By Dion Lefler/The Wichita Eagle
It’s been a weird week for sales taxes in Wichita, as local citizens grapple with an upcoming March 3 vote on whether to impose a 1% tax on their purchases.
It started out with the people who proposed the tax, a well-funded but heretofore unknown entity called Wichita Forward, running TV commercials equating opposition to the tax plan with being a fellow traveler of the Kansas Communist Party, (which by the way rose from 87 Facebook followers to 118 after the ads began running).
And the City Council held its first public hearing — three hours long — on putting “guardrails” around the five “buckets” of money that will flow into City Hall if the tax passes.
Let’s just say that was more a matter of motion than progress.
But sandwiched between those two events was an island of serenity in a sea of political chaos.
It was called a “Braver Angels Debate.” Sponsored by the Kansas Leadership Center, the Wichita Journalism Collaborative and the League of Women Voters, it drew a crowd of 120 public-spirited citizens from both sides of the issue to the Advanced Learning Library, on a night of bitter cold and icy roads.
Full disclosure: The Wichita Eagle is a founding member of the collaborative, which consists of 10 local information organizations representing commercial news media, nonprofit news media, and academia. My wife, Kathy, a former news editor for the Los Angeles Times/Washington Post News Service and The Eagle, is the coordinator of the collaborative. I myself did not take any active role in the debate and attended it as a journalist.
The tax plan as proposed includes designated spending in generalized areas (the aforementioned “buckets” of money).
They include $225 million for public safety, another $225 million for convention space, $150 million to fight homelessness and spur affordable housing, another $150 million to cut property taxes, $75 million for a contribution to a public-private partnership to build a new performing arts center, and $25 million for renovating our current convention and performing arts center, Century II.
Yes, I realize that’s six buckets, but apparently City Hall has shifted the $25 million for Century II (’cause what’s $25 million among friends?) into the convention center bucket.
Good questions deserve good answers
The Braver Angels Debate was an experiment, and I think a successful one.
It represented a different approach from the campaign forums that Wichita usually has, where you have Candidate A and Candidate B (or “Yes” and “No” advocates in the case of ballot measures) standing at a podium delivering focus-grouped, poll-tested and well-rehearsed lines.
The Braver Angels format allowed ordinary Wichitans to express their opinions and ask their questions about the tax measure. Questions were directed to the chair of the meeting, who then would give the green light to the person being asked to answer.
The “yes” and “no” sides alternated turns and got a more or less equal chance to speak or ask questions.
It was calm and cordial, and it was encouraging to see Bill Anderson, possibly Wichita’s most liberal man, sitting next to and yucking it up with John Todd, longtime officer of the arch-conservative Wichita Pachyderm Club.
Some excerpts from the debate:
“I’m speaking as someone that’s neutral on this issue. There are a lot of good things in this, but something that really bothers me, we’re going to spend $25 million to revitalize Century II . . . but then we’re going to spend $75 million for a downtown performing arts center. I don’t understand if we’re going to revitalize Century II, why are we building another Performing Arts Center?”
“Typically I say ‘yes’ to things because I care about my community. But sometimes I have to say ‘no,’ and one of the reasons why I think ‘no’ is what needs to be said this time is there are more guardrails around this (debate) event than were put around the initiative when it was brought forward.”
“I have been active in a lot of advisory boards and presentations to City Council over a number of years. The answer to every single request was, we don’t have any money. I’m going to ask folks here if they’re jealous of Oklahoma City? . . . They have a lot of amenities. These, I’m jealous that they did that 30-plus years ago. We don’t, we don’t have nice things.”
“How do we know as taxpayers that when we say that the funds will be spent, CIP (Capital Improvement Program) funds won’t be needed? How do we know that the funds won’t be redirected and we still do debt-funding projects anyway? . . . There are no clawbacks. There’s no guarantees for our taxpayers, and citizen input was not held.”
Those are excellent points and should have been addressed before the tax plan ever got anywhere near a ballot.
But in this case, Wichita Forward planned a campaign, publicly announced it a couple of weeks before the special election deadline, and handed a completed proposal off to the City Council, who dutifully put it on the ballot. The council went along largely because the three public faces on the proposal are influential CEOs in the community: Aaron Bastian of Fidelity Bank, Jon Rolph of Thrive Restaurants and Ben Hutton of Hutton Corp., formerly Hutton Construction.
The strategy here is obvious: Put it to a vote on a day likely to draw low turnout, minimize time for public input and campaigning, and flood the airwaves with “yes” commercials (including that ridiculous “communist” ad).
This, friends and neighbors, is no way to make a decision likely to affect our city for decades.
Strange coalitions form among conservatives, progressives
The current ballot measure has created strange bedfellows and even stranger adversaries on both sides of the political spectrum.
Conservative Wichita is divided. Business conservatives are enamored with shifting some of their property tax burden to the general public, along with more tax investment in big convention and performing arts projects. They’ve split from the conservatives whose battle cry is “no new taxes.”
Progressives are also split, between those who oppose sales taxes as shifting more of the tax burden to the poor (they’re not wrong), and those who see the sales tax as the only way to get reliable operating funding for Second Light, the multi-agency homeless service center serving the poorest of the poor (can’t say they’re wrong either).
I can’t help thinking this whole thing would have gone a lot better if we’d had a process like the Braver Angels Debate before the council committed to a $170,000 taxpayer-funded special election.
If the current ballot measure fails, (and I strongly suspect it will), I’m pretty sure we could persuade our partner organizations to hold another Braver Angels kind of event.
Maybe then we could get together as a community and come to consensus on what we need, what we want, and what would be nice to have, but not worth taxing ourselves extra to get.