He admitted ethics violations.

 Harry “Butch” Felker was the Topeka mayor people liked, and the one whose campaign-money case ended the strong-mayor system.

He was born Harry L. Felker III on September 13, 1945, in Wichita, the son of Harry L. Felker II and Virginia Lee Tandy. The family settled in Topeka. He graduated from Topeka West High School in 1963, then from Washburn University in 1967 with a degree in political science. He spent 17 months in the Naval Reserve in 1967–68 with a Navy advisory group in Korea, stayed in the reserves until 1972, and earned a law degree from Washburn that same year. His first civilian job was at the Kansas Revisor of Statutes office, the shop that drafts the bills legislators vote on. He had grown up around that world. His father was a Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent in the years before civil service, and Felker later said the family sat in front of the television every other November to see if Dad still had a job. Politics was not a later hobby. It was the house he grew up in.

Topeka in those years did not have a city manager. It had a commission. Five elected officials ran the city and the departments. Felker never particularly wanted the mayor’s chair under that system. In 1975 he ran for parks and recreation commissioner, won, and kept the job until 1985. He said the work fit him: athletics, gardening, and a law degree. In 1985 voters threw out the commission and installed a strong mayor, a district council, and a hired administrator under the mayor. Felker did not like the first administration under the new charter. He went to work for the Chamber of Commerce and the Topeka Sizzlers, the old minor-league basketball team. About a year before the 1989 election, he and three others decided they could win it. They did. He served as mayor from 1989 to 1997, then stepped aside rather than seek a third term, citing his health. In the gap he ran the Topeka Youth Project.

In 2001 he came back, beat Joan Wagnon, and took the strong-mayor job again. By then the office was the real executive of the city. The mayor hired and fired department heads. The council passed the laws. A mayor who wanted to move could move without asking nine people first.

That power is what the scandal sat on.

In 2002 the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission opened a case on his 2001 campaign and charged him with six counts under the state campaign-finance law. The allegation was not a briefcase of cash from a contractor. It was a paper trail. Employees of the Topeka Convention and Visitors Bureau filed false travel-expense reports. The money then showed up as donations to Felker’s re-election campaign, and the sources were not properly documented. Prosecutors also said the reports hid cash gifts over the $100 limit, the cap that exists so a contribution can be traced to a name. In July 2003 he pleaded guilty to three ethics violations and was fined $7,500. Two other counts were dropped. No criminal case was filed.

Shawnee County District Attorney Robert Hecht then asked a court to remove him. The petition had three parts. One was the campaign report. One was an agreement paying former city administrative officer John Arnold about $113,000 over eight months after Arnold resigned in February 2002, never taken to the council. One was an August 2001 power of attorney letting Betty Simecka, of a group called Cultural Exhibitors and Events, contract with the Kremlin museum in Moscow for a Russian-artifacts show, plus a $5,000 city credit-card charge to that museum in January 2002, also without the council.

On October 17, 2003, District Judge Eric Rosen suspended Felker while the case was pending. Rosen kept the campaign-finance cloud. He wrote that the question was whether the city could be governed by a person under “a cloud of credible suspicion of criminal violations involving moral turpitude.” He threw out the Arnold payments and the museum deal. His reason is the part that still matters: Felker was acting inside the power the strong-mayor charter gave him, and he had not enriched himself. The trial was set for November 17. Felker resigned on November 6. He said he could not afford the defense. Deputy Mayor Duane Pomeroy became acting mayor. The council later picked James McClinton to finish the term.

People who had known him for years did not pretend he was a stranger. Wagnon, who had lost to him and sat in on some of the hearings, said later that everybody liked Butch, he broke the law, and he paid a big price, and that the town felt bad about it. He was also the third local official in a short stretch to leave under an ouster cloud, after Sheriff Dave Meneley in 2000 and county treasurer Rita Cline in 2003.

The city did not stop at replacing the man. Council members Betty Dunn and Lisa Stubbs used the resignation as the opening to put the form of government on the ballot. On July 20, 2004, the council voted 6–3 for Charter Ordinance 94. McClinton was in the room and was told he could not vote. On November 2, 2004, the same day as the presidential election, Topeka voters approved a council-manager charter by about 66 percent to 34 percent. They had rejected a city manager in 1929, 1952, 1962, 1964, and 1969. The Felker year is what flipped them. Starting in April 2005, an appointed manager hired the department heads. The mayor kept the title, the gavel, and a thinner set of powers. McClinton did not run for a full term. He said future mayors would basically cut ribbons and shake hands.

Felker left City Hall and went to work for the Heartland Park Foundation until illness stopped him in 2004. He died of cancer on January 3, 2008, at Midland Hospice House. He was 62. He had married Paula Felker and adopted three foster children, Tammy, Joshua, and Joe. That marriage ended. On September 30, 2000, he married Bette W. Martin, who survived him. A memorial service was held at Grace Episcopal Cathedral.

The fair reading is not that he stole the city treasury. He admitted ethics violations. The money path was false expense reports into a campaign, with the donors not properly named. A judge said the other deals Hecht complained about were legal under the charter Felker was elected to use. Voters then decided the charter was the problem. Twenty years later Topeka still lives with that decision: a manager who answers to the council, and a mayor the public still treats as the person in charge.