No, KCK is not going bankrupt. But voters need to hear leaders’ priorities | Opinion
The Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas will create a fresh set of elected officials this coming election, but the design of the UG charter as written by the public calls for a strong administrator — without which, we will never be strong.
Our charter separated the powers of an executive mayor and a board of commissioners, but all were elected to set the government’s priorities — along with a powerful administrator to carry them out.
Elected officials could no longer have their friends’ streets paved, nor could the administrator choose whether one service was more important than others. Everything now comes from a budget approved in open hearings.
Few voters understand that we do not (yet ) have enough total appraised value or sales taxes to pay for the services required of 160,000 people — at any lower tax rates than we have now. In fact, our total taxable appraised value per person here is half that of Johnson County.
That leaves revenues here to be paid for in the form of higher taxes for the same city, county and school services, and we have infrastructure that is 100 years older.
Fortunately, our costs for city services priced per person is pretty durn low. Overland Park costs $2,305 per person while KCK costs $2,267.
In the long term, the economy creates the tax base according to decisions made by elected officials, and taxpayers who want lower property taxes but seem to always call every once-in-a-lifetime deal “corporate welfare.”
So we have an obvious failure to cultivate a factual positive image of ourselves, and why the Unified Government and the Board of Public Utilities show no interest in strong public relations is a mystery to me. We tried to legislate it into existence.
According to our UG charter, the legislative auditor is tasked with providing “independent scrutiny of the performance and operations of government offices and employees.” That is as written in 1997 during 35 open hearings of the consolidation study commission, and incorporated into the new unified city-county charter.
The auditor was to review and publish the UG’s “performance and operations of all government offices and employees” and can only be hired or fired by the chief judge of the 29th District Court with concurrence of all the judges.
Our auditor has never publicly commented on Mayor Tyrone Garner’s false accusations of $23 million missing from the budget and imminent bankruptcy for the UG — extremely serious allegations that should have been immediately investigated.
Fortunately, neither the Robert Bobb Group audit the mayor calls his source, nor the KBI investigation he demanded, found any evidence of missing money, and we are not bankrupt. Our credit ratings are high, but the internal silence left an angry public.
In fact, while public trust is at its lowest ebb, our KCK sales tax revenue at $83 million annually exceeds the $63 million in property taxes collected.
Here’s the misunderstood truth about our property taxes: Wyandotte County homeowners get one tax bill, and KCK’s city taxes represent 23% of that bill, and our property taxes represent 18% of that.
So cutting a few points off the property tax mill rate doesn’t achieve the results desired by taxpayers, but are desperately needed for street preservation and policing, including illegal dumping. Those past cuts are crippling our infrastructure, which is one of any city’s greatest responsibilities.
It’s up to our candidates to research our economics and truthfully explain their positions to the voters, while debating what our actual priorities should be.
Right now, that’s between a deteriorating city landscape or taxes. There has not been a greater challenge since 1997.
Mike Jacobi was a leader in the consolidation of the Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas, governments. He retired at Fort Leavenworth in 1987 with two Presidential Unit Citations, a Distinguished Flying Cross, a Bronze Star and 39 Air Medals for flying helicopters in Vietnam.