One of Joplin’s longest-serving members of the City Council and city boards, Phil Stinnett, is going to have more free time now that he did not seek reelection to a sixth council term.
In all, Stinnett served 33 years on behalf of Joplin residents. Twenty of the past 26 years were spent on City Council and another 13 years as a volunteer on city boards, including the Building Board of Appeals, and overlapping years of service on the Joplin Redevelopment Corp. and as chairman of the Joplin Tornado First Response Board.
More than $800,000 in donations were made to the city of Joplin after the 2011 tornado, and that money was distributed by the First Response Board to local nonprofit agencies that submitted grant requests to obtain funding to assist victims of the deadly storm.
The record for the most year spent on the council by an individual belongs to Donald E. Clark, who served 36 years with five of those years as mayor. Current council member Gary Shaw has 22 years of service, according to records of the Joplin city clerk.
Stinnett joined the council in 1998 after he became interested as the result of serving on the city’s Building Board of Appeals in 1988.
“Apparently I did decent because they left me there for 10 years. It was while serving on that board that my interest got piqued about the city,” he said.
One of the people on the board was Jan Tupper, who then was an engineer with Allgeier Martin and Associates Inc. He and Stinnett’s longtime friend, Richard Russell, encouraged him to seek a council seat. “So I said, ‘Why not? Let’s give it a whirl.’”
Family connection
As it turned out, it was beneficial for him personally because it brought him new details about his family history in Joplin.
On his mother’s side of the family, his great-grandfather was Adam Scott, who engaged in mining lead and zinc after he came to Joplin in the late 1890s. He at one time served as superintendent of the Tennessee Mining Co. He built a Queen Anne-style house at 202 S. Sergeant Ave., called the Adam Scott house, that is within the Murphysburg Historic District.
No stranger to politics, Scott had been the mayor of Wellston, Ohio, before he came to Joplin and was a friend and supporter of President William McKinley.
“I knew about him, but I didn’t know about the house until I got on council,” Stinnett said.
Another relative he learned of owned the first shoe store on Main Street.
“The more I got into it, the more I found out my family had a lot more ties to Joplin than I knew that they had,” Stinnett said.
His early years on the council were served with “a really good group of leading citizens on the council,” Stinnett said. They included Earl Carr, Dr. Donald Clark and Dr. Floyd Belk as well as Jack Belden and Darieus Adams.
Clark, Stinnett said, “was a fixture” in the community. The city’s public safety building at 303 E. Third St. was named after him. Clark had a Joplin city flag designed, and that design is still in use today.
Of the others with whom Stinnett served in his early years, Carr was regarded as the “backbone” of the Jasper/Newton County Superfund Citizens’ Task Force to facilitate lead remediation in the Joplin area. Belk, in addition to his council service, was a leader of efforts for Missouri Southern State University and an interim president of the college in the late 1970s.
“They were excellent mentors for me,” Stinnett said.
Lesson learned
Stinnett developed a practice of asking questions until he was satisfied with the information he obtained about proposals that went to the council. That habit came as a lesson learned early in his council career.
“The very first thing that happened, in fact it was already ongoing” when Stinnett was elected to the council, “was that the city suffered a significant financial loss in the derivatives market. And the council was in the process of trying to recover some of that money through its auditing firm.” That was the biggest problem the council had during Stinnett’s early years, the 1990s.
Losses in what had been popular derivative investments were sustained by many companies and government investors in the 1990s when the market turned out to be more volatile than expected. The city lost $7 million on a $22 million investment, and the city’s finance director at the time resigned. The particular derivatives that city money went into were described later by the investments industry as the “worst of the worst.” Those derivatives performed so poorly because they were principal-only investments in the mortgage market that paid only if borrowers prepaid their mortgages.
The council sought repayment from the city’s auditing firm at the time.
“The claim was that the auditing firm should have made the city aware about the riskiness of the derivatives,” Stinnett said. “And obviously the auditing firm thought that was outside their area of responsibility. There was a lawsuit ongoing, and there were many, many meetings where a proposal would be offered and council would make an offer back.”
The city did recover some of the money, Stinnett said. The Globe reported then that a $3.5 million settlement was agreed upon after months of wrangling.
“But for those of us who were new, the question was asked of other council members, ‘How did you get to this point?’” He said Clark told him, “I think some of us felt like this was too good to be true, but there are no red flags. Nobody is raising a red flag” about the investments. “To a person they all indicated, ‘We should have asked more questions.’ and that became my operating plan.”
Stinnett served three terms from 1998 until 2010, including a term as mayor. He then did not run for reelection, partly because of health reasons. He did agree to an appointment in 2013 to the Joplin Redevelopment Corp., which is the board that bought properties for resale and redevelopment after the 2011 tornado.
But he couldn’t stay away. Stinnett ran again for council in 2016 and just finished his second four-year term when he did not seek reelection in the April 2 election.
Mayor Keenan Cortez, who has been on the council with Stinnett, said he considers Stinnett “very astute” on city matters and “and very dedicated to the citizens of Joplin. He has a heart of gold when it comes to the citizens and the city staff,” and did not want any fanfare about his retirement from the council.
Although he may not have always agreed with Stinnett on some city questions, “I always listened to him,” Cortez said, adding that Stinnett sometimes presented points about a subject “that I hadn’t thought of. He served his community very well. He’s definitely earned his retirement.”
