No matter what happens in the Nov. 3 election, an outsider will be leading Jackson County for the next four years.
Two candidates are facing off to become the next Jackson County executive, who will manage and oversee hundreds of employees at the county courthouse under the direction of the county Legislature.
Longtime political names flocked to the race in the primary, including current and former county legislators and the former mayor of Lee’s Summit. In the end, lawyer Stacy Lake won the Democratic primary and will oppose Republican Alan Rohlfing, a 31-year military veteran and human resources professional.
To help voters decide who should be elected Jackson County executive, The Beacon sat down with both candidates for separate phone interviews. Those interviews have been condensed into two short profiles on each candidate’s goals and priorities.
The candidates are presented in the order in which they will appear on the November ballot.
Click a link to jump to a candidate:
Republican Alan Rohlfing
Alan Rohlfing is an Army veteran from Lee’s Summit. He has 31 years of military experience and a professional background in human resources.
He said that the most important task for Jackson County’s next executive is to rebuild trust with county residents and taxpayers. And the best way to do that, he believes, is by delivering “world class customer service” to Jackson County.
Better customer service from the county can mean different things to different people, he said. For people in unincorporated parts of the county, that’s addressing potholes and bridges. For homeowners, it’s improving the assessment process. For small businesses, that might be streamlining permitting.
“The leadership principles that I learned and used and benefited from over those 30 years of military service will work in this environment,” he said. “Leadership really boils down to, for me, the simple equation of service plus accountability.”
Outside of delivering key services, which he considers the baseline, Rohlfing said his three key priorities as Jackson County executive would be property tax reform, charter reform and making the county more friendly for small businesses.
Property taxes
Rohlfing said that in two years, county voters will have the ability to elect a county assessor to head up the property valuation process. But until that point, he wants to make sure the county appoints a qualified individual to head the assessment department.
(The county has not had a director of assessment since interim County Executive Phil LeVota fired Gail McCann Beatty in November 2025.)
In the meantime, he wants to make sure that the county is abiding by all of its legal and contractual obligations and following the guidance of the state tax commission.
“There’s still cleanup to do,” he said. “Once we have a good qualified assessor in there, what I want to do is to help them lean forward and get that office ready for the elected assessor to take over, so that they don’t have to start from scratch.”
Charter review and financial audit
For the past several decades, the county courthouse has become a spectacle of dysfunction and drama, Rohlfing said, and the county’s charter is long overdue for an update.
The charter is the county’s constitution. It outlines the structure of the government and the duties of the executive, the Legislature and all of the other county offices.
In addition, he’d like to publish a forensic audit of the county’s spending to make sure elected leaders “treat the taxpayer dollar like it’s precious.”
“I don’t want to go out there and say, ‘Jackson County is corrupt as everything and we need to go out and clean house,’” he said. “I’m not saying that at all.”
But perhaps, he said, the county Legislature should be given some of the duties that currently belong to the county executive. Or at least some language around those duties should be tweaked to more clearly outline what the executive must do, rather than simply what they are allowed to do.
Any changes made to the county charter would end up going to voters for ultimate approval.
Supporting small businesses
Over the years, Rohlfing said, the county has gotten a somewhat bad reputation among municipalities and small-business owners for being difficult to work with.
He wants that to change. And the biggest way to do that, he said, is by clearing unnecessary red tape.
“It’s speeding the process along,” he said. “It’s making it quicker to check the blocks to get access to capital — those kind of things that at the end of the day can can make it either less costly for a business to start or to stay in business.”
And the county executive, he said, has an important role to play in rebuilding relationships that have deteriorated over the years.
“I’ve had a lot of folks tell me that Jackson County doesn’t play well with others,” he said. “What we really also need to do is to rebuild some bridges,” including with other cities and regional groups.
Democrat Stacy Lake
Stacy Lake is a lawyer specializing in civil litigation who lives in midtown Kansas City. She previously ran for Jackson County executive in 2022, nearly defeating Frank White Jr. in the primary.
She defeated five other Democrats in this year’s August primary election, earning about 46% of the vote.
Lake said she wants to “reform and modernize the Jackson County government.”
“Our technological systems within the county government, they’re outdated,” she said, “They’ve been behind for decades.”
The acronym for her seven-point strategy is the JACKSON Plan:
- Justice system reform
- Audit Jackson County government
- Countywide infrastructure
- Keep taxes affordable
- Small-business support
- Ownership and affordable housing
- Neighbor-to-neighbor transportation plan
But above all, Lake listed her top three priorities as bringing property assessment back under the county’s control, auditing the county and improving infrastructure.
Fixing the property assessment process
Lake said one of the first steps she’d take to reform the county’s assessment process is to bring it back in-house, severing the relationship with the company the county had outsourced much of the work to, Tyler Technologies.
County officials tasked that company with collecting the data for the 2023 property assessments. Tyler Technologies also helped with computer-assisted mass appraisal, the process by which those property measurements are converted into market values.
Lake said that Tyler Technologies, 10% of which is owned by global finance giant BlackRock Inc., is responsible for many of the unlawful increases in property assessments in 2023. She said the BlackRock relationship is a conflict of interest.
“BlackRock is basically a private equity firm that goes around the United States buying single-family homes,” Lake said.
In addition, Lake supports an annual cap on assessment increases at the state level.
“For me it’s unethical to tell a person that their taxes are going to increase from one year to another by 500%,” she said, “and only give them six months’ notice of that increase.”
Auditing Jackson County government
Lake said Jackson County government has lost trust among its residents. She is calling for a “deep-scale audit” and reform to make sure tax dollars are spent efficiently and effectively.
“Over the years, Jackson County government has been mired in scandal,” she said, noting that auditors who belonged to both political parties rated the county “poor,” the lowest possible rating, on the assessment appeal process, travel expenses and no-bid contracts.
She wants to investigate the assessment department, but she also wants to hire an independent auditor to go department-by-department ensuring that money is accounted for and being spent as outlined in the budget approved by county legislators.
“We owe it to the people of Jackson County,” she said, “to one, make sure that our books are correct, and (two), that we are passing balanced budgets each year, which we currently are not.”
Investing in county infrastructure improvements
Lake is interested in infrastructure on two fronts.
She wants to revamp public transportation in Jackson County, including in several suburbs that have divested from the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority in recent years.
Her dream vision of a rapid bus system would include four main lines — connecting downtown Kansas City to Buckner, to Lone Jack and to Martin City, as well as one connecting Grandview to Independence.
“It’s actually just crazy,” she said, “to think that in the 1950s our tram system was more accessible than what our quasi-bus system is right now.”
Beyond public transportation, she said, Jackson County is in desperate need of updating county buildings — which she said are falling apart.
She said the county should have been investing a portion of its budget every year in maintenance, but instead, the issues have snowballed.
“We still have pipes in the courthouse that are over 150 years old,” she said. “The majority of our buildings in Jackson County are not ADA-compliant, meaning that they’re not even accessible for every single Jackson County resident to go into, and that has to change.”
