Grievances generated by policy and personality clashes in a southeast Kansas community have spilled onto the statewide stage in the battle over Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly?s nominee to head the state Department of Commerce.
David Toland often found himself at odds with Virginia Crossland-Macha when he was the CEO of Thrive Allen County, a community health-improvement and economic development organization based in Iola.
Crossland-Macha is the daughter of the late Ivan Crossland, founder of Crossland Construction, one of the nation?s largest general contractors. She is also the newly elected vice-chair of the Kansas Republican Party and she?s been working behind the scenes to scuttle Toland?s nomination.
The intensity of the battle has rattled many in the town of approximately 6,000, said John McRae, a former mayor and current president of Iola Industries, a business development group.
?They?re kind of stunned that Virginia is leading the charge against the hometown boy who has done so much and so well,? McRae said.
They?re also stunned, McRae said, that abortion has now become an issue in the confirmation fight that was already complicated by Toland?s flippant jibes at prominent Republicans.
On Monday, Kansans for Life, the state?s most powerful anti-abortion organization, charged in a letter to senators that Toland was unfit for the commerce post because of his ?ties? to the late Wichita abortion provider George Tiller.
?It is unconscionable that anyone wishing to sit in the governor?s Cabinet would be part of honoring the legacy of an individual who took so many innocent lives,? KFL said in the letter.
The connection consists of two small grants Thrive Allen County obtained from a memorial fund established after Tiller?s murder in 2009. Neither paid for abortion services.
The first, a $9,380 award received in 2015, went mainly to fund a campaign to reduce the smoking rate among pregnant women in Allen County. The grant application pegged that rate at the time at ?an astounding 26.1 percent.?
The second was a $10,000 grant awarded in 2018 that Thrive immediately transferred to the SEK Multi-County Health Department based in Iola.
?It arrived one day and exited the next,? said Lisse Regehr, Thrive?s incoming CEO.
The money funded a health department program to curb the incidence of premature and low-birth-weight babies.
She said that using those grants to the organization to connect Toland to abortion politics shows that Crossland-Macha and Republican legislative leaders are ?desperate? to ?take him down.?
?It?s a personal vendetta,? she said. ?It?s despicable.?
