Citizen Participation in Wichita City Government
~ a more detailed history...
A consequence of Wichita's enthusiasm for the "One Man -- Many Votes" idea is the city's once-pioneering flirtation wtih "neighborhood government," which gained national notoriety in the 1970s and early 1980s. A faint echo of that remains today in Wichita's "District Advisory Boards."
During the late-1960s to late-1970s, under U.S. Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter, the rise of federal "revenue-sharing" -- returning federal tax money to states and localities -- became formalized through various federal programs:
- CDBG (Community Development Block Grants)
- CAA (Community Action Agency)
- Model Cities
- ...and other programs.
Most of these programs were intended to put the money into the most needy areas and neighborhoods, providing housing and infrastructure improvements, community centers, health and recreation programs, job-training and placement assistance, food-buying co-ops, tax-preparation assistance, and various other services of value to the poor and working class.
While Republicans and other conservatives favored this "rebate" of tax money to states and localities, in broad principle, Democrats and other liberals knew it would quickly fall into the hands of business-dominated state governments and developer-dominated city governments, and little money would ever actually reach the poor.
So, to ensure that citizens in poor neighborhoods had an audible voice in the spending of the money, the Congress required state and local governments to establish elected councils of ordinary citizens, from targeted districts (especially impovershed areas and struggling neighborhoods), and give them a voice in how the money was spent.
CAA - Community Action Agency
In Wichita, the federal government CDBG money was targeted on about 12-15 poor and struggling neighborhoods in real need of help -- mostly mixed-race, predominantly-white, poor neighborhoods:
- Midtown
(in north-central WIchita, already a beneficiary of "Model Cities" money)
- Northeast Wichita
(inner-northeast, actually; Wichita's predominantly black community)
- Evergreen
(inner-northwest Wichita; Wichita's predominantly Hispanic community)
- Planeview
(far southeast Wichita, northeast of Boeing & McConnell AFB, a mixed-race, predominantly-white, poor neighborhood)
- Hilltop
(far southeast Wichita, northeast of Boeing & McConnell AFB)
- East Wichita
("short east," -- just east of downtown)
- West Wichita
("short west" -- just west of downtown)
- Orchard Park
(the poorest part of southwest Wichita)
- Oaklawn
(a poor suburb in far south-southeast Wichita)
(NOTE: These are listed from memory; little public documentation remains of the CAA Neighborhood programs; some may have been listed incorrectly, or not at all.)
Each of these neighborhoods were served by a federally-funded, locally operated "Community Action Program" (CAP), which, in turn, was administered and staffed by a "Community Action Agency" (CAA), which, in turn, was at least partially guided by an elected "neighborhood council," (citizens elected from that poor neighborhood by their neighbors).
Each CAA Neighborhood Council (CAC - "Community Action Council") consisted of about 9 members, elected during alternate city council elections every two years (council members were elected for staggered four-year terms -- five members in one election, then four more members in the next city election, two years later).
Professor Edward Tihen's notes on the Wichita newspapers indicate that a "Map showing boundaries of Wichita CPO districts" can be found in the Wichita Eagle, January 25, 1976, on page 2C."
An attorney general's opinion on the CPO elections, sent to the Sedgwick County Election Commissioner from Kansas Attorney General Curt Schneider (Democrat), indicates that -- contrary to the Election Commissioner's protest, he is obligated to conduct the election, though he may charge the ctiy for it.
Each council elected its own Chairman and Vice Chairman -- and usually a "Central Council Delegate" who would carry the neighborhood council's concerns to the CAA "Central Coordinating Council," for the whole City of Wichita. The Central Coordinating Council, in turn, would advise the Wichita Ctiy Commission (forerunner of today's City Council).
The neighborhood council meetings became "lightning rods" for attracting passionate citizen cries for help, angry complaints, insistent demands and intense debates -- but brought the poor a voice in community affairs they had never had before, in a city normally dominated by wealthy interests.
The CAA councils became extremely popular vehicles for "citizen input" and "neighborhood government."
Somewhat by coincidence, Wichita had, at the time, one of its few (or only) truly liberal City Commissions -- four liberals (a doctor, a pscyhologist, a lawyer and an upper-class homemaker) and a lone, out-voted, conservative businessman -- who were exceptionally receptive to input from the CAA councils. The result was a rare upswell in the popularity of city government, and its brief receptiveness to "citizen input."
CPO - Citizen Particpation Organization
However, in the late-1970s / early-1980s, as a conservative movement swept the nation -- ushering in the "Reagan Revolution" and a conservative Wichita City Commission -- things began to change radically.
