I wrote the book on Kansas small-town sleaze, and didn’t know 'til I got it in the mail | Opinion
Someone really needed to write the book on political corruption and the good-ole-boy network in Stafford County.
Imagine my surprise when I got a book in the mail and found out I did — or at least a lot of it.
Someone working under the anonymous byline of “Three Concerned Kansans” has published a book called “A Souvenir of Stafford County, Kansas.” The subtitle: “The Prettiest Town on Paper — The Ugliest Truth Between the Covers.”
The book is a collection of news reports about, let’s just say, questionable conduct by government officials and locally prominent businesspersons. Someone anonymously sent me the paperback.
Of the 112 pages in the book, 48 are reprints of my columns and 38 are copies of social media posts by my friend and former Eagle colleague, Beccy Tanner. She lives in St. John and started a Facebook page to recount local happenings in the newspaperless county.
The rest is odds and ends — a couple of stories by other journalists, letters to the editor, copies of original documents and such. The book was assembled and published anonymously, so we don’t know who to send a cease-and-desist to about the copyright violations involved.
I am gratified that whoever assembled this book didn’t do it for money, but as a cautionary tale of what happens to a community when a small cadre of insiders obtains too much power and control.
Small town machinations
The book begins with one of my columns about the time the city of Stafford — in the name of weed control — hired a guy to literally mow down a new resident’s dream to establish a six-acre prairie bird habitat, with a bed-and-breakfast for visitors to the nearby Quivira National Wildlife Refuge.
The owner of the property, Daniel Wallach, (who was instrumental in rebuilding tornado-shattered Greensburg into a model city for environmentalism and renewable energy) had his Stafford plan set back years. His junior partner got charged with assault for chasing the mower guy away with a brush knife before the destruction was complete (he got probation and has since cleared it).
.JPG "IMG_8951 (2).JPG")
The bulk of the book chronicles another instance of “You ain’t from here, what’cha doin’ here?” in the neighboring town of St. John.
It contains several columns I wrote about the strange case of Mike Rosseau and Dorothy Tobe, a married couple in their 60s who got pushed out of Denver by the overheated real estate market, and bought a deconsecrated abandoned church building in St. John to turn into their home.
The plan conflicted with a prominent local businessman who had his own designs on the church building and deep ties to the city government. City Hall charged the couple with a criminal violation of the zoning code — while ignoring blatant violations by the local gentry — for sleeping on the property while converting it to housing.
The townspeople, to their credit, rallied around the couple by raising money for their legal bills (the charges were ultimately dropped), and they voted out some of the councilpeople involved.
It took more than a year for the couple to be able to move in, which they eventually accomplished by establishing a small business in the basement and living on the upper floor (city code allows that). During their period of homelessness, they worked on the church by day and slept in their Realtor’s guest room, or a small cabin they were lent by a supporter.
Back to St. John
It looks like I might need to return to Stafford County in the near future.
In the course of reporting this column, I discovered that the St. John City Council is contemplating putting a referendum on the ballot for a 1% sales tax.
To quote from the movie “Dodge Ball”: “It’s a bold strategy, Cotton, let’s see if it pays off for ‘em.“
We tried the sales tax thing here in Wichita a couple of months ago and it got curb stomped, 42,513 noes to 9,519 yeses.
Pro tip for proponents of the St. John tax plan: Whatever you do, don’t accuse the other side of being in league with the Kansas Communist Party.
They tried that here, and it’s the leader in the clubhouse for biggest political blunder in Wichita history. It alienated the undecideds and energized the “no” voters to turn out in droves.
Also, I found out there’s a petition circulating in St. John to try to save a historic building that formerly housed the local post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. I need to find out what that’s all about.
And that’s why I’d rather write columns than books — every day brings something new.
