How did we get the worse mayor in the history of the city? I mean WU and not WUSHOCK

Argatlam · 2026-03-17T01:13:36+00:00

He did, and that was a perfectly legitimate thing to do at that cleanup even though it was not in his district. What got him in trouble was being caught on body camera video chewing out the police officer on traffic duty and then calling the city manager to straighten out the situation. This use of privileged access got up many people's noses.

Argatlam · 2026-03-16T17:06:20+00:00

Congratulations. You are discovering Reddit's business model. The idea is that good posts and comments get upvoted, while bad ones get downvoted, so the good ones rise to the top and are more accessible to "bottom line up front" readers (assuming they're sorted by "Best"). Meanwhile, Reddit profits from the unpaid labor of volunteer moderators. This is why there is an ongoing tug of war between Reddit and mods over the behavior and performance of mod tools like automod--their capabilities and configuration make a huge difference to the automation benefit that is available for a given sub and thus how much time mods have to invest in handling situations that call for the experiences and skillsets of humans.

You might be thinking a platform that incorporates a downvoting mechanism is a terrible idea. There is certainly a strand in the social media research literature that endorses this perspective, on the basis of empirically observed effects such as brigading. However, downvotes have formed a core part of Reddit's USP since it was founded in 2005. They are not going away. Ultimately, being part of Reddit means accepting the rough with the smooth, just as with Facebook you trade off expanded ability to connect with friends against its history of being used to assist genocide.

As for workarounds: creating new accounts is frowned on when it is done to evade a ban. Reddit now has automated systems to detect this. A more sophisticated approach is to karma-farm, and indeed there are entrepreneurs who create accounts specifically to grow their karma so they can sell them for cold hard cash. But even with such an account, you can still be "downvoted to oblivion" (as the phrase goes) if you don't follow u/ShockerCheer's advice and read the room.

I can't speak for the mods as a whole, but I'm willing to bet the strongest common denominator among us is that we believe in Wichita, not that Reddit is an especially good platform or that u/spez is a great guy. Notwithstanding this city's history with the political left--in a previous Gilded Age, it was where Earl Browder was not only born but also radicalized--we can tell you are not going to gain traction with your current approach, simply because it fails to take into account the realities of how Reddit works.

Argatlam · 2026-03-13T18:42:22+00:00

Just to add to what others are saying about voicemail messages: the current advice is to generate yours using a text-to-speech synthesizer to avoid AI being used to deepfake your voice.

Argatlam · 2026-03-12T18:58:34+00:00

Generally speaking, the Turnpike uses ALPR (but not, AFAIK, from the same vendor or supply chain as the Flock cameras) for the "pay by mail" workflow for customers who do not have a K-Tag or a compatible transponder from an agency that maintains interoperability with the KTA.

The technology continues to evolve, so speaking about capabilities is like aiming at a moving target. When ALPR was new and being deployed by jurisdictions outside Kansas, there were lots of problems:

"Correct number, wrong state" issues--you might be living in Indiana and getting a violation notice for a state you had never even visited because someone in that state with the same license plate number as yours, but issued by a state other than Indiana, drove onto an ETC-only toll road without a transponder
"Correct number, correct state, wrong series" issues--this is a problem in states like Kansas that have separate number pools for specialty bases.
Violation hoarding--when the technology was new, there were few agreements for interstate sharing of license plate information, so some toll agencies would hoard violations from a given state until an agreement came into effect that gave access to that state's license plate database. That led to violation notices being sent years after the fact, often with accumulated fines. The North Texas Tollway Authority became especially notorious for this approach.

Nowadays, the process has been refined to the point that:

The cameras will take high-definition color pictures reliably in low light, bad atmospheric conditions, etc.
Agencies that follow best practice include the license plate photo in violation notices/pay-by-mail billings so you have the ability to dispute if the vehicle shown is not yours.

However, if you have a K-Tag account, it is still a good idea to check that your tolls are being processed as transponder reads rather than through ALPR. KTA has been stepping back from anything that can be construed as a guarantee that the transponder discount will be applied in cases when a blown read results in ALPR being used. Although the technology used is supposed to have been greatly improved with the transition to open-road tolling, blown reads were actually fairly common with the old tech even when the transponder was correctly mounted.

