Columns

WICHITA MATTERS: What Mayors Need

By |

Last week, Mayor Whipple had a rough time during the city council meeting, with his request for a deputy somewhat embarrassingly tabled in the face of both criticism from other council members and a long list of online attacks that got read into the record. The whole affair has already been critically commented on, but as a break from talking about the coronavirus pandemic all the time, let me beat this dead horse one more time–mostly because I hope it will revive. Not immediately, to be sure. Some members of the city council argued that any discussions about additional staff in the city’s government needed to wait on the completion of a comprehensive review currently being conducted by the city manager’s office; others pointed out that the politics of hiring a major new city employee at a time of government furloughs, increasing unemployment, and great economic uncertainty are pretty dubious, to say the least. And beyond that, there was disagreement between Mayor Whipple and different council members over how best to describe the duties of such a deputy, over who would be the likely candidates for such a position, and over whether or not a city employee already exists who could fill exactly the sort of policy research and community outreach role he’s requesting.

Columns

WICHITA MATTERS: The Coronavirus in Kansas: Wichita’s Weaknesses and Strengths

By |

When it comes to the coronavirus pandemic, it’s sometimes easy, here in Wichita–a large city nonetheless somewhat isolated and disconnected from the larger metropolitan areas of the country, a city which centers a largely rural and therefore much more low risk part of the state–to be unclear if we’re overreacting or not reacting enough. But feeling as though we’re stuck in the middle, feeling divided, is nothing new for a midsized city like ours. In general the news for Kansas overall seems to be pretty good. It is looking like the spread of the virus, as it peaks in April, won’t be as deadly as we feared, almost certainly in part because of Governor Laura Kelly’s (and locally, Sedgwick County Commissioner Lacey Cruse’s) insistence on pushing for stay-at-home orders as early as possible. But is it true that, in taking these actions, Wichita will suffer even more than it would have had the city, and its surrounding county and state, not shut things down?

Columns

The Coronavirus in Kansas: A Week of Triage

By |

This has been a week of triage for our city. With the Sedgwick County Commission at first resisting and then finally
submitting to medical opinion (and political pressure) regarding the need to
order many businesses and places of public gathering to close for the sake of
minimizing the potential spread of the coronavirus on Monday, the other
shoe–which every small business-owner and all of their thousands of supporters
throughout the city have known was just waiting to be dropped–came down
on Tuesday, and the scramble find a new normal began in earnest. We’d seen
libraries, movie theaters, restaurants and shops of various kinds, and so much
else start to limit their hours or close down entirely last week; this week it
finally became official. The question becomes the classic one which arises in
every emergency, every instance of limited resources: what can be sustained,
what can be changed, and what can’t be saved? Like many Wichitans, toward the end of last week I made the time to check in
on places of business I was most worried about surviving the loss of commerce
which this order–and, let’s be honest, the even stricter ones likely to follow
it–is going to entail.

Columns

The Coronavirus in Kansas: The First Week

By |

It’s a dark and quiet Wednesday
morning here in the Fox household, March 18, 2020. It’s been dark every
morning–and mostly gray and cloudy and cool all through the days as well–for
pretty much a whole week now, appropriately enough. Partly that’s because our
schedules, both external and internal, haven’t caught up with the hour in the
morning we lost less than two weeks ago when daylight saving time began. But
most, I think, it’s because of the gloom which has descended upon many of us
here in south-central Kansas in the past seven days, with the
weather–unhelpfully but perhaps unavoidably, reciprocating. A week ago, Wednesday, March 11,
I was wrapping up my classes in anticipation of spring break.

WICHITA MATTERS: Questions for Riverfront Boosters and Their Critics

By |

Last week, Populous
presented their complete (or nearly complete) vision for transforming
the east bank of the riverfront through downtown Wichita.* They were not
unambitious in their recommendations. In what they predict
to be an at least $1.2 billion project whose construction would stretch over at
least 10 years, they recommend the demolition of Century II, the construction
of a new performing arts center and convention center twice the size of Bob
Brown Auditorium, a host of mixed-use properties to bring consumers and
residents into the downtown, and the development of a wide green space which
the labeled Century Park, which might include a brand-new ice rink (apparently
no one told them about the publicly owned Wichita Ice Center  less than a half-mile away from their proposed
park, or maybe they just figured no one would notice). The developer-beloved
new pedestrian bridge is there, of course, but sadly, no monorail. Of course, the most controversial part of all that was their urging the city to level Century II. Its defenders are gathering petitions to put on the ballot a requirement that any historic building in the city can only demolished after a public vote.

