The Omaha City Council’s Feb. 6 meeting started like any other. Then, barely five minutes in, it turned tense with three words: “Thank you, smartass.”
Councilwoman Juanita Johnson said she was “in line” with the comment because City Planning Director Dave Fanslau had spoken to her in a disrespectful tone.
Fanslau rose from his seat behind the council, murmured “Good luck” to his colleagues and left the chamber.
The interaction set off an exchange of strongly worded letters that represents the most public blowout in a years-long dispute between Omaha’s mayor and North Omaha’s councilwoman – a dispute that some North Omaha advocates worry is inhibiting progress in their historically underserved part of town.
On Feb. 9, Mayor Jean Stothert wrote that, because of Johnson’s unacceptable behavior, staff other than department directors would be excused from closed-door committee meetings with council members.
Days later, Johnson sent a note to city department directors asserting that she, the council’s only Black member, receives unequal treatment compared to her colleagues.
The absence of some city employees from certain meetings will have little functional impact, said Council President Pete Festersen. But some council members worry any further barriers placed between staffers and the council would pose bigger problems.
The public fracas follows clashes between Stothert and Johnson on issues ranging from the proposed streetcar to the mayor’s political appointments.
Their offices sit just a floor apart in City Hall, but the pair seldom meet face to face. Johnson is the only council member who doesn’t have regular private meetings with Stothert.
Community leaders in North Omaha – constituents of both Stothert and Johnson – hold varying perspectives on the causes of the feud.
Several say the mayor is perpetuating a longstanding trend of Omaha’s predominately white power center excluding the city’s Black community.
Two – including the incumbent North Omaha councilman who Johnson defeated – say Johnson’s brash style and antagonistic approach to politics is mostly to blame for the unnecessary conflicts with Stothert and city staff.
Others think both officials are letting a petty interpersonal rivalry get in the way of their jobs.
But nearly all of the half dozen community leaders who spoke with the Flatwater Free Press agreed on one point: The infighting doesn’t serve North Omaha.
The City Hall discord pulls focus away from the policies and developments that neighborhoods a few miles north of City Hall need to thrive, said Dorothy Johnson, a North Omaha native and businesswoman who is not related to the council member.
“We have so much power in Omaha, and it’s wasted on personal vendettas that will never drive the community work forward,” she said.
A contentious relationship
The heated interactions between Stothert and Johnson began years before the latter ascended to elected office in 2021, Stothert told the Flatwater Free Press.
The Republican mayor recalled a 2016 town hall meeting in North Omaha where Johnson, then heading up her local neighborhood association, “came busting up to me, yelling at me about something.”
“I remember I told her … ‘use your inside voice,’ like you might say at a grade school,” Stothert said in an interview.
Johnson declined to be interviewed for this story. During a short phone conversation, the Democratic councilwoman said the news media have promoted “a one-sided narrative” and that it wasn’t worth her energy to comment further.
The first major political dust-up between the two came when Stothert tried to appoint Ben Gray to the Municipal Land Bank board a few months after Johnson unseated the longtime councilman.
Johnson protested the appointment, noting that Stothert didn’t consult her before nominating her one-time opponent for the position.
After the City Council sank Gray’s nomination, Stothert released a statement saying that appointments “should never be influenced by personal grudges.”
Johnson has frequently cast dissenting votes on projects supported by the mayor, including the proposed streetcar and the relocation of the downtown library.
The two officials occasionally met in private after Johnson joined the council, but the get-togethers stopped after a particularly acrimonious May 2022 meeting, the mayor said. (Johnson is invited to private briefings where other council members are present, Stothert said.)
Emails obtained by Flatwater revealed growing tensions between Stothert and Johnson in the weeks leading up to the recent public flare-up.
In a January note to the mayor, Council Chief of Staff Jim Dowding wrote that Johnson “asked me to convey her disappointment” about not being briefed on the announcement of two major grants affecting North Omaha.
Two days after her Feb. 6 exchange with Fanslau, Johnson asked Stothert to discipline the planning director for insubordination. (The mayor’s office redacted most of the email, saying it featured personal information about an employee, but a spokeswoman confirmed Johnson requested discipline for Fanslau via email.)
Stothert sent the letter to the council condemning Johnson’s behavior a day later.
Despite ample evidence of an ongoing beef, Stothert denied that her rocky relationship with Johnson influenced her decision to rebuke the councilwoman.
“This has everything to do with her treatment of city employees and city staff and city directors,” Stothert said, noting several other previous occasions when Johnson tangled with employees of the city’s legal team and parks department.
“The letter was to protect city employees from this abusive treatment, and I felt like the (fewer) that were present, the less chance she has to act out,” Stothert said.
It’s Festersen’s responsibility as council president to maintain decorum when discussion becomes hostile, she said.
Festersen said he’s worked hard to maintain civility at City Hall, adding that “it’s important that we rise above any personal or political differences and stay focused on the work of people.” He said it would be good if Stothert and Johnson could meet privately to discuss their issues.