First, the arch-conservative Reagan Administration stripped away all requirements that state and local governments have any serious input from the poor on how "revenue sharing" money would be spent. In fact, the Reagan era essentially brought an end to the "War on Poverty," and federal money previously ear-marked for the poor was shut off, or given to state and local authorities to spend as they wished. The federally funded Community Action Agency (CAA) system was essentially abolished.
Second, Wichita-area developers -- resentful of the influence that the CAA had given poor people over land development in their neighborhoods -- launched a passionate and effective campaign to unseat the liberals on the City Commission, and replaced them with their own people (a land-developer, a concrete supplier, a construction-insurance executive, and a finance executive).
However, the developer-oriented City Commission quickly found that many people had been stirred up into activism by the CAA councils, and -- without CAA councils to complain to -- would show up at City Commission meetings and "raise Hell," demanding attention to their concerns. Further, these citizens demanded the reinstatement of some form of neighborhood government.
Rise of the CPOs
Giving in, grudgingly, the City Commission organized a "Citizen Participation Organization" -- "CPO" -- to replace Wichita's defunct CAA system. (In fact, the CAA councils, apparently from a brief review of some historic and academic documents, were themselves referred to officially as "CPOs" -- "Citizen Participation Organizations.")
But the City Commission explanded the CPOs to include the entire city, dividing the city into 23 CPO districts (lettered "A" through "W"), each with with its own 9-member CPO Neighborhood Council. In general, it operated like the CAA Neighborhood Council system before it, but administrative support came from a CPO office in City Hall, directly under the City Manager.
Each Neighborhood Council elected representatives to the CPO Central Coordinating Council, which directly advised the City Commission. (Individual neighborhood councils, though, often sent representatives to City Commission meetings, to express their neighborhood's particular views, if they differed from the rest of the Councils).
Though only advisory in nature, and carrying no authority, CPO councils not only voted on how federal revenue-sharing money should be spent, but also on virtually any other City government issue they felt was a vital concern to their neighborhoods. And the new City Commission, still sensitive about their role as elected officials, paid attention.
This quickly angered the business community, who were used to having direct influence over the City Commisison, with little need to heed citizen concerns.
Land Developers vs. the CPOs
Of all the Wichita business community, none were more angry with CPO "interference" than land developers and their colleagues (land speculators, landlords, real estate investors, realtors, architects, civil engineering firms, construction and paving companies, their suppliers, financiers and insurance companies) -- who (in Wichita, as in most of the nation's cities) had traditionally controlled the City government that officially been empowered (by state law) to regulate their high-dollar developments.
When the CPO councils were set up, former CAA council representatives demanded that the new councils continue to have influence over developments in their neighborhoods. Land developers had routinely wrought havoc in poor neighborhoods callously, in their efforts to make money off of the cheap land easily bought there.
It was not unusual for a quiet residential neighborhood to suddently find itself facing a grimy, smoky, factory or a noisy nightclub, or a swarm of traffic at a new shopping site serving mostly out-of-neighborhood customers. Road, street and highway developments had routinely bulldozed whole neighborhoods -- driving homeowners and (especially) poor renters out of their homes.
The CAA councils had helped to slow that trend, and activists demanded that the CPO councils have similar neighborhood-saving influence. Accordingly, grudgingly, the City Commission established the CPOs as the "first point of contact" for developers seeking City Council permssion for their projects.
Land developers seeking city authorization for land developments, zoning changes and construction projects, were required to first approach the appropriate CPO neighborhood councils, who would vote on their project -- not automatically deciding its fate, but at least giving official public notice to the City Commission of the opinion of the affected neighborhood.
Once again, then, as with the CAA, the CPO councils gave a loud voice to neighborhoods about the development in their "backyard."
Decline of the CPOs
Over time, however, the developer-oriented City Commissioners became more confident in their power, and began to ignore input from the CPO councils -- commmonly "rubber-stamping" developers' projects (even some of their own) -- regardless of neighborhood concerns expressed through the CPO councils.
Community enthusiasm for the CPOs declined, as their power declined. At the same time, increasingly arrogant developer-interests pushed for elimination of the CPOs.
Initially, the 23 neighborhood councils were consolidated into just a dozen or so. Then, the City Commission system of government (five Commisioners, all elected at-large from throughout the community) was replaced by a City Council government (a mayor elected at-large, and six Council Members, each representing, and elected from, separate districts of the city). This was an opportune time to further prune the CPOs, and they were reduced to six councils, reconfigured to match the City Council districts.
Citizens still elected their CPO representatives from their "neighborhoods," but the term "neighborhood" was now so broad that it could mean someone from a trully different actual neighborhood, but within the same City Council district) In each City Council / CPO district, certain neighborhoods seemed to dominate over others on the district CPO council.
