City staff floats cuts to police and fire staffing, sales tax to offset $55M shortfall

Wichita is considering cuts to public safety staffing and a potential sales tax referendum to offset a projected budget shortfall of more than $55 million between 2026 and 2028.

Cuts to firefighter staffing by $12.6 million and police staffing by $9 million over three years are among the 35 options that were presented to the Wichita City Council on Tuesday. Cuts to the fire department budget would eliminate 42 firefighter positions; police cuts would eliminate funding for vacant officer positions.

City staff said Tuesday afternoon that cuts to public safety are unavoidable as wage increases continue to outpace revenue. Public safety spending is by far the city’s largest expense in its current budget. The police department’s $120 million budget is 38% of the general fund while the fire department’s $70 million budget is 21%. The City Council appears to have no desire to raise the mill levy.

The city projects shortfalls of $12.9 million in 2026, $20.6 million in 2027 and nearly $22 million in 2028.

But the move to cut public safety would force many City Council members to break campaign promises they made about police and fire staffing and deviate from existing plans to enhance public safety.

J.V. Johnston, who represents northwest Wichita on the council, a growing area of the city that was identified as needing an additional fire station to meet 4-minute response times, pushed back on the idea of spending more money on the fire department. His comments sparked a heated exchange with Council member Maggie Ballard and condemnation from the head of the Wichita Firefighters’ Union, who said it appears he’s trying to pit police and fire against each other in a fight over funding.

“I think we need to look at all options to make sure we have a balanced budget,” Johnston said.

“But at what expense — public safety for people that aren’t adequately covered?” Council member Maggie Ballard responded. “That’s our job is to protect them, too.”

Johnston said a 4-minute fire response time is optimal, but noted that all options should be on the table to balance the budget.

“What’s the response time for police?” Johnston said. “It’s a lot more than four minutes. So you have to balance the police coverage with fire coverage with all the different needs of the community.”

“But we can’t talk about public safety and that be one of the major things that we cut,” Ballard said in response.

Wichita firefighters’ union president Ted Bush was visibly upset with Johnston during and after the meeting.

Bush said he had a meeting with Johnston regarding fire preparedness in District 5, but Johnston refused to look at data Bush presented him.

“I’m almost speechless,” Bush said. “He’s the worst I’ve ever seen, as far as when it comes to the fire safety in his district and in the city of Wichita.”

Johnston defended his comments after the budget workshop. He said he looked at the fire data presented by Bush, but declined to say whether he was convinced District 5 needs another fire station, saying he needs to “study it some more.”

“When you have a budget deficit, you need to look at everything,” he said. But he said the city should not consider any cuts to the police budget. He would not make the same commitment to the fire department.

“They’re both important, but we need to analyze each one independently,” Johnston said.

Other recommendations

The 35-point list of recommendations also includes a $3.5 million cut over three years to park maintenance staffing, $2 million in savings from a “health insurance plan redesign” and a $9 million freeze to across-the-board city staff pay increases.

City Manager Robert Layton is scheduled to present the official 2025-26 proposed budget to the City Council during a public meeting on July 16. Approval of the budget options presented on Tuesday won’t come until the summer of 2025.

Layton said the 2026-2028 recommendations would halt using the capital improvement project budget for new projects in those years, instead focusing on maintenance, other than public works and utilities projects. He said any new enhancements could be covered by a sales tax referendum.

“So for park improvement projects, for fire stations, police stations, under this concept you would then go out for referendum — probably for sales tax,” Layton said.

“It’s just a concept that we’ve kicked around a little bit, but we haven’t really refined it all,” Layton said. “The question is do you want to bring to the public enhancements and allow them to vote on those, or do you want us to continue to do the CIP the way we do and try to balance maintenance projects with enhancements.”

Council member Brandon Johnson said he worries that voters would reject a sales tax and that the council is better positioned to approve spending on future projects.

“I always like going out to the voters on that, but will we get to a point where the nice things that we want to see in parts of our community — will they actually happen?” Johnson said. “We have to combat misinformation now. We’ve seen that with other things, and how much can we really do to gauge whether people are wanting to settle for what we have or truly invest in ourselves.

“We’ve been talking about that so long, even with Project Wichita, and it just seems that oftentimes as we come up with things than can improve our quality of life, and in those discussions, a lot of people settle. And I think if this body was making decisions for those nicer things — our aquatics plan and all of that — we make better decisions more times than not, and our community benefits from it.”

This story was originally published June 5, 2024 at 2:22 PM.