Sherman Wells, a North Omaha community activist, says the core of the problem isn’t North Omaha’s councilwoman or the council president – it’s the mayor.
Stothert’s attempt to limit Johnson’s access to city employees is “just another form of suppression,” Wells said.
Thomas Warren, the mayor’s chief of staff, points the finger in the opposite direction, saying that since Johnson won a seat on the council she hasn’t made an effort to establish a relationship built on trust and mutual respect with Stothert’s administration.
“From the very beginning, it was almost as if it was adversarial,” he said.
It’s difficult to see an end to the conflict between Stothert and Johnson.
Stothert said it’s not her job to address Johnson’s inappropriate behavior behind closed doors. When asked if she would meet privately with the councilwoman, Stothert said she would “in the presence of someone else.”
‘Who’s going to hold them accountable?’
To one of Johnson’s constituents, an interaction the mayor’s office cites as illustrative of Johnson’s inappropriate behavior looks more like the councilwoman sticking up for her district.
At the Jan. 23 council meeting, Johnson repeatedly prodded Deputy City Attorney Ryan Wiesen to answer a question about a program designed to prioritize small businesses based in low-income areas for city contracts.
Wiesen said he wouldn’t respond in a public forum since it could compromise the city’s position in a pending lawsuit but offered to meet with Johnson in private.
To Stothert, the councilwoman’s line of questioning delayed a meeting and obstructed the work of city government.
But Rodney Johnson thinks his councilwoman was just trying to get answers for him.
Rodney Johnson, no relation to the councilwoman, originally posed the question Wiesen wouldn’t address. The janitorial company owner is suing the city, alleging that it failed to properly consider his North Omaha-based business when awarding a city contract.
The mayor is now punishing the city’s only Black councilwoman by restricting her ability to represent her community, he said.
Since arriving on the council, Johnson has faced microaggressive disrespect from city colleagues that Black people in America experience constantly, said Wells, the community advocate.
The interaction with Fanslau epitomizes that point in Wells’ mind. The news clips that captured the exchange left out the lead-up in which Johnson asked a question that Fanslau appeared to ignore, Wells said.
Johnson refused to put up with the degrading treatment, so Stothert decided to make an example of her, Wells said.
By politicizing Johnson’s contentions with city staff, the mayor created a divisive image for Omahans, Wells said. Many white residents might see Johnson as an “angry Black woman” yelling at staffers, while many in the Black community might see Stothert as “a racist white woman” trying to put down their elected leader, he said.
As mayor, Stothert is “supposed to be developing relationships and bringing community together, not severing it,” Wells said.
Stothert said her handling of Johnson’s behavior has nothing to do with the councilwoman’s race, noting that she has hired a diverse staff and worked to make city government more inclusive.
Gray, the former councilman who has long had an oppositional relationship with Johnson, said the idea that Stothert came down harshly on Johnson because of her race is “nonsense.”
“People run to that (race) when they have nothing else that they can point to,” Gray said.
Gray said he and the mayor had a productive working relationship and often met several times a month to talk politics. The two didn’t always agree, but their collaboration helped to establish the Municipal Land Bank, a North Omaha jobs center and other progress, he said.
Johnson is part of a wave of newly elected politicians that doesn’t understand how to be effective in government, Gray said.
It’s a mistake to view the Stothert-Johnson dispute just as a conflict between two politicians – it goes back much further, said A’Jamal Byndon, chairman of Movement in Omaha for Racial Equity.
White-dominated City Hall operates like a “segregated apartheid” system and has always mistreated the Black community and its leaders, he said.
For Cheryl Weston, the feud between Stothert and Johnson is not about race – it’s a case of two politicians serving their own egos rather than their constituents.
And North Omaha is the “biggest loser,” the local community advocate said.
The two leaders should be focusing on important issues affecting the area like economic development funding, conditions in low-income housing and a proposal for a large-scale business park, Weston said.
When asked whether her exchange with Johnson is impeding Omaha’s progress, Stothert pointed to a handful of recent downtown development projects, including the Kiewit Luminarium and the Steelhouse music venue, as evidence that the city is moving forward under her administration.
(A spokesperson later supplied a list of projects completed or underway in North Omaha, including a Habitat for Humanity housing development and the revitalization of the former Spencer Homes neighborhood.)
Dorothy Johnson, the businesswoman, said there’s a disconnect between the mayor’s priorities and the wellbeing of North Omaha that predated Councilwoman Johnson’s tenure.
“I think downtown is beautiful … but I haven’t seen that kind of investment into North Omaha,” Dorothy Johnson said.
Stothert should provide extra support to Johnson given her community’s historic lack of resources, she said.
To refocus the agenda on moving North Omaha forward, someone needs to bring Stothert and Councilwoman Johnson to the table for reconciliation, Dorothy Johnson said.
“It’s unprofessional no matter how you slice it,” she said. “There’s a certain standard of behavior that must be upheld, and who’s going to hold them accountable to it?”
