KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The people of Kansas City thought they were getting a straight-shooter with financial smarts as their new mayor. What they got, critics say, is a henpecked husband who needs his wife to tell him what to do.
In an era when politicians get in trouble for infidelity, Mayor Mark Funkhouser finds himself under fire for his devotion to his wife, a sharp-elbowed New Yorker whose role as his closest adviser has locals wondering who’s really running this city of 450,000.
“I knew Mark for almost 18 years as auditor and didn’t even know he was married. It’s not like he needed his wife when he was auditor,” said City Councilman Ed Ford, a leading critic of Funkhouser and his wife, Gloria Squitiro. “I think we were all surprised that he felt she was so indispensable once he became mayor.”
Squitiro ran her husband’s campaign for mayor, and after he got elected last year, she took a desk near his office in City Hall.
That arrangement came to end soon after a former mayoral aide filed a lawsuit last summer in which she accused Squitiro of making lewd comments around the office and calling the aide, a black woman, “Mammy.”
The council responded with an anti-nepotism ordinance that bars Squitiro from volunteering in the mayor’s office. Funkhouser vetoed it, and the council overrode the veto. Funkhouser shot back by suing the city, saying the ordinance infringed on his authority. He also began conducting a large share of city business from his home, stunning members of the council.
“I think government business should be done at City Hall and not out of the mayor’s home,” Ford said. “Part of it’s transparency. Part of it is, ‘Why is the mayor working out of his home?’ It’s obviously so Gloria can be by his side.”
Funkhouser said he and his wife are a political team. “The idea that I’m this infantile guy who’s tied to his wife’s apron strings and has to have her right there holding his hand — anybody who knows me knows that’s silly,” he said.
