Darin Stephens is an elected director of GO Topeka. He is also the broker and founder of Stone & Story Real Estate Group in Topeka. Those two facts are public. What they add up to is a fair question, and it is not the same thing as a finding.
GO Topeka is not the tax. JEDO is not the broker. The half-cent is not a city street tax. People mix those up, so the rest of this only makes sense if they are pulled apart.
The half-cent is countywide. A buyer in Topeka, Auburn, Silver Lake, Rossville, or on a county road pays it. Voters extended it on November 4, 2014. It runs from January 1, 2017, through December 31, 2031. The state collects it and divides it between the county and the cities. Topeka and Shawnee County pool those shares under an interlocal agreement. JEDO, a board of elected officials, holds the money. The 2016 agreement set aside $5 million a year for economic development. JEDO pays that slice to GO Topeka, a private nonprofit. GO Topeka writes the checks.
The directors of that nonprofit are in the room when the pipeline is discussed. Who is looking at Topeka. Who is leaving. Which site is in play. Which employer is being offered an incentive. A broker who is not in the room learns it later, if a press release is issued at all.
Stephens’s published production is large. Homes.com shows about 1,027 closed sales and roughly $249.5 million in volume over five years. Zillow shows 214 sales in the last twelve months. That is brokerage business. It is not a check from the half-cent, and this post does not say the tax paid him. He is also not the only real-estate person on the board.
So the question for the public is a narrow one. Does a working broker who sits in that room have an inside track on who is coming and going, and could that track have anything to do with a volume his competitors do not see from the sidewalk?
Kansas law does not answer that question by banning the seat. The rules are narrower than people think, and they apply in three different rooms.
The real-estate license regulates a deal, not a civic appointment. K.S.A. 58-3062 says a licensee who is buying, selling, or leasing must tell the other side about his own interest in the property. The brokerage act says he must keep a client’s confidential information confidential and put that client ahead of himself. Those duties attach when he is acting as someone’s broker. They do not say he must refuse a seat on GO Topeka. They do not say he must leave the room every time a prospect is named. If he later lists or buys a property he first heard about in that room, the license rule that matters is disclosure of his own interest in that deal.
A city board is stricter. Topeka Municipal Code 2.225.070 says a Planning Commission member with any interest in a matter, money or otherwise, is disqualified from discussing it and voting on it. Failure to step aside is grounds for removal. That ordinance is written for the Planning Commission. It is not written for GO Topeka.
GO Topeka is a private corporation. Its bylaws allow any adult with a business in Shawnee County to be a director. They do not reserve the seats for people who do not sell real estate. If the corporation then does business with a director’s own company, K.S.A. 17-6304 says the contract is not automatically void. It can stand if the interest is disclosed and the directors who do not have that interest approve it in good faith, or if the deal is fair to the corporation. Attorney General Opinion 1989-044 says that statute does not erase the duty of loyalty. A director may not take an opportunity that belongs to the corporation and use it for himself at the corporation’s expense. That duty runs to GO Topeka. It does not run to the broker down the street, and it does not run to the taxpayer.
The public-officer rule binds the elected officials. K.S.A. 75-4304 says a local governmental officer shall not make or participate in a contract with a business in which that officer has a substantial interest, unless the officer abstains. Owning a brokerage is a substantial interest. A mayor, a council member, or a commissioner who voted a contract that paid his own firm would be inside that statute. A private director of GO Topeka is not, by that seat alone, a local governmental officer.
Nothing in those rules says a sales volume is illegal. Nothing in them gives every other broker a right to the same prospect list. The inside track is a public question first. It becomes a legal question when a specific deal appears: a listing, a purchase, or a GO Topeka contract with the director’s firm, done without disclosure and without the disinterested directors signing off.
If the pipeline is public information, publish it when the directors hear it. If it is not public, a working broker should say so, and should say whether he steps out when a name in that room could become a listing. That is a yes-or-no question. Volume is not an answer. Recusal is.
Henry McClure
Topeka
October 2, 2026