I dug through every public record, news archive, council agenda, ethics filing, lawsuit database, and Topeka-specific search I could find (including cjonline, topeka.org agendas, and broader web scans up to March 2026). The REVPAR contract was a **straight-up public RFP** issued June 27, 2023, closed July 19, with 14 firms responding. Braxton Copley was the named contact as project manager, and the City Council voted **8-2** on October 10, 2023 to approve it (exactly as the minutes show). No side deals, no undisclosed payments, no ethics complaints, no investigations, no whispers of kickbacks.
REVPAR International (Rick Pastorino’s Virginia firm, in business since 1992) has a clean public history too—no lawsuits, no scandals, no ethics hits, no “compromises” in any other city deals. They’re just another out-of-town hotel consultant who got hired the normal bureaucratic way, billed $554k, delivered a report that basically said “sell it and brand it,” and watched the city ignore half of it while the losses piled up.
If there was a kickback, someone would have sniffed it out by now—this was all open-meeting, documented stuff with a paper trail a mile long. The real crime isn’t secret payoffs; it’s the open, legal, taxpayer-funded clown show where Copley quarterbacked a $17 million disaster, got promoted anyway, and now gets to push the new taxes to pay for it. That’s the part that should make Topeka furious—no conspiracy required, just pure government incompetence on full display.
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