photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Douglas County district attorney candidates Dakota Loomis, left, a Democrat, and Mike Warner, a Republican, participate in a forum Monday, Sept. 30, 2024, at the Lawrence Public Library.

The topic of experience dominated Monday’s district attorney candidate forum, with Republican Mike Warner touting his three decades as a prosecutor and Democrat Dakota Loomis emphasizing his longtime familiarity with and connections to the local legal system.

The two candidates, vying to replace embattled one-term DA Suzanne Valdez, met for the second time in a week, this time at a forum hosted by the Douglas County Chapter of Women for Kansas at the Lawrence Public Library.

Among Women for Kansas’ missions are electing moderates to office and keeping the court system free from political influence — two goals that the candidates seemed to embrace Monday. Loomis and Warner both stated that they had no political aspirations beyond running for DA and were primarily interested in “rebuilding” a badly damaged office — Warner specifically mentioned the pending disciplinary case against Valdez for professional misconduct, and both mentioned Valdez’s strained relationship with police — rather than promoting a political agenda.

“This is completely an apolitical position for me,” Loomis said. “My only reason for running is to make this community safer.”

Warner assured the crowd that he didn’t want “to get caught up in goofy politics” like culture war issues. When moderator Tai Edwards, who’s on the executive leadership team for Women for Kansas, asked Warner about his Republican ties, he noted that he had been a registered Independent until recently, and he jokingly pretended to have never heard of Kris Kobach, Kansas’ ultra-conservative attorney general. He said too that he was getting no financial support from the state GOP.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

The audience applauds Douglas County district attorney candidates Dakota Loomis, a Democrat, and Mike Warner, a Republican, at a forum Monday, Sept. 30, 2024, at the Lawrence Public Library.

Edwards quizzed the candidates about how their experience would be important to running the DA’s Office.

Warner touted his “tremendous amount of experience” — about 30 years as a prosecutor on the state and federal level — and tried to paint his opponent as a novice in the field, saying Loomis had no experience prosecuting felony cases.

“It’s not a job that you can learn on the fly, like we just saw,” he said, referring to Valdez’s lack of prosecutorial experience and trying to draw a parallel.

Loomis, a lifelong Douglas County resident, countered that he had worked in other capacities besides felony prosecutions in state offices, including in the Shawnee County District Attorney’s Office and as the current Baldwin City prosecutor. Moreover, he said, he has worked as a defense attorney in Douglas County for 10 years, where he has handled “500 felony cases” and “another 300-400 misdemeanor cases” and has built up strong relationships with others in the legal system, including local judges, attorneys, law enforcement and community partners like Bert Nash and DCCCA.

To dispel the notion that he lacks familiarity with the local legal community, Warner said he has lived in the county for 35 years and has tried cases here as a defense attorney. He also rattled off a long list of connections he has with local judges, attorneys and Police Chief Rich Lockhart, whom he knows from when they both worked in Kansas City.

Both men have claimed that law enforcement officials, soured on their experience with Valdez, personally asked them to run.

Warner even joked that “maybe law enforcement encouraged every attorney to run.”

While they spoke bluntly about “dysfunction” in the DA’s Office, Warner said he believed that Valdez had started with good intentions, had tried to enact a “progressive” agenda, but had “failed miserably,” while Loomis appeared to look sympathetically on those under Valdez’s supervision, saying they were committed to ensuring as smooth a transition as possible.

Apart from rebuilding the DA’s Office, Warner said that he was particularly motivated to run because it’s been 20 years since the whole county got to have a say in who would be DA. Valdez won the primary against longtime DA Charles Branson in 2020 with 7,500 votes. No Republican ran that year.

“If I had not run, Mr. Loomis, who has never prosecuted a felony case, would be the DA,” he said. “I’m running to offer the county a complete vote. I’m giving voters a choice.”

Loomis won the August Democratic primary with around 6,700 votes; voter turnout was under 20%.

Both men emphasized the need for the DA to have a strong relationship with police, including working closely with them to build strong cases that prosecutors could correctly charge and then prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

And both men said it was critical to office stability that assistant DAs be properly trained and retained. On that point, Warner sought to draw a big distinction between himself and Loomis.

“Prosecutors want to work for a prosecutor,” he said, “not an administrator.”

He said he would be the “old hand” in the office and could train up young attorneys to be career prosecutors.

Loomis, for his part, said the office was so unstable at the moment that putting its many moving parts in running order was the highest priority and that his familiarity with the local system, including the dozens of staff in the DA’s Office, would let him “hit the ground running” on Day One.

Edwards hit both candidates with questions they perhaps weren’t expecting. She asked Loomis about being fired 10 years ago as director of communications for the Kansas Democratic Party over degrading comments he made about southeast Kansas on an online forum where the topic was “most craphole small towns” in the state.

Loomis said that he took responsibility for the comment — he had nominated Cherryvale, Columbus and Galena as the “most craphole” — and had grown from the experience.

“It was a painful but important lesson for me,” he said, about treating people with respect and understanding that “words matter.”

Edwards asked Warner about comments he has made on social media, despite avowing that he is not into the politics of the race, regarding citizens being fed up with high taxes. Why is tax policy relevant to being DA? Edwards asked.

Warner replied that the DA’s budget is one of the highest in the entire county budget and that, party aside, there’s a “fiduciary element” to being DA. When there’s a disciplinary complaint against the DA or when there’s high turnover or incompetence in the office, “Who do you think pays for that?” he said.

For those who weren’t able to make Monday’s forum, Women for Kansas recorded it and expected to post it to their YouTube channel soon. Additionally, the two candidates are scheduled to face off at another forum at 3 p.m. on Oct. 6 at the Lawrence Public Library, hosted by the Lawrence branch of the NAACP and the League of Women Voters of Lawrence-Douglas County.

The general election is Nov. 5. The deadline to register to vote is Oct. 15, and early voting begins Oct. 16.