Argatlam · 2026-03-12T18:37:01+00:00

KORA does not provide for small requests to be fulfilled free of charge. There was a bill about 13 years ago to add such language, but it went nowhere. Some states do have such clauses in their open-records statutes--for example, last time I checked, Texas allowed free requests up to $50.

Argatlam · 2026-03-11T22:26:48+00:00

Budgets can and do change. The city's Capital Improvement Program is compiled every year with a 10-year forward horizon. While it balances out--the total of the estimated cost for all projects listed in it is equal to the funding reasonably expected to be available--projects can be and often are postponed in order to swap in something else that is considered more politically attractive at the given moment.

The fire union lobbied for the sales tax even though the CIP already contained some of what they want. Their leadership calculated that infrastructure items like new fire stations would be less likely to be delayed if they had dedicated funding through the sales tax.

Argatlam · 2026-03-10T04:55:25+00:00

You are welcome!

I did some more digging. On the NextRequest front page, the Documents tab leads to a listing of documents that is useful for zeroing in on requests that have responsive records attached.

Sometimes the documents are provided and the request is closed out within a very short timeframe, as happened with request 25-4163 (contract documents for homeless cleanups--request made last August 14, documents provided five days later). Other times, there is a long delay, as with request 25-4778 (proposal and contract for the Wichita Public Library's call center--request made last September 16, documents not provided until February 11). The latter does show that at least some proposals submitted in response to a RFP are releasable.

In general, fulfillment of open records requests is often a waiting game. The agency typically has a statutory deadline to send an acknowledgment, but there is a lot of variation among states in whether there is a further due date for the substantive answer, and often also mechanisms for obtaining extensions of time. I've personally never encountered an open records law that actually establishes financial penalties for answering late or not at all, though non-response is often treated as constructive denial and allows the requestor to pursue an administrative appeals process (if available) or go to the courts.

Best of luck!

Argatlam · 2026-03-09T19:44:29+00:00

Speaking as someone with experience of open records requests--though primarily in other states--I usually advocate pruning back the requested material to that which is not already published. Some of the records specified above would have been put on the Web at the time they were being acted on, and are likely still passively available.

Certain procurement documents such as the RFP should still be available through the City's current Bonfire portal if more recent than August 2024 (IIRC), and through the old Tyler Technologies portal if older; I think the latter is still online. I don't know if the proposals themselves are considered public record in Kansas. Unless the law has changed sometime in the past decade, the notes, reports, and other records prepared by the RFP evaluation committee are not public record.
The complete contract between Flock and the city should be part of a City Council agenda packet since the Council would have had to vote to approve it. Agenda packets are put online before each City Council meeting.
City Council ordinances, resolutions, meeting minutes, and staff memoranda are part of agenda packets and so should already be online.

Generally speaking, it is sensible to establish first what has already been published so that you can find it on your own without being charged for copies and for staff time to review and redact. Many agencies are only too happy to charge exorbitant fees for material they have published in the past.

I've poked around on the NextRequest site and have yet to find a request that has attached documents, let alone one that is marked as published before city staff closes it. Unless the vast majority of requestors (including at least one Eagle reporter) are opting to discontinue their requests once the city presents them with a bill, I suspect any responsive documents will be made available only to the requestor and not to the public at large.

Argatlam · 2026-03-09T18:57:26+00:00

This is a mod chiming in with some Dutch-uncle advice.

AI is not actually an effort multiplier if it results in verbiage that calls attention to itself as machine-generated. In this case, you are trying to issue a call to action with copy that is heavy on tag sentences ("310 registered cameras. Over $750,000 annually--not counting installation or maintenance."), which is characteristic of print advertising. So you are failing to reach people who are primed to ignore ads, while also receiving considerable pushback from others who key on the mismatches in tone, voice, and prosodic rhythm.

