Wichita council member’s version of DOGE inflates potential budget savings

A citizen advisory group for Wichita City Council member Dalton Glasscock says it has identified tens of millions of dollars in potential savings in the city’s budget.

But the potential savings are inflated based on unverifiable sources of information, apples-to-oranges comparisons between city budgets and an unscientific survey that did not poll a representative sample of Wichita residents, an Eagle analysis of the panel’s report and survey found.

Those savings would also require a series of politically perilous moves, including almost $47 million in cuts to public safety spending, procurement policy changes, clawbacks from incentives to developers and a funding freeze for the city’s tourism bureau.

The report claims the city could save up to $75 million a year by matching the lowest per capita spending on services in Springfield, Missouri; Tulsa; Omaha; and Sioux Falls. It also identifies nearly $72 million in potential savings from unspent contract funds, unmanaged expenditures without a purchase order and “unoptimized” P-card — or employee credit card — purchases.

The Wichita Organization for Government Efficiency Exchange’s probe into some of the city’s economic development deals and other contracts also found $27.2 million in what it calls “recoverable or avoidable costs from weak enforcement, unpaid debt, rent discrepancies, and missed revenue opportunities.”

Multiple members of the panel acknowledged the report has shortcomings, but they say they stand behind the group’s work. The point isn’t to provide an exact roadmap but, instead, to get the community and elected officials thinking critically about the budget and discussing, they said.

“We’ve had great conversations with city leaders, but ultimately, the decision will be up to them,” said Michael Austin, a Lawrence resident and Topeka-based legislative director for Americans for Prosperity and a former chief economist for Govs. Sam Brownback and Jeff Colyer, who led the WOGE panel.

“We’re just a bunch of volunteers,” Austin said. “We’re not being paid for this. ... And we’re kind of presenting this as a take it or leave it.”

The panel is not an official city committee, and the council has taken no action to officially recognize it or grant it any authority over the city’s decisions. The city paid no money for the report, and members of the WOGE group had limited access to financial information from the city.

Several WOGE members presented their findings during the public comment portion of Thursday night’s council meeting, where the report was distributed to the public.

Glasscock said at the meeting that he appreciated the group’s work and that the survey results provide a “mandate” to the council that it should consider cuts before increasing taxes.

“Wichita residents expect transparency and measurable efficiency improvements before any increase in the financial burden on taxpayers is considered,” Glasscock said. “And I appreciate this line: ‘For policy makers, this provides both a mandate and a roadmap. Reform first, justify second.’”

Glasscock said he thinks the recommendations by the WOGE group — many of which are already in the works by the city — are not controversial, including:

• Implement centralized purchasing, accounts payable and receivable controls through the finance department.
• Require competitive bidding for all purchases over $50,000, with no exceptions.
• Consolidate P-card and one-time vendors into formal contracts to reduce duplication.
• Conduct quarterly reviews of contract utilization to flag overbudgeting and underuse.
• Enforce clawbacks within six months for underperforming developers.
• Require all developer debts over $50,000 to be disclosed in public financial reports.
• Publish an annual efficiency audit highlighting contract utilization, clawback enforcement and vendor compliance.

Glasscock did not mention several other recommendations, such as relocating Visit Wichita, prohibiting deals with vendors or developers who are in litigation with the city, and posting all major development agreements and financial disclosures online in a searchable format.

He dismissed potential inaccuracies in the report and said he was not involved in the group’s work beyond calling for members to search the budget for efficiencies.

“If even 1 percent of your recommendations are true, this could save the city $720,000,” Glasscock said. “Even if 1 percent is true. So I’m thankful for the work that you did. . . . I specifically did not involve myself in this process because I want to be held accountable from this group and this organization as well.”

Public safety cuts?

The largest savings highlighted in the report are a $46,901,789 spending cut from the city’s general fund for public safety, which includes the police department, fire department and municipal court; more than $50 million in savings from overbudgeted projects; and $20.7 million from new restrictions on spending without a purchase order or contract.

No specific cuts to public safety are outlined in the report. The nearly $47 million cut would make Wichita’s per-capita spending match what Springfield, Missouri, residents pay out of the general fund. It does not consider other tax revenue Springfield uses to pay for public safety, including an extra property tax, a sales tax and a special grant funding program.

“The most striking difference is in Public Safety, where Wichita spent $456 per resident,” the report reads. “In contrast, Springfield — the low-cost leader — spent only $338, suggesting potential savings of $46.9M if Wichita adopted similar cost structures.”

The WOGE report acknowledges the complexity of municipal budgets and multiple revenue sources makes “apples-to-apples comparisons difficult” and says “lower spending does not always translate to better outcomes or more efficient government.”

“Springfield, Missouri, for instance, spends less per resident on Public Safety, but also experiences a higher crime rate than many comparable metro areas, suggesting that their spending levels may be insufficient, not more efficient.”