Columns

WICHITA MATTERS: Strong Mayor, Strong City

By |

A short while ago, The Wichita Eagle ran a column
of mine on the brouhaha
over whether the Wichita City Council ought to continue with the current limit
of two terms for city council members, or if it ought to be expanded to three. Since talking about government is what I do for a living–and since this
argument is likely to come back sometime
in the new year –let me expand on this a little. To reiterate, Wichita has a council-manager
form of government. That means that the city is divided into districts (in our
case six, meaning each council member theoretically represents the concerns and
interests of roughly 65,000 people per district), and the mayor is simply an
at-large member of the city council, with some particular procedural
responsibilities (supposedly enough to make it a full-time position, whereas
every other member of the council is nominally a part-time employee of the
city), but fundamentally no different from anyone else elected to the council
to a four-year term. Practical executive power–that is, the authority to keep
the city running on a day-to-day basis–is not vested in the mayor or the
council, but rather in a city manager, who is hired (at $228K a year, more than
twice what the mayor is paid) by the city council, and theoretically subject to
their oversight.

Columns

WICHITA MATTERS: Taking Our Time with Century II

By |

The argument over what to do
with Century II has quite arguably been a subtext to just about every major
debate which has been conducted in our city in 2019. With the rapid
construction of the new baseball stadium and the redesign of McLean Boulevard
on the west side of the river, the need to think about the east side, and in
particular the fate of Wichita’s single most notable landmark (sorry Keeper,
but you know it’s true), has been unavoidable; you can see the evidence for it
everywhere. Last spring, The Century II
Citizens Advisory Committee, chaired by Mary Beth Jarvis, finished their work,
concluding that a new performing arts center to replace Century II was a necessity. By the
summer, historical preservationists and other activists were organized to protect
Century II, asking hard and necessary questions about retrofitting
alternatives, financing schemes, and the influence of local development
interests. At a mayoral debate in the fall, a
disagreement between Mayor Jeff Longwell and Mayor-Elect Brandon Whipple
over the loss of the downtown coffee house and community center Mead’s Corner
was seen as staking out different approaches to historic buildings like Century
II.

WICHITA MATTERS: Growth, Sustainability and the City Elections

By |

In a recent column
in The Wichita Eagle, I talked about
how, much more than any particular candidate being elected to the city council
or as mayor in next week’s election, my fondest hopes are tied to whether or
not any of those candidates might read a book, and take seriously the message
inside it. The book is Charles Marohn’s Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. Why this book? Let me explain. First, the big picture.

Columns

A Study in SimianScope

By |

About 10 years ago, I went to a local Blockbuster to rent
the film King Kung Fu. Cinemassacre, a popular YouTube channel
that reviews retro movies and video games in a humorous manner, recommends you
check out the movie. It is a very goofy G-rated parody that fits into the “so
bad it’s good” category. But just as importantly, the movie is a snapshot of
what Wichita looked like in the 70’s. King Kung Fu is a 1976 comedy that tells the story of
a gorilla trained in the martial arts that gets loose in Wichita, falling into
in series of mishaps while beating people up using its Kung Fu skills.

WICHITA MATTERS: 20 Years in the Parks

By |

The city elections are only a
month away, but at this moment, my mind is looking back to summer, rather than
forward to November. Each year, ever since our family moved to Wichita in 2006,
mid-June and early-September have offered my wife and I–and, as the years went
by, often our children too–a fine treat: a free, all-volunteer, invariably
creative and nearly-always successful outdoor play, courtesy of the Wichita
Shakespeare Company. This past summer was their 20th continuous
season of operation, so I think a few words of congratulations, explanation
and, more importantly, appreciation are in order. We’re a bookish family, and a
theatrical one, and civic one–which means public performances of Shakespeare plays
in Wichita (and usually including a performance in parks around Park City,
Derby and Andover as well) are triply appealing to us. We’re not alone of
course.