decisions Kirkwood makes about these utilities will matter enormously. I think that Kirkwood should have as much control over these sectors as possible. It certainly seems shortsighted to permanently relinquish local control over these sectors to a private monopoly just to plug short-term budgetary holes. It’s a bit like trading Albert Pujols the first time he goes 0 for 4 in a game.

But from the Council’s perspective, if they can successfully privatize these services, they’ll have achieved a conservative priority that outlives their terms. In this way, they’re functioning less like traditional local representatives and more like a municipal DOGE, borrowing Elon Musk’s playbook of short-termism, zero-sum thinking, and targeting civil servants who stand in the way. Utility privatization is the most consequential example, but the pattern extends across city operations:

• After badly bungling the financial details of a contract renewal with a parking sensor company, Fybr, the Council utilized the ensuing confusion to cancel the full smart cities initiative that had been spearheaded by Director of Kirkwood Mark Petty and which had won us plaudits in the local press. Analysis shows the decision will cost the city $58,000 per year in foregone parking revenue.
• In the Fall of 2024, Council Member Rheinnecker teamed up with Council Member Jaksetic in a failed effort to claw back a clean electricity contract that had already been approved by the Council. Director of Kirkwood Electric, Mark Petty, explained that the contract was meant to insulate residents from wholesale electric price volatility and warned that this would erode Kirkwood’s trust as a negotiating partner in future negotiations.
• On November 20th 2025, Council Members Jaksetic and Schaefer attempted to block the extension of a mutually beneficial Police, EMS, and Fire dispatching service agreements with Glendale. At their next meeting on December 4th, Council Member Schaefer was absent, but Council Member Rheinnecker joined Council Member Jaksetic’s crusade, this time targeting an ambulance services agreement that is revenue positive

Each of these interventions shares a common thread: Council members disrupting competent city management, then blaming staff for the resulting chaos. This pattern reached its logical conclusion in the firing of Russ Hawes and Mark Petty—scapegoated for decisions the Council itself approved.

Petty was the first to go. After months of clashing with Council members over the clean electricity contract and the smart cities initiative, he was removed over concerns about Kirkwood Electric’s financial position — the same financial position the Council had directly overseen. As I detailed in a separate piece, the Council approved $7.8 million in Kirkwood Electric spending after being sworn in in April 2024. They were actively engaging with the utility’s budget as recently as their March 6th, 2025 meeting, where they made several line-item edits — including eliminating a proposed $710,000 transfer from the Water Department to the General Fund — while leaving $2.5 million in transfers out of the Electric Department untouched. Seven months later, they proclaimed the city’s finances were in crisis. A couple of months after that, the city’s credit rating was downgraded. And Petty was the one who paid the price.

Hawes followed within weeks, dismissed in a Friday evening news dump the week before Thanksgiving — no formal transition, no named successor, no transfer of institutional knowledge after more than a decade of service.

Abdication of Duty

In blaming city staff for these outcomes, the Council has conveniently obscured its own role. It exercised final approval over every decision now laid at Hawes’ and Petty’s feet. Two examples illustrate this pattern with particular clarity.

In a now-infamous chapter, the city used opioid overdose settlement money to buy a Ford F-350 truck that had no relation to opioid prevention. Despite Mayor Gibbons telling News Channel 4 she did not recall approving the move, Gibbons and council members Rheinnecker, Schaefer, Zimmer, Luetzow, and McLean (Jaksetic was absent) all offered their unanimous approval of the purchase without debate at their May 16th, 2024 meeting:

This embarrassing episode might be dismissed as a one-time lapse in judgment. But the same pattern—unanimous approval followed by selective amnesia—repeats with far greater financial consequences in the case of Kirkwood Electric.

As noted above, the Council directly approved $7.8 million in Kirkwood Electric spending across 30 separate votes since taking office — a full accounting of which you can view in this spreadsheet. That includes $3.5 million for the infrastructure upgrades that tapped the city’s reserves and ultimately led to a reduction in our credit rating. Here’s the Council unanimously approving nearly a million dollars — $778k — in a single meeting back in September of 2024, for example:

That’s not to say there’s anything nefarious about the approval of those contracts; it’s just to say that whatever complaint the Council now has with the utility’s conduct, they sure kept it to themselves while voicing their unanimous approval of its spending.

The firings have cost the city $32,500 for ‘Executive Search Services.’ But the real consequence is a strategic one: the Council now has a free hand to handpick successors who fit their partisan preferences, cementing their ideological perspective long after they’re voted out.

The April Election

The good news is that the next election is three months away, providing an opportunity to replace three of the Council’s four members. The bad news is that one of those members is Nancy Luetzow, currently the Council’s lone Democrat, and she has decided not to run again. Another, Council Member Zimmer, who was cited as a Conservative in the voting guide that circulated ahead of the last election but who always seems to be a fairly independent, fair-minded thinker, is term-limited and will also be replaced. That leaves Council Member Al Rheinnecker as the lone incumbent seeking reelection.

But we have a path forward. Three candidates —Justin Arnold, Sheila Burkett, and Deb Lavender, the same candidate who previously bested Jaksetic in her state legislative race— are running to fill the open seats and, hopefully, restore mutual understanding and good-faith governance.

I encourage you to support all three in any way you can: Follow them on Facebook and Instagram, tell your friends about them, throw a sign in your yard, or donate a couple bucks in a local race where a couple bucks goes a lot further than $30k to national candidates ever could.

But mostly, I encourage you to go vote for them. The truth is, even if we elect all three, Conservatives will still hold a 4-3 majority on the Council. But three votes is enough to demand recorded votes on controversial measures, to force public debate where the current Council prefers backroom consensus, and to ensure that residents hear about what’s actually happening at City Hall before it’s too late to do anything about it. A loyal opposition can’t stop everything, but it can shine a light—and in local government, sunlight is often the best disinfectant.

More than that, electing Arnold, Lavender, and Burkett would send a message that Kirkwood is paying attention—that residents expect their elected officials to represent them, not use their city as a laboratory for partisan ideological projects.