More than $71 million in savings from vendor payments are based on estimates derived from unverifiable sources, The Eagle found. The footnotes in the report cite multiple broken URLs to blog posts on procurement company websites and a seemingly unrelated podcast.

“These figures are grounded in recognized procurement benchmarks and present Wichita with realistic, research-backed targets,” the report reads.

Austin said he hopes City Hall will heed WOGE’s recommendations. But he acknowledges it’s unlikely everything will be adopted.

“It’s not our responsibility what the city decides to do with it,” Austin said. “We just want Wichita to be in a better place, and we hope something can be taken from this report.”

Council members seemed receptive to parts of the report that called for transparency in awarding contracts, as well as ensuring the city was collecting fully on economic development incentives. Some signaled they weren’t interested in the peer city comparisons, including public safety cuts.

“None of the recommendations that they offer in here were cuts to services,” Glasscock said. “They were, how do we create more efficiency? How do we hold things accountable?”

‘Finding a better way’

The WOGE report, titled “Finding a Better Way,” has undergone multiple revisions since last month. The Wichita Eagle obtained a copy of the first two versions of the report from the city under the Kansas Open Records Act.

Austin provided a third version to The Eagle on Wednesday afternoon, which city officials confirmed was also the third version shared with them. It included minor typo corrections and a new set of redactions in the survey responses.

The newest version redacted comments that were critical of Austin, Mayor Lily Wu and the Koch family while keeping disparaging posts about the Steven family, Michael O’Donnell and City Manager Robert Layton.

A comment that suggested the city could save money if it would “Eliminate Lily Wu” is blacked out. A separate comment that suggests the city “eliminate city manager” remains visible along with another comment that says to “get rid of the city manager and the two assistants.” Another comment calls for Layton to be criminally charged “for his terrible development deals.”

The other redactions include “(Expletive) Michael Austin, he’s a little (expletive) 1” and multiple swear words in a post calling for more taxation of the Koch family.

The WOGE Exchange was formed earlier this year as a local version of President Donald Trump’s Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, in response to a projected budget deficit. The expected deficit was largely negated by updated financial forecasts earlier this year, but could return in 2028 after the council decided to cut the mill levy rate in response to the rosier financial outlook.

Besides Austin, the group included John Whitmer, the chairman of the Sedgwick County Republican Party; Marcia Brungardt, an executive officer with Republican Women United; former chairwoman of the Sedgwick County Republican Party Deb Lucia and her husband Pat, a Republican precinct committeeman; Republican Carl Maughan, a former state representative who ended his reelection campaign after being charged with possessing a loaded firearm while driving under the influence; Celeste Racette, a former Democratic candidate for the Sedgwick County Commission who campaigned for mayor in 2023 on the promise that she could eliminate enough waste in the city budget to not exceed the revenue-neutral rate; and Henry Helgerson, a fiscally conservative Democratic state representative.

Whitmer, a former state representative and a conservative talk-radio host, said the top priority for Wichitans is cutting property taxes, and he wanted to be involved to help provide areas of potential spending cuts that could result in real tax savings.

“Oftentimes — I mean, I served in the Legislature — there’s a lot of times when they say, you know, well, we don’t know where to cut. There’s no place to cut,” Whitmer said. “This eliminates that excuse. The city council can no longer claim, well, we don’t have any place to cut.”

Whitmer said it’s on the council to decide what from the report is followed.

“They may not like some of the proposals or some of the suggestions, but we’ve given them the toolbox, the tools. Now, if they don’t like them, at least now they don’t have the excuse that there’s no place (to cut). Some of them could be painful. Some of them aren’t. There’s a lot of easy things, certainly enough to fill the budget shortfall without raising taxes.”

Uncollected taxes, other plans

Part of the report largely criticizes how the city has used economic development incentives — a yearslong project for local activist Racette, who authored a section on economic development savings for the WOGE group.

Racette, who has an extensive background in accounting, auditing and fraud investigations, was one of two Democrats on the panel. She said she was happy to join the group and to have an opportunity to try to force the City Council to be accountable for some of the questionable dealings she has uncovered in recent years.

“Where would I find a better platform for pointing out areas of improvement than what we’re doing right now? How many times have I stood up by myself in City Council to point out something that didn’t make sense or was a poor decision? Now, I have a group I’m working with that cares about this and is trying to do their best to publicize what we found. That has never happened for me before.”

Racette’s section of the WOGE report examined a batch of tax incentives and identified $27.2 million in potential revenue recovery, but she said in an interview that at least half of that money will likely never be recovered.

It includes $13.3 million in uncollected parking-fee increases from business owners in Old Town that the city failed to bill over decades. The city would likely have difficulty recovering the cost for its own failure to increase prices. Another $7 million is what the city has in its capital improvement plan for Crystal Prairie Lake Park, which the WOGE report says should be fully funded by a private developer. It’s listed as $7 million in savings.

