Banned from son’s football games, Kansas father gets settlement for free speech retaliation

[Pelican Press 0]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Banned from son’s football games, Kansas father gets settlement for free speech retaliation

Tim Clark, who threatened to sue the small western Kansas town of Quinter for free speech violations after he was banned from his son’s sporting events, sits for a Dec. 12, 2024, interview for the Kansas Reflector podcast. (Photo by Anna Kaminski/Kansas Reflector)

TOPEKA — Conflict in a small Kansas town that began at youth football games became a nucleus for a threatened free speech lawsuit that prompted a $75,000 payout.

Over the course of about three years, Tim Clark, whose children attend school in the roughly 1,000-person city of Quinter in western Kansas, clashed with coaches, parents and city officials at his son’s football games. The single father, who doesn’t live in Quinter, expressed his frustrations in a 2022

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

post complaining about playing time and accusing coaches of favoritism.

Shortly after, city officials banned him for life from attending his son’s sporting events.

Clark recalled the experience during a Kansas Reflector podcast interview alongside his attorney, Max Kautsch.

In October 2022, then-city administrator Greg Thomas, Mayor Jeremy Blackwill and a Gove County sheriff’s deputy confronted Clark in a parking lot outside his son’s football practice. Clark, who was sitting with his young daughter at the time, recorded the incident on his phone — including Thomas calling Clark the “community’s problem.”

“It was overwhelming. It was disheartening,” Clark said during the podcast interview. “It was all the things you could possibly feel, and emotions I don’t think I’ve ever felt before, especially because these three men were standing behind me. One of them’s got a gun. You know, I’m unarmed with my daughter, and they’re threatening to arrest me.”

According to a prepared legal complaint alleging First Amendment retaliation, Clark “faced the prospect of arrest for attending Quinter Parks and Rec events.” The city rescinded the ban on Sept. 27 of this year, the draft complaint said, “but retaliation against Tim continues.” The parties settled the dispute in October for $75,000 before the complaint was filed in court.

The draft complaint named Blackwill, Thomas and the city’s recreation director, Daryl Havlas, as defendants.

Kautsch, who has written

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

for Kansas Reflector, underscored the labeling of Clark as the “community’s problem” throughout the draft complaint.

“It is not up to the government to label members of the community as a problem,” Kautsch said in a podcast interview. “That obviously shows bias. It shows that there is not a rational basis.”

But city officials didn’t fully accept the settlement agreement.

Mayor Blackwill said the city only paid a $1,500 deductible, and it was the city’s insurance company’s recommendation to offer a settlement “despite heavy protest from the city.”

“The city had no say in this decision,” he told Kansas Reflector in an email. “We still strongly oppose their decision and are currently evaluating our options with other carriers.”

Blackwill, who is also the assistant fire chief for the Quinter Fire Department, said all decisions before the settlement came directly from him.

“We consider this situation behind us,” he said.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

#Banned #sons #football #games #Kansas #father #settlement #free #speech #retaliation

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up