A Sedgwick County budget hearing of one

Last summer, dozens of supporters of public health, culture, recreation, economic development and the arts overfilled Sedgwick County’s commission room for the first hearing on the 2016 budget.

This year, there was just Paul Lavender.

The 32-year-old native Wichitan recently returned home after spending six years in Sydney, Abu Dhabi and San Francisco. He said he and his wife returned to Wichita to start a family.

“My priority is quality of life, as a young person looking to start a family just moving back into the city,” Lavender said. “This is home. This is a choice we’ve made. This is where we want to be.”

Lavender said county use of deficit spending in property-tax-supported funds was “extremely concerning.” And he said he was worried about the county burning through its cash reserves.

“What other options do we have, as opposed to a deficit spending policy?” Lavender asked. “I would like to understand the process that went into approving such an aggressive plan.”

A ‘planned approach’

Since Lavender was the only member of the public who spoke, most of the hearing became a back-and-forth between commissioners over the county’s use of cash reserves to pay for capital projects like roads and bridges.

“We have a large amount of reserves, actually larger than what we need,” Commissioner Richard Ranzau said. “So we’re taking a planned approach to use some of that: it’s like you have a lot of money in your savings account.”

“It saves us from borrowing money unnecessarily,” Ranzau said. “We are not going to use up all of our reserves so that we can’t deal with emergency situations.”

Commissioner Tim Norton said he’s opposed to “spending down our cash reserves at the level we have.”

“We’ve worked really hard, at least in the time I’ve been here, to build up the cash reserves to be able to have that ability to do capital projects over the long term,” Norton said.

He touted the benefits of borrowing money for bigger projects by issuing bonds.

“Generations pay for the road and bridge that’s going to be used, not just the people that saved up the cash,” Norton said.

Commissioner Karl Peterjohn called spending cash reserves a prudent use of funds. Commissioner Dave Unruh said he was still concerned about deficit spending.

“We are not using all the financial tools that are available to us,” Unruh said. “We had some very painful cuts last year. This year we have been able to avoid that.”

‘Perhaps they’re happy’

Another hearing on the 2017 county budget will be held at 6 p.m. Aug. 4 on the third floor of the Sedgwick County Courthouse.

The low attendance of the first hearing was not lost on commissioners.

“My takeaway: Perhaps they’re happy with the budget,” Chairman Jim Howell suggested.

Norton said he hoped people didn’t feel like they wouldn’t be heard by commissioners.

“Some of the actions we took last year, after a lot of people weighed in, felt like we didn’t change our ideas about things,” Norton said, looking directly at other commissioners.

Most of last year’s cuts, which were largely unpopular at both hearings, remained in place.

Ranzau and Howell disagreed with Norton, saying commissioners did take the public input into account. Howell pointed to the budget softening cuts to Exploration Place and Project Access.

“There’s a number of things that we changed as a result of the public hearings last year,” Howell said.

Ranzau said the County Commission was criticized inappropriately last summer because of the budget cuts, which he called “necessary and prudent.” He said last August that the budget cuts were also about restoring “core American values.”

“The quality of life of this community has not decreased a single bit as a result of last year’s budget,” Ranzau said. “Nothing bad has happened as a result of our budget decisions last year.”

This story was originally published July 27, 2016 at 2:46 PM with the headline "A Sedgwick County budget hearing of one."