Pachyderm Club hosts District 5 City Council forum

Three contenders for the District 5 City Council seat said Friday that they voted against the citywide sales tax proposal last fall.

The fourth didn’t vote on it because he found the proposal too confusing.

The candidates for the seat in west Wichita – north of Maple and west of I-235 – spoke at a forum at the Wichita Pachyderm Club. They seek to replace council member Jeff Longwell, who is running for mayor.

Club members, generally Republicans or Libertarians, asked the candidates a myriad of questions, including how they voted on the 1-cent-on-the-dollar sales tax proposal that failed last November.

The four candidates for District 5 are:

▪ William Beliles, 21, a Butler Community College student

▪ Gary Bond, 57, marketing and sales for Top Master, a countertop company

▪ James F. Breitenbach, 79, farmer and retired civil servant

▪ Bryan Frye, 48, marketing director for KAKE-TV and president of the Wichita Park Board, a seven-member advisory board.

Frye, Bond and Breitenbach said they voted against the sales tax.

Frye voted no because, he said, “the sales tax was a quick, easy attempt to fix long-term ills,” while Bond said he thinks the four aspects of the sales tax (water, streets, transit and jobs) were valid, but they shouldn’t have been bundled.

Breitenbach said he opposed the water plan in the sales tax because it was “a disaster” and that he wasn’t convinced the city’s plan to expand the aquifer storage and recovery project (ASR) was a good idea. Instead, he proposes expanding Cheney Reservoir over the next 50 years and including Wichita in the governor’s water plan.

Part of the sales tax money would have gone toward expanding an existing water source, the city’s ASR facility northwest of Wichita. The ASR pulls water out of the Little Arkansas River and stores it in the Equus Beds, a sprawling underground aquifer where the city has wells.

Beliles said he didn’t vote on the sales tax measure at all, because it was too confusing and he didn’t understand it.

All four candidates say they would favor saving Century II over razing it for a new performing arts center and that the city and county should look at ways to consolidate services without decreasing quality.

Bond and Frye also supported the idea of thorough auditing of all city departments to find inefficiencies.

John Todd, vice president of the Pachyderm Club, said the group does not endorse any particular candidate.

“I was impressed with the quality of the candidates and think we could do well with any of the four,” Todd said.

The March 3 primary will narrow the field to two candidates ahead of the general election April 7.

This story was originally published February 13, 2015 at 6:01 PM with the headline "Pachyderm Club hosts District 5 City Council forum."