Feature Stories

Wichita’s Mayoral and City Council Elections: What Might Tuesday Teach Us?

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Elections are contests, but they’re also interpretive opportunities. In that spirit, here are some interpretations (along with some predictions) of my own. –Becky Tuttle will be re-elected to the Wichita City Council in District 2, Dalton Glasscock will be elected over his opponent Judy Pierce in District 4, and J.V. Johnston will be elected over his opponents Gary Bond and Ben Taylor in District 5. This means that, aside from the mayor’s race, the partisan leanings of the city council won’t change, at least not in any obvious way. Tuttle, the incumbent Republican candidate in District 2, will be re-elected; the Republican candidate to replace retiring Republican city council member Jeff Blubaugh in District for will be elected; and a Republican candidate to replace retiring Republican city council member Bryan Frye will be elected.

Columns

Practical Developers, Idealistic Planners, and Their Disagreements (Some of the Time)

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The tension between acting in accordance with one’s ethical or moral principles versus contenting oneself with pragmatic efficiency and “realism” is one of the oldest tensions in the whole history of philosophy. It’s an old and abiding tension in part because one can experience it everywhere. Here in Wichita, KS, I’ve lately been thinking about primarily in connection with an intersection a little over a mile from my house, where the major arterial streets Central and Ridge meet. (Allow me a digression here; I’ll get back to my main point presently.)

Central and Ridge, in west Wichita, on the southwest corner, looking northeast

North of Central and Ridge, on the west side of Ridge, looking south

It is not, by any possible stretch of the imagination, a pleasantly walkable intersection, nor a location of any kind of real artistic activity or civic engagement. It’s a stretch of two stroads, to use a Strong Towns term.

Columns

On Forums, Factions, Strikes, and Elections

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Monday night there was forum involving five of the candidates to be Wichita’s next mayor—though only three serious ones: former Wichita Councilmember Jared Cerullo, activist Celeste Racette, and the incumbent, Mayor Brandon Whipple. The forum was held at the SEIU Hall and organized by the Sedgwick County Grassroots Democrats, so it’s easy to imagine that as the reason why the other two serious candidates—Councilmember Bryan Frye, a longtime and well-connected Republican, and Lily Wu, a former television journalist and registered Libertarian—decided not to attend (though that didn’t stop Cerullo, also a Republican, from showing up). But considering how much controversy over partisanship there has already been on the Democratic side of the mayoral race so far (something that I think is partly being forced by the specific positioning of a couple of these candidates) perhaps it’s just as well that the debate on Democratic turf featured primarily those most tied up with that side of the aisle. I say “Democratic turf,” though of course a union hall isn’t necessarily Democratic party territory. But then again, who am I kidding?

Columns

Local Politics and the Development “Problem”

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I’ve become a major fan of the Kansas City-area architect and designer Kevin Klinkenberg’s “The Messy City” podcast. I don’t know Kevin—I met him once, briefly, at a Strong Towns gathering in Tulsa years ago, and I made use of the material he presented at that gathering a couple of times, but most of what I know about his work and ideas I’ve learned from listening to him over the past several months. His approach to thinking about land use, city design, and our built environment—all central concerns to anyone who lives in any kind of urban polity, and I would say especially a mid-sized one like Wichita—is not my own, and I appreciate the challenge that presents. His perspective on the sustainability or affordability of the places in which we live and move and play and work is profoundly practical; his defense of the local and the incremental is rigorously apolitical and empirical, with next to no engagement with the policies and theories (both political and sociological) which I would argue undergird the ways in which we even conceive and talk about the local and the incremental. Which is fine—I don’t think it’s imperative that everyone who cares about our places have critical takes on the urban growth machine or municipal democracy!

Columns

What Will the Mayor’s Race Be About?

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On Friday, Celeste Racette, the founder of Save Century II and a woman who has made herself a constant presence at City Hall over the past few years–especially when anything related to Wichita’s finances or policy decisions that implicate the ethics of those on our city council are being discussed–declared that she would run for mayor. The tagline on her website? “I’ll Restore Your Trust in City Government.” Her focus, clearly, is on issues of financial oversight and ethical integrity–both of which she says she had hoped to see improve under Mayor Brandon Whipple, whom she supported when he ran in 2019, but neither of which she thinks has. The interesting thing is that in making this argument, Racette is putting herself in the same shoes Whipple once wore, since “transparency” was his central argument against the incumbent mayor, Jeff Longwell. Whipple’s accusation then (as you can see on his old website) was that City Hall under the Longwell administration had become “a place of insider deals made behind closed doors,” while Racette’s accusation today is that City Hall has lost the trust of Wichitans due to “insider handouts, poor judgment and backroom deals.”

The particulars are different, of course.

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?

Columns

Why Councilmember Brandon Johnson Matters

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My headline is pretentious, of course; Brandon Johnson—the councilmember representing Wichita’s heavily African American and traditionally Democratic District 1, a longtime community activist and an alum of Friends University where I teach, as well as someone I have a friendly (if not close) relationship with—matters to a lot of different people for a lot of different reasons, most of them far beyond the specifics of current Wichita City Council debates. But as a someone who has spent decades observing and thinking and writing and teaching about politics, Brandon Johnson’s comments, toward the end of another marathon session dealing with the proposed non-discrimination ordinance before the council, were a deeply profound perception about the nature of political life. Watching the whole thing is a revealing as well as often depressing slog, but if you zip to the four hour and six minute mark, you’ll hear this (edited slightly for clarity):

“A ‘community divided’ [over]…a non-discrimination ordinance? I don’t know if I would go that far. There are upset people.

Columns

WICHITA MATTERS: Eight Inter-Connected Observations about Complexity, Liberty, and the City of Wichita

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1)  Cities are complex systems—that is, they are places where different groups of people organize, worship, trade, celebrate, work, and simply live in close proximity to each other, all in different ways and with different goals in mind. In other words, cities are pluralistic, with different sectors and levels all interacting in complex ways. Obviously not all cities are equally pluralistic and complex—the size of the city matters, its economic and racial and religious and regional history matters, and the way it is governed matters. Still, the one common feature of every modern city—meaning every built community that isn’t a rural village and exists in the wake of the democratic and industrial revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries—no matter what its relative size or history or location or politics, is simply this: its day-to-day operation is a complex, and by no means necessarily automatic, matter. 2) That doesn’t mean a large portion of what happens in any given city on any given street on any given day isn’t significantly automatic, because in a healthy city an awful lot of it will be.

Columns

WICHITA MATTERS: Biden and (Some) Better Times for (Some of) Wichita

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When President Joe Biden signed into law the American Rescue Plan (ARP) a little more than a week ago, I commented to some friends that this may arguably turn out to be one of the best things that has happened to Wichita in a very long time. Let me explain that argument here—starting with a rephrase of my original comment: the ARP will likely turn out to be one of the best things that has happened for many Wichitans in a very long time. Why the change? In part because there are a thousand ways to think about a city, depending on the perspective of the person doing the thinking. For every metric I or someone else might propose, someone else can surely come up with a different, countering one.