How will new commissioners change county government?

David Dennis and Michael O’Donnell are going to replace Karl Peterjohn and Tim Norton on the Sedgwick County Commission in 2017.

So what can residents expect from a commission with two new faces? And will some of the county’s decisions in the past two years be reversed?

“I don’t know,” Commissioner Richard Ranzau said last week following Tuesday’s election. “I was talking to people yesterday and today about that.

“It’s hard to know for sure. … It’s going to come down to individual issues.”

Commission Chairman Jim Howell had similar thoughts.

“It’s going to be hard to answer that question definitively for a couple weeks before we get used to working with each other,” Howell said. “(But) David Dennis and Michael O’Donnell represent more of a middle point (than Peterjohn and Norton).”

District 3 voters in western Sedgwick County picked Dennis, a retired Air Force colonel, over Goddard Mayor Marcey Gregory by a comfortable margin. Dennis will replace Peterjohn, one of the conservative commissioners on the current commission majority. Dennis defeated him in the Republican primary in August.

Norton lost a tight race to O’Donnell in District 2, which includes Haysville, Clearwater and parts of southwest Wichita. Norton was the commission’s lone Democrat and the most consistent vote against the majority on split votes.

O’Donnell, a former state senator, said he would work well with the other four commissioners, who are Republicans like him.

“It really comes down to a case-by-case basis,” O’Donnell said.

‘We need to reconsider that’

Commissioner Dave Unruh, who often voted with Norton on split issues, said he thinks the commission will be “less extreme.” Unruh did not endorse O’Donnell in the election.

“Tim has been a good ally, and we’ve developed a great relationship,” Unruh said.

“I believe that Michael will be somewhat less of an ideologue than what we’ve had on the commission the last couple of years,” he added. “I really think that Michael will, for the most part, have sound judgment.”

Unruh said he didn’t want to assume what issues the new commissioners would want to reconsider.

“I’m not inclined to want to revisit every issue that I was not in the majority for the last couple of years,” Unruh said.

But Unruh said he’d be interested in the county rejoining the Regional Economic Area Partnership and potentially offering immunizations for international travel, a county health department service that commissioners voted to cut from the 2017 budget this summer.

“I’ve been contacted by several people who said it was a hardship,” Unruh said. “It makes it difficult for them to find.

“I’ve had enough comment from constituents that I think we need to reconsider that.”

Howell said the new commission could be more open to using debt to pay for capital projects like roads and bridges.

The current majority has shifted to paying for some of those smaller projects with cash reserves instead of debt.

“I think we can go ahead and put that tool back in the toolbox to bond certain projects,” Dennis said.

Howell also suggested the next budget cycle could see more interest in restoring cuts made last summer to arts, culture, recreation, economic development and the county health department. Those cuts were largely unpopular at public hearings, making some think commissioners did not listen to the public.

“They both talked about basically revisiting the cuts in 2015 and maybe they’d like to undo some of those things,” Howell said.

‘Going forward’

O’Donnell said he wasn’t planning on “revisiting the current budget.” He said he never campaigned against past county cuts, but he did say in the summer that he would have voted against the 2016 budget because it cut the Wichita Area Technical College and health care program Project Access.

O’Donnell said he was focused on “what we need to do going forward.”

Howell said the county will likely go ahead and place gun lockers in the county courthouse lobby. He suggested victories by Norton and Gregory, both critics of the gun lockers, could have reversed last month’s vote to spend $64,318 to place the lockers.

“If Tim was still here and Marcey had won … why would they not bring up the issue?” Howell asked. “It would have been reasonable for them to raise that.”

Dennis also said he would be interested in setting up citizen advisory boards for each commissioner to gather public input.

“Even if it’s just for me, I don’t think it would be very expensive to set up,” Dennis said.

Unruh said the two candidates would improve the county’s relationships with the city of Wichita and the Sedgwick County Zoo board, which Unruh thinks have grown worse under the current majority.

O’Donnell said he already had talked with city leaders like Mayor Jeff Longwell and City Council member Jeff Blubaugh about improving county relations with the city.

“We’ve already started that today,” O’Donnell said.

No ‘lame-duck’ commission

Howell supported Peterjohn in the Republican primary. But Howell said he could work well with Dennis, pointing to his support for the gun lockers and the property tax lid on local governments.

“We agree on probably more than we disagree on,” Howell said. “And I think that he’s going to be a good fit for the commission.

“He has been a critic of the majority, but there’s been a number of things he’s come out and has supported us in.”

Howell said there would be less conflict on the new commission when it takes its seats in January. Howell said he hopes to seek the input of O’Donnell and Dennis before then.

He added he does not want a “lame-duck” commission that will vote on numerous contentious issues before Peterjohn and Norton leave.

“I’m not trying to race a clock here and jam a bunch of things in,” Howell said. “I want just the opposite.”

Howell says he felt “disrespected” that county commissioners voted to buy the former IRS building downtown and contribute $5.3 million for the zoo’s elephant barn in late 2014 before he joined in the commission in early 2015.

“I don’t think it’s respectful to the process to just push a bunch of stuff through just because they perceive they have the votes now,” Howell said.

This story was originally published November 13, 2016 at 6:33 PM with the headline "How will new commissioners change county government?."