Columns

WICHITA MATTERS: The New Council, Part 2

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What a City Council Majority in a Mid-Sized City Can Do

Read Part 1 HERE

Last week I wrote in a political-sciencey vein about the significance and implications (mostly positive, I think, but also partly negative) of the new Democratic majority which the very–if not officially–partisan city elections of 2021 gave Wichita. This week I want to throw out some ideas regarding what that city council majority could and, I think, should do. I write this fully aware that the limits upon their possible actions, even beyond whatever disagreements may derail their supposedly shared partisan priorities, are pretty significant. Leaving aside the restrictions regularly placed upon the cities of Kansas by our state’s officially affirmed but only rarely enforced principle of “Home Rule”, there is also the fact that under Wichita’s council-manager system (as opposed to the strong-mayor system which most of our peer cities have embraced), the ability to research new concerns, respond to citizen complaints, or act in a genuinely representative capacity towards the constituents in their districts is constrained by the simple fact that it is the city manager, and the staff which works for him, that handles the essential details of the city’s budget, the implementation rules for city policies, and the specific direction of city resources. This means the council can propose, debate, table, ratify, or oppose, but not, in any truly active sense, govern.

Columns

WICHITA MATTERS: The New Council, Part 1

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The Potential of, and the Problems with, Wichita’s (More) Partisan Future

There’s been a lot of talk about the “new Democratic majority” on the city council that officially took power on Monday night. WSU professor Chase Billingham, in particular, observed last August what the consequences of the November elections might mean should they go the way Mayor Whipple wanted them to (which they did). In a long Facebook post on Monday, Billingham considered a relatively small-stakes fight during last week’s council agenda review meeting in ways that makes his observations from last year seem pretty prescient: namely, that with three–presumably reliable–Democratic votes on the council, Mayor Whipple appears both capable and willing to pursue agenda items that he previously knew he wouldn’t have the votes to push forward. And he wants the Republicans on the council–who have long enjoyed an unstated and basically uncontested majority on the council but are now in the minority–to know it. So is the business of the city council, or the way it conducts business, about to radically change, and if so, how should the people of Wichita feel about that?