Federal transportation funds in the Topeka–Shawnee County area, and what MTPO compliance actually buys

The Metropolitan Topeka Planning Organization does not receive a block grant because it is certified. Certification is the gate. A road or transit project in this planning area cannot take federal highway or transit money unless it sits in a plan the MTPO has constrained and self-certified.

What the federal law requires

Two statutes impose the same duty. Highway planning is 23 U.S.C. § 134. Transit planning is 49 U.S.C. § 5303. An urbanized area of more than 50,000 people must have a designated metropolitan planning organization. Topeka crossed that line long ago. The designation agreement that named the Metropolitan Topeka Planning Organization was executed March 3, 2004, by the City of Topeka, the Kansas Department of Transportation, and the Topeka Metropolitan Transit Authority. The policy board adopted its bylaws on June 3, 2004.

The required process is what planners call the 3-C: continuing, cooperative, and comprehensive. The MPO, the state, and the transit operator do it together. The products are a metropolitan transportation plan of at least twenty years, and a transportation improvement program, the TIP, covering at least four years. A project seeking federal highway money under Title 23, or federal transit money under Chapter 53 of Title 49, has to be in the approved TIP. The regulation that turns those statutes into a checklist is 23 C.F.R. Part 450, Subpart C.

The compliance paper is the self-certification in 23 C.F.R. § 450.336. At least every four years, when the TIP goes up with the statewide program, the state and the MPO certify that the process meets the planning statutes, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the transit nondiscrimination rule, the disadvantaged-business rule, equal-employment rules on federal-aid highway contracts, and the Americans with Disabilities Act together with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. The Federal Highway Administration and the Federal Transit Administration then find that the TIP matches the long-range plan. That finding rests on the self-certification.

The harder federal review, the one that can hold back up to 20 percent of an area’s highway and transit funds, applies to a Transportation Management Area, an urbanized area over 200,000. Topeka is under that line. It self-certifies. It does not get the four-year federal certification review that Kansas City and Wichita get.

What the certified program shows

The current compliance document is the MTPO Transportation Improvement Program for federal fiscal years 2026 through 2029. On page 90 the board self-certifies that the process meets 23 C.F.R. Part 450, including fiscal constraint. These figures are programmed amounts in the Topeka planning area. They are not cash already received.

2026: roads and bridges $22.8 million, transit $11.2 million 2027: roads and bridges $8.6 million 2028: roads and bridges $304.7 million 2029: roads and bridges $19.2 million Four-year total: roads and bridges $355.2 million, transit $11.2 million

Source: MTPO Transportation Improvement Program, FFY 2026–2029, funding summary. Figures rounded.

The 2028 figure is one project year, not a new annual allotment. Take it out and the other three years of federal road and bridge work run from about $9 million to $23 million. Transit is lumped in 2026 in the programmed table. The same TIP lists Topeka Metro’s ordinary FTA formula grants at $3.2 million a year, $12.8 million over the four years. Those are Section 5307 urban formula funds, matched by the city mill levy and fares.

Two other numbers in the same document keep the federal share from being read as the whole transportation budget. After operations and maintenance are taken off the top, the TIP shows about $498 million available for road and bridge projects over four years and about $12.6 million left for transit projects. Most of the road money is local sales tax and state highway funds, not a federal check to the city. The city’s own capital table inside the TIP shows a much smaller direct federal line, on the order of $0.6 million to $2.4 million a year, plus a $30 million competitive-grant assumption in 2026.

What compliance does, and does not, do

A normal year is a few million dollars in transit formula money and somewhere around $10 million to $20 million in federal road money programmed through the TIP. A year with a large KDOT project inside the planning area can show a few hundred million, because that project cannot be authorized unless it sits in this certified program. The self-certification is what lets FHWA and FTA act on those projects. It is not a separate appropriation, and it is not a finding that the money was well spent.

The local papers that show the duty are the March 3, 2004 designation agreement, the June 3, 2004 bylaws, each TIP, and the self-certification statement filed with that TIP. The bylaws already say the chair signs the self-certification after the policy board approves it.

Henry McClure MCRE, LLC 3625 SW 29th Street #100, Topeka, Kansas 66614 785-383-9994

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.