Maplewood Mayor Nikylan Knapper slipped out of her last city council meeting Tuesday night without any comment about her upset loss in last week’s municipal elections.
Knapper was easily defeated in the April 2 balloting, falling to former Mayor Barry Greenberg’s write-in campaign by an almost 2-to-1 margin.
Overall, Greenberg picked up 63% of the vote and had a winning margin of 419 votes out of 1,671 cast.
Along with avoiding questions Tuesday by using a side door of City Hall, Knapper also appears to have deactivated her campaign’s Facebook account and she did not respond to messages left Wednesday.
Greenberg will be sworn as mayor, for a second time, before the April 23 council meeting. After serving 14 years on the council, Greenberg was elected to the top spot in 2017, only to lose to Knapper in 2021.
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Greenberg attended Tuesday’s meeting but did not comment during the public forum portion of the proceedings.
After Tuesday’s meeting, Greenberg said he had no specific plan for making any widespread changes in the city administration.
“I need to reacclimate myself to the position†of mayor, he said.
Taking a look at last week’s voting in Maplewood, the numbers indicate that voters were clamoring for change more now than they were in 2021, when they elected Knapper over Greenberg.
Keeping in mind that only 261 more votes were cast in this mayoral election than in 2021, Greenberg garnered 1,045 votes — almost 500 more tallies than the 588 he received in 2021.
On the other hand, Knapper pulled in 626 votes this time around, about 200 votes less than the 822 she earned three years ago.
Knapper’s three-year run as mayor, the first for an African American in the solidly progressive suburb of about 8,200, took a negative turn shortly after she took office.
Several council members who publicly supported Knapper against Greenberg in 2021, Jenny Schmidt and Sarah Crosley, quickly cooled in their support.
In December, both told the Post-Dispatch that they became disillusioned with Knapper after she failed to keep her promises about improving transparency and community involvement.
The dissatisfaction that Knapper had created among former supporters was even more evident during this recent campaign.
Former council member Sandi Phillips, a quiet Knapper supporter in 2021, and Jon-Erik Hanson, Knapper’s first treasurer, both turned up as key leaders in Greenberg’s successful write-in effort.
The ebbing support for Knapper became more publicly evident last fall, when her increasingly contentious relationship with city manager Michael Reese led to him abruptly resigning in September.
The city eventually agreed to pay Reese about $165,000 to get him to leave quietly, a settlement amount that city officials seemed reluctant to disclose until news organizations filed public information requests.
But further stirring up civic ire was what came closely on the heels of Reese’s departure.
Knapper and her allies, five of the six city council members, conducted a behind-closed-doors search for a new city manager.
The job opening was not posted in any professional publication and no employee search firm was used. The field of candidates included only two people — with one candidate being Amber Withycombe, a close friend and political ally of Knapper.
As the hiring process continued in early December, former Knapper supporter Crosley aimed some criticism at Maplewood council members.
“Everyone on the council needs to decide when they’re tired of saying ‘yes’ to (Knapper),†she said. “They have some soul-searching to do.â€
But later in December, Knapper’s five council allies voted in favor of hiring Withycombe as Reese’s replacement and paying her $157,000 a year.
Only one council member, Chasity Mattox, voted against Withycombe’s hiring.
Prior to being hired in late December, Withycombe had no prior experience in city management and does not have a college degree in public administration.
Withycombe’s husband, Josh Kryah, also had served as Knapper’s treasurer and was appointed by the mayor to several city boards.
Both Knapper and Withycombe served on the board of the Maplewood Richmond Heights School District and also were involved with the ill-fated campaign of council member Shana Jones.
Jones, praised by local media for her pandemic relief work in 2020, resigned from the council in 2022 after only five months when her past felony convictions on fraud and forgery charges began circulating in Maplewood.
When pressed for a specific response about Withycombe’s position with the city, Greenberg adopted a wait-and-see approach.
“I haven’t worked with Amber before, so I need to figure out what her strengths and weaknesses are before I make any decisions,†he said.
In the weeks before this past election, Knapper’s campaign showed signs of losing traction.
She declined to respond to a request by the League of Women Voters to debate Greenberg, and her campaign was two weeks late in filing a report that should have been submitted in February with the Missouri Ethics Commission.
The last campaign reports filed with the state show that Knapper eventually passed Greenberg in fundraising, taking in $8,156, compared to Greenberg’s $6,423.
Helping Knapper pass Greenberg was a single $3,000 donation made two weeks before the election by Bruce Tarkington, a retired Brentwood, Tennessee lawyer. Tarkington also contributed $7,000 to Knapper’s 2021 campaign that raised about $13,000.
And while Knapper lost her office, she is not the only person whose political clout took a hit in last week’s balloting. ºüÀêÊÓƵ County Councilwoman Lisa Clancy, D-Maplewood, a supporter of Knapper, also came up on the short end of the ballot stick.
Not only did voters oust Knapper, but two incumbent Maplewood Richmond Heights school board members who ran with Clancy and Knapper’s support — Julie Francois and Rachel Goltzman — also were defeated at the polls.
One of the winners in that school board race was the aforementioned Jenny Schmidt, the former Knapper supporter-turned-detractor.