Attempts to mollify complaints, by dividiing CPO districts into three CPO subdistricts each -- with a single representattive elected to the district CPO from each subdistrict -- failed to result in citizen satisfaction.
The public, and CPO council members, became disenchanted with the constantly-changing CPO system. Neighborhood council members became frustrated with the erratic and dramatic changes in CPO structures -- often resulting in elected representatives getting bumped out of office. Both CPO Neighborhood Representatives and their constituents became even more frustrated by the decline in influence that the CPOs were having over the CIty Council (which mostly served the business community, instead), and over life in their own neighborhoods. Going to CPO meetings and "participating" became less and less fruitful, and people stopped showing up, or even turning out for CPO elections. Candidates for the increasingly pointless CPO posts dwindled.
Meanwhile the business community (dominant funders of City Council members' campaigns) -- especially developers -- still just wanted the CPOs to go away, altogether.
Nevertheless, the CPOs still had some credibility as a "voice of the people" and ignoring them made the City Commission appear insensitive to the public, and blatantly biased towards the powerful developers (which the Commissioners largely were).
Clinging to power, Wichita's new City Council (mostly the same faces, affiliations or politics as the previous City Commission), struggled with how to put an end to the CPOs without appearing to be indifferent to the neighborhoods within their districts -- an important consideration at re-election time.
DAB - District Advisory Boards
Finally, in late-1999 / early-2000 -- after a quarter-century of "meddling" by elected CAA and CPO councils in city affairs -- the City Council decided to eliminate the CPO councils by "re-organizing" them into "District Advisory Boards" (DABs) -- one for each City Council District.
The key difference? The members would no longer be elected by the public. Instead, they would be appointed by the City Council members from their respective districts.
In essence, then, the public has no direct vote in who the DAB members are. DAB "repesentatives" while pretending to "represent" their neighborhood, actually represent the City Council member who appointed them.
Though many former CPO members were intially appointed to the few DAB seats, eventually most DAB "Representatives" would eventually be people who were (for the most part) simply friends, business colleagues, and supporters (personal cronies) of the Commissioners, themselves -- largely developer and business interests in place of the ordinary poor and middle-class citizens who had previously made up the CPO and CAA councils.
While some ordinary citizens still manage to find their way onto the DABs, they don't get their memberships renewed by any City Council members unhappy with them -- so they cannot be effective voices of dissent to represent the under-repreented elements of Wichita society... nor even the vast majority of the population. The business interests (mostly developers) who fund the costly City Council elections are the powers deciding almost everything, now.
Also, as initially envisoned, DABs would not continue the CPOs requirement that developers come to a CPO meeting and publicly argue their case, to the CPO council, for zoning changes and major developments in their neighborhoods, and getting an official CPO neighborhood council opinion -- pro or con -- on record, before the developer could go to the City Council for approval. Developers would be able to casually bypass neighborhood councils altogether.
See: Meeting of the Board of County Commissioners, Aug 18, 1999, Sedgwick County (Minutes), item 2. "MAPD MONTHLY REPORT", by Mr. [Marvin] Krouse, [Metropolitan Area Planning Dept. (MAPD) Director], wherein he describes the difference between CPOs and DABs -- as planned by the City Council -- and their impact on citizen input, particularly regarding zoning and land-development issues.
The DABs, then, effectvely put an end to effective citizen input -- particularly from working-class voters -- at City Hall... just as the development community intended. And so it remains, to this day.
Epilogue
Wichita's experiments in "citizen participation" and "neighborhood government" may have ultimately failed, but in their day they had notable influence, and much remains today.
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Advance Warning from Developers: Developers are required to post a small sign on sites for which they seek zoning and development changes, to give neighbors some semblance of warning -- allowing them to fight the action before the City Council issues final approval.
This idea originated in a southeast Wichita CPO council, under CPO member W.C. Harris, who researched similar practices in other cities, and spearheaded his CPO council's push for the idea -- backed by CPO leader Howard Boise (Boyse?), and quickly endorsed by the other CPO councils' delegates to the CPO Central Coordinating Councils, and (despite intense opposition by developers)eventually accepted by the City Council.
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The Birth of Leaders: Several CAA and CPO council members went on to other political activism, and some influence -- even a few ascending to the City Commission or City Council.
CAA Central Council Chairman Tom Sawyer was elected County Clerk, then to the Kansas Legislature -- eventually becoming Minority Leader of the Kansas House of Representatives (and briefly Majority Leader), and Democrat nominee for Governor. Northeast CAA Councilwoman Oretha Faust's passionate work inspired daughter Oletha Faust-Goudeau, who became the first black woman in the Kansas Senate.