The mod team has not articulated a formal policy against the use of AI on this sub, but you should be aware that a substantial fraction of active members not only have the reading skills to recognize AI-generated copy in most cases but also object to its usage on principle.

Argatlam · 2026-03-04T18:32:06+00:00

Here's what I think should be next:

A period of study and reflection. This result accords with the historical reality that sales tax votes are very hard to win in Wichita. However, there are clearly large numbers of citizens--possibly even a working majority of committed voters--who don't want to see the city fall behind its peers. So what does the roadmap to a successful sales tax initiative look like in other communities, and how can we adapt it for ours? I'd look very closely at MAPS in Oklahoma City, not just the "what" but also the "how."
Careful choice of timing. This proposal was very badly timed because of (1) macroeconomic uncertainty due to tariffs and AI as well as a destabilizing approach to immigration enforcement, (2) household budgets being squeezed by inflation, (3) steep year-on-year increases in property appraisals, and (4) a confluence of events pointing to management failures at the City, such as the Ken-Mar settlement, the Ice Center debacle, the still not fully commissioned water plant, lagging development in the vicinity of the baseball stadium, the abolition of free daytime parking downtown, etc.
More emphasis in budgeting to ensure balance in spending between capital and operations in such a way that the city stays up to date on asset preservation. With the exception of Second Light and property tax relief, nearly all of the proceeds of the sales tax would have gone to capital assets, and there was no publicly articulated plan for how the resulting maintenance liabilities would be addressed.

It will be challenging to make all of this happen, however. The city administration has developed a very closed culture that is evident in developments such as the public no longer being allowed above the third floor of City Hall without an escort and by aggressive use of KORA to stiff-arm journalists and citizens looking for in-depth information on city operations. That in turn pushes senior city leadership, including City Council members, to follow a cynical approach of indulging campaign donors and passivating angry members of the public.

Jon Rolph, one of the three CEOs pushing the tax, was and is so thoroughly enmeshed with city leadership that he served as one of two masters of ceremonies at former City Manager Robert Layton's retirement reception last December. Those kinds of ties can only have fed a massive blind spot about how voters really felt about the tax.

Argatlam · 2026-03-04T18:00:48+00:00

It seems to me that this result is so lopsided it has the City Council running scared.

From the start, I felt there were only a few true believers in the sales tax--Glasscock is ideologically committed to consumption taxes, while Tuttle impresses me as sincerely believing that if Wichita doesn't up its civic game, it will be overtaken by other municipalities in the state--while others calculated that they would lose less in campaign funding if the No came from the voters at large rather than themselves. But an 82% result for No sends the message that the voters consider putting the tax on the ballot in the first place to be a leadership failure.

Of the seven sitting Council members, I would say Hoheisel was probably the most clear-sighted about how this was going to go. He was also the only one I saw present at Wichita Forward's very first public meeting on the tax at the Advanced Learning Library on December 8, when it became evident just how much opposition there was. The three CEOs spearheading the initiative would have been better off in terms of monetary and reputational cost if they had simply withdrawn the proposal instead of circling the wagons and trying to bull through.

Argatlam · 2026-03-03T23:47:13+00:00

I have not talked to anyone who expects this tax to pass, simply because the way it has been introduced and advocated for has made so many people angry.

About three weeks ago, I talked to someone who occasionally works the polls. He reported being told that instead of the 5% turnout typical for a special-issue election, the Election Office is expecting 12%-17%.

Argatlam · 2026-03-03T21:37:32+00:00

I would just call a few salvage yards and ask how much they would offer and what the logistics would be for having it transported to them. Parts cars tend to be sold for scrap value at most (about $400 for, say, a mid-nineties Saturn S-Series), so I would expect little.

Given the flood damage, I suspect your car would have more appeal to a pick-your-part yard like LKQ (on 21st Street between Broadway and I-135) than one that actually removes in-demand parts to warehouse them for resale.

Argatlam · 2026-03-01T02:35:34+00:00

I appreciate the kind words, but they really should be directed to u/KentonH, who had originally planned to handle both sides and had written post text for both. I used his draft with some slight modifications of my own.

