Sedgwick County asks for help to remove federal rules for northeast park

County leaders and U.S. Rep. Ron Estes are working to remove federal protections from Northeast Sedgwick County Park.

The 650-acre park near Benton has sat undeveloped since the county acquired it in 2011 from the city of Wichita. It’s mainly used for horseback riding and hiking.

The federal protection from the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act was placed on the land before the county acquired it, mainly to protect a spotted skunk species. It limits the use of the park to parkland and doesn’t allow for it to be sold.

Estes, who represents south-central Kansas, recently introduced legislation to remove the federal protections from the land after commissioners signed off on a letter asking him to do so.

“Local Kansas communities should be able to make decisions about how to use their land without federal strings attached,” Estes said in a news release. “My legislation will ... restore local control of the land to the Sedgwick County Commission instead of allowing the federal bureaucracy more than a thousand miles away to limit its use.”

County Commissioner Pete Meitzner he’s unsure what will happen to the parkland if the protections are removed.

“We don’t have any plans to do anything with it,” he said, “because we can’t.”

“The goal is just to remove the encumbrance to free up whatever it is that might pop up immediately or long term or down the road,” he said.

In the letter submitted in support of the legislation, commissioners left options open for a possible sale of the land.

The letter says any funds from a possible sale of the land could go toward the county’s cultural and recreational properties.

“We deeply value the purpose of the LWCF Act in fostering public outdoor spaces,” the letter reads. “However, the Northeast Sedgwick County Park does not serve a comparable role, prompting our request to re-evaluate its encumbrance.”

Some residents pushed back on the idea of selling the land at a recent county meeting.

“Being so close to a conservation area, I think developing that land is dangerous,” Faith Martin said. “I also do not advocate for selling public land to private entities when we have so few public spaces left to us.”

This isn’t the first time commissioners sought to remove federal protections from county property.

In 2017, commissioners sought to remove the same federal protections on property at Lake Afton Park in Goddard. Estes also introduced legislation to remove those protections, but the bill didn’t move past its committee assignments.

Meitzner said he’s optimistic that protections at the northeast park would be removed.

“There’s a lot of conflict and fight [that] goes on in Washington,” he said, “but in this kind of thing, there’s a better spirit of cooperation on stuff.”

However, at a Wichita Regional Chamber of Commerce lunch, Estes cautioned that the legislation may not pass this year, but that there could be other means of working with the Trump administration to remove the encumbrance.

“I‘m not going to commit to you right now [that] we’re going to get that done by the end of December,” Estes said at the luncheon. “But in the particular matter dealing with this land, I think it’s another issue that we can push on other directions as well.”