The $27.2 million figure also includes almost $3 million that the city is already seeking in lawsuits over the Ken Mar TIF district and the Wichita Ice Center.

New findings by Racette include an estimated $800,000 a year that the city is failing to collect through its Community Improvement District taxes across the city. She conducted spot checks in multiple districts and found many retailers are not charging an up-to 2% sales tax at their businesses.

She said that’s a ballpark figure based on tax collections because she does not have access to state tax records. She was also limited in what information she could receive because the WOGE group had to rely on information obtained through Kansas Open Records Act requests and often had follow-up questions that city officials would not answer.

She said the city could also realize immediate savings by moving Visit Wichita from the WaterWalk to a city-owned building and cutting the CEO’s salary. The city should also move its Old Town police substation from a private lease to a public building to save $50,000 a year.

Additional savings to the tune of $639,955 could come from early repayment of a debt the city took on for the Fairfield Inn & Suites at Main and Dewey, near the WaterWalk, Racette said.

The WOGE report also criticizes the city for allowing private companies to manage some of its public properties, including the Ice Center and Stryker Sports Complex. Racette said Wichita Sports Forum, which manages Stryker, has entered naming rights agreements without written approval by the city. She also cited unpaid water bills and other utilities charges that the city was paying for unknown reasons until August of last year.

“It’s a mess, and trying to get answers from anybody is extremely difficult,” Racette said.

“Multiple tools, including TIFs, CIDs, IRBs, and privatized management agreements, have been misused,” the report reads.

The report said these agreements have led to millions of dollars in outstanding debt, including $1.8 million from the Ken Mar TIF district, which city council members recently rejected a $400,000 settlement for.

As a result, the report recommends the city not work with developers who are noncompliant in their contracts.

Other recommendations made include disclosing all loans above $50,000 to developers and fully recovering balances owed instead of settling for less than the total debt owed.

It asks the city to conduct routine audits to ensure retailers are in full compliance with the tax districts.

Critical response

The Eagle shared a copy of the report with Chase Billingham, a Wichita State University sociology professor who teaches and trains students in how to perform and interpret survey results.

Billingham said WOGE’s report was flawed from top to bottom.

“It is — quite literally — a waste of paper if they printed it out,” Billingham said. “It should be entirely disregarded, and the people who wrote it should be thanked and sent on their way. The City Manager and the budget officers in the city government should spend zero minutes reading or trying to interpret this report.”

One of the most obvious problems he noticed in the report was in the demographics section of the survey, he said. Only about 20% of respondents were under the age of 44 while the largest age group (36.95%) was 65 or older. The median age in Wichita is 35.

Nearly 88% of respondents claimed to own their residence. That’s significantly higher than the 58.4% reported in Census Bureau data.

“This is not remotely a representative sample of residents of the city of Wichita, which is what it purports to be,” Billingham said.

The problem went beyond who answered the questions. It was in the way the questions were framed, too, he said.

“The questions were not written, obviously, by trained survey methodologists,” Billingham said. “They were written by political operatives with specific agendas. And you will find that many of the specific political agendas that the people who made up that committee tend to espouse in public are reflected in the content of the questions themselves.”

For example, one question says “Considering the City of Wichita’s projected General Fund shortfall, do you believe the city’s automatic 2% annual increase to arts funding should be: Maintained as is, reduced, suspended temporarily until the budget is stabilized, eliminated permanently, unsure.”

The budget shortfall is no longer projected, but was projected during the formation of the committee. Wichita does not automatically increase arts funding by 2% each year. Budgets for individual capital improvement projects have 2% of their funding set aside for public art.

Other examples include “How concerned are you that Wichita may be losing money through inefficient contracting practices?” and “How important is it to you that Wichita city leaders enforce strong accountability for developers receiving public funding?” and “Do you support a review of vendor spending to reduce waste before any tax increases are considered?”

Billingham said the report is completely out of step with regular city business.

“It is a completely irregular attempt by one council member, Dalton Glasscock, to deputize non-official political operatives to try to persuade the public that these people are voices that ought to be listened to in shaping public policy,” Billingham said. “It’s anti-democratic, and it goes against standard practice of how municipal governments should operate.”

Glasscock pushed back on Billingham’s statements, saying he’s glad citizens are engaging in city government.

“I think engagement is a good thing. I was removed from this entire process,” Glasscock said. “I think it’s offensive to say that citizens can’t engage in the process. I think it’s an elitist attitude.”

Austin acknowledged the survey responses are not a “representative sample,” meaning they are not meant to represent broader public opinion on the questions posed in the survey.

“We didn’t want to encourage any criticism that we were manipulating the survey so the results that you see here are exactly as they came in,” Austin said. “All that we did was test the numbers to see whether it was statistically significant in terms of the responses that we got.”

This story was originally published August 7, 2025 at 5:27 PM.