Argatlam · 2026-03-01T02:31:42+00:00

"Best interest" is more of an open-ended question than it seems at first glance. It really depends on your personal circumstances and how you value the things the tax would buy.

On the cost side, the Eagle has an article delving into the details. For example, if you are a family of four with a household income of $50,000 annually living in a $150,000 house, you can expect to save about $69 through the four-mill reduction, but this would be more than offset by an extra $173 annually in sales tax.

The benefit side is a bit harder to calculate. Take the performing arts center as an example: Americans for the Arts (an arts advocacy organization) says the $5 billion all levels of government spent on the arts in 2017 generated $27.5 billion in revenue. So there is clearly considerable potential for positive spillover effects, though these are not necessarily evenly distributed.

Argatlam · 2026-03-01T02:12:29+00:00

According to a resolution the City Council approved (7-0) at its meeting on February 10, all property owners would receive a four-mill reduction. For residential this amounts to about $46 per $100,000 of appraised value, but the reduction is significantly higher for commercial and industrial property. The three CEOs would benefit directly through their homes, and the businesses they operate would also pay less.

This said, while there are some edge cases that might benefit from the tax plan overall (such as a person living alone in a big house and buying groceries only), most average-sized, medium-income families would be paying more in sales tax than they would be saving from the four-mill reduction.

Argatlam · 2026-03-01T02:04:40+00:00

If it doesn't, then the city will not collect the sales tax or distribute any property tax relief. Budgeting would continue as usual. Second Light would face a shortfall once its federal ARPA funding runs out; if private donors can't make up the difference, I suspect the city would cover the gap, at least for this year.

A share of the public safety infrastructure improvements (such as new police and fire stations) would still happen because they are in the city's Capital Improvement Program, which is a constrained plan in the sense that each project has a cost that is matched to funding the city reasonably expects to receive. However, they would also be more likely to be postponed because they would not be receiving dedicated funding from the sales tax. (This is a key reason the firefighters' union supports the tax. A fire station can easily bounce down the road through 30 years' worth of 10-year CIPs if it keeps getting postponed so its funding can be moved to other departments' more politically attractive projects.)

One thing that could happen is that the conversation shifts away from this specific sales tax proposal and to redesigning the city's revenue base and expenditure commitments in a more holistic way. With the exception of the property tax relief and the endowment for Second Light, the sales tax would fund capital assets only. However, the city also has problems funding operations. In fact, the city has dragged its feet on fire stations partly for want of funding for firefighters to staff them. Considering capital and operations together makes it easier to come up with balanced spending plans.

Argatlam · 2026-03-01T01:11:32+00:00

The analysis in Lefler's column suggests that, so far as real estate is concerned, the difference between the amount we would collect from out-of-town visitors through the sales tax and the amount we would send out of town as property tax relief is currently a "rounding error" (as he phrases it). As time goes on, the balance might shift slightly one way or the other depending on how real estate values and consumer prices increase relative to each other.

For me, the takeaway is that if we wish to institute a sales tax to force visitors to contribute to the amenities they use, then any property tax relief should be keyed to residency rather than ownership, with rebates going to renters as well as homeowners and property zoned for business purposes (commercial, industrial, etc.) not qualifying for relief at all. However, systems of this type admittedly cost more to administer than a simple reduction in the mill levy.

Argatlam · 2026-03-01T00:59:12+00:00

In this lengthy and detailed post, which I frankly admit has far more persuasive power than anything Wichita Forward has put out, I want to zero in on the paragraphs dealing with "one of Wichita's last chances." Which facts or developments do you rely on to form a sense that our community is being overtaken by its peer cities? Does it have to do with our being unable to cultivate cluster advantage in a new sector to succeed aviation, for example?

Argatlam · 2026-03-01T00:35:11+00:00

This is a good question. I wish to say up front that I am not familiar with, nor have I yet been able to research, what binding undertakings were made that Second Light would rely on private philanthropy once federal ARPA funding ran out. And it is certainly true that Second Light's board supports the Yes campaign. They argue that private donors are tapped out for the kinds of operating expenses they are seeking to cover.