And many others became political leaders, as well. (This author went on from CAA & CPO roles to several other minor roles in city government and civic leadership).
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Neighborhood Associations -- unofficial organizations made up of passionate members of certain neighborhoods -- rose to largely carry on the organized citizen-input activism of the CAA and CPO councils.
An important distinction, however, influences neighborhood associations: They remain mostly the turf of land-owners, and landlords. Renters -- disproportionately the city's poor and working class -- have much less voice on these councils than on the prior CAA and CPO councils.
In fact, absentee landords are often welcome at the meetings, even made members, and -- in some cases -- officers, of assocations for neighborhoods in which they don't even live, but have property.
This leaves their renters daring not to speak about abuses by the landlords, nor about land-use decisions where the renters' priorities are often at extreme odds with the interests of their landlords. "Trouble-making" renters could find themselves evicted if they attempt to battle with their landlords at the neighborhood association meetings.)
NOTE: In their academic paper, INVOLVING CITIZENS IN THE DECISIONS OF GOVERNMENT AND COMMUNITY: NEIGHBORHOOD-BASED vs. GOVERNMENT-BASED CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT, writers Mark A. Glaser, Samuel J. Yeager and Lee E. Parker, of Wichita State University, suggest that Wichitans actually prefer these unofficial, independent neighborhood associations over the government-affiliated CAA and CPO councils.
I have a different view, but their experience with CAA and CPO, if any, was likely different from mine -- and their perspectives and mine may come from different political biases.
Further, their observations seem to have been based upon citizen reactions to the CPO councils during their era of decline, with the CPOs under adverse pressure from a conservative, business-dominated City Commission that had come to resent and ignore them -- thereby making the CPOs powerless, and of little use or interest to Wichita's citizens.
Community enthusiasm for CAA and CPO councils was arguably much greater at their outset, when respected, supported and heeded by a liberal City Commission (as in the case of the CAA councils), or at least feared and grudgingly respected by a newly conservative City Commission that had not yet figured out how to safely marginalize and neutralize their early CPO councils.
In any case, with the loss of neighborhood-elected CPOs, the rise of non-governmental "neighborhood associations" have partially substituted for the CPOs' neighborhood-voice role.
To some extent, these "organizations have become federated under an umbrella organization -- Wichita Independent Neighborhoods (WIN) -- which provides very limited administrative support, and helps resolve diferences between neighborhoods, and coordinates such issues as neighborhood association boundaries, newsletter publsihing and special events.
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Neighborhood Centers: During the "citizen participation" era, the City responded to neighborhood coucils' desire for recreational and meeting facilities in their individual neighborhoods, and -- as a result -- the City built several "neighborhood centers": small buildings with meeting rooms, classrooms and recreational accommodations (usually including a grade-school-sized gymnasium), available to the public.
Many were built next to public parks or schools, and partially integrated with those facilities -- benefitting both -- and some centers were briefly equipped with miniature branch libraries (some later replaced with full-sized branch libraries nearby).
The buildlings became the meeting places for their respective neighborhood councils -- "bringing city government to the people." Several had onsite full-time administrative support staff (often working through the City's Parks & Recreation Department, who used the buildings for community recreation programs.)
The facilities were also made available to other neighborhood and community organizations for events and activities that served their neighborhoods, including cultural festivals, parties, recreational programs, charitable food and clothing distributions, health screenings, tax-preparation assistance, election polling sites, and many other services.
Today, those facilities (most of them well-built) still remain -- though not as active nor as well-supported by the City as in years past. Still, they continue to serve many of the functions they originally served, and remain helpful resources for many neighborhoods.
A 2010 paper -- "Local Practices in Public Engagement" (PDF format) -- by Bonnie Mann and Stephanie Rozsa of the National League of Cities -- cites the use of some of these centers as "Neighborhood City Halls" overseen by Neighborhood Services Supervisor, Megan Buckmaster (316-268-4351, MBuckmaster@Wichita.gov). The NLC reports:
"The City of Wichita maintains four Neighborhood City Halls spread throughout the city that provide access to various city and social services and to City Council members. Two of these are located in elementary schools to allow working parents increased access to city resources. With limited variation among them, the neighborhood city halls provide free community education classes, computer and printing services, bill pay services and meeting space where neighborhood associations and boards gather. In addition to offering city services, other organizations use the same building space, including a free notary public, police and a health services center."
Among the useful functions of the remaining neighborhood centers -- whether used as Neighborhood City Halls or not -- is their continuing role as the meeting place for many of today's Wichita-area neighborhood associations -- where some of the people of the neighborhoods continue the demand for citizen participation in shaping their own neighborhood, community and future.
Participate - Let your voice be heard!
CITIZEN PARTICIPATION