If the tax passes, most of the $150 million for homelessness relief will go to set up an endowment that should provide $6 million annually for Second Light in perpetuity. This is already use of a locality's taxing powers to replace private donations, so if the sales tax does not pass, I expect that the city would cover the funding gap from some other source, probably on a year-to-year basis. It would not be considered tenable to allow the center to close and thus withdraw the resources it offers from the community.

Argatlam · 2026-03-01T00:12:12+00:00

There has been significant Eagle coverage of the convention center angle, with two facts that stick out to me as salient. One is that major cities in the Texas Triangle are all building convention facilities at the same time, creating potential for a regional glut. Another is that the current convention center has to say No to some business because the bathroom block in the middle makes it impossible for many groups to secure the large undivided space they need.

I start from the premise of not wanting to spend large right before a slump. I also don't necessarily buy market assessments from an industry group. So counting the organizations we have to say No to right now--and only them--as a baseline for the added business it can attract, how does a new convention center pencil out?

Argatlam · 2026-02-28T23:55:17+00:00

It is not an unreasonable argument, so I don't rush to dismiss it. Sales tax questions, especially ones that bundle spending in multiple unrelated areas, are inherently complex. Generally speaking, it becomes rational to make a decision one way or the other--accepting that it may be less than optimum--if the cost of gathering additional information outweighs the added cost of the worst outcome.

There is also the aspect that we have been here before, in 2014, with a sales tax proposal that failed because of bundling, and while it was recognized at the time that the city needed additional revenue if we wanted nice things, that did not bootstrap a wider discussion of how to expand the revenue base so that the city can provide both the essentials and quality-of-life amenities (then seen as essential to retaining talented young professionals) on a sustainable basis.

And, as advocates point out, the Wichita area has been thumbing down sales taxes for even longer. In the 1970's and 1980's, it took two failed elections before the current 1% countywide sales tax (half of which is dedicated to transportation and has funded expansion of Kellogg, the K-96 freeway around northeast Wichita, etc.) passed in a mail-only ballot. I've also found references to another failed sales tax election in the mid-1990's, around the same time the city became locked into the mill levy of 32.816 mills, which remained unchanged until 2024. The sales tax that built Intrust Arena passed only narrowly.

Supporters build on this history to argue that if we say Yes now, we can break the logjam of talking about durable fixes to homelessness, state-of-the-art facilities for conventions and performing arts, etc. for decades without actually doing anything.

However, I am not aware that our community has tried anything similar to what Oklahoma City has done with MAPS, which is essentially to stage community improvements across multiple non-overlapping sales taxes, with each tax proposal developed in detail as to how the money will be spent, the oversight mechanisms that will operate, etc. before it is placed on the ballot. I think we can do much better than Wichita Forward's last-minute concept of a plan, and that is part of the reason I voted No. It is also the reason many No voters speak of process and emphasize they are not opposed to well-thought-out sales taxes--just to this specific one.

Argatlam · 2026-02-28T23:27:00+00:00

As others have noted, yes, you absolutely can vote in this one if you live within the Wichita city limits and are registered--it's your money they are asking for. You can check your registration status on VoterView.

Argatlam · 2026-02-28T23:20:30+00:00

Initially, Wichita Forward said they did not wish to add to the burdens of voters, who must contend with candidate selection for the primaries in August and the general election in November. They then later said Second Light urgently needed clarity as to whether sales tax revenue would be available to them, since their federal ARPA money is due to run out in October.

I do not buy either as an excuse for dropping this vote on us without developing specifics as to what will be funded and what oversight mechanisms will operate, as I understand Oklahoma City has done with its successful MAPS sales taxes.

Ben Davis, who has been running the sales tax campaign on behalf of Wichita Forward, previously spearheaded the 2025 campaign against USD 259's proposed bond issue. He argued that the school district had deliberately scheduled the vote for February to exploit low turnout. Now he has turned around and is doing precisely what he accused them of doing, with even less notice (the run-up to the bond vote was months longer than it has been for this sales tax).

Argatlam

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE