Election endorsement: The obvious choice for Wichita’s 3rd City Council District | Opinion

Voters seldom have a clearer choice than they do in Wichita City Council District 3.

The Wichita Eagle strongly recommends returning incumbent Mike Hoheisel to office for another four years in next Tuesday’s election.

Residents of District 3, primarily the southeast corner of the city, have for decades borne the brunt of urban problems: lack of public amenities, crime, homelessness, illegal dumping and an omnipresent stench from the city’s sewage treatment plant.

These are the things that bother the people of south Wichita. And they’re the things that bother Hoheisel as well. He has been a tireless and effective advocate at City Hall to improve the quality of life in Wichita and ensure the 3rd District gets its share.

For example:

A new and much-needed community center for the Planeview area is finally starting to take shape.

The city and county are building a multiagency shelter with an array of services to not just house homeless people, but help them break cycles of poverty and addiction that got them there.

Progress is being made toward crime control, with new gunshot detection technology being deployed and improved camera coverage in trouble spots.

Illegal dumping is being cracked down on, and odor-control measures are being installed at the sewage plant, due to be completed next year.

Above all, Hoheisel has a heart for the common people.

He was one of only two votes on the council against hiring an out-of-state company to charge us for parking downtown (and write the parking tickets), a move by City Hall that discourages lower-income residents from south of Kellogg from taking advantage of downtown amenities.

There is work yet to do. For one thing, City Hall needs to come closer to keeping the promises it made to District 3 for a major regional destination park when the city closed Clapp Golf Course. A disabled-accessible playground and dog park are a start, but only a start. Most of the parkland is still tied up by a privatized disc golf operation that generates token income for the city, which was supposed to be a short-term stopgap but is now looking more and more permanent.

Hoheisel is by far the best candidate to push for further improvements, at Clapp Park and elsewhere in the southeast quadrant of the city.

His opponent, Genevieve Howerton, is deeply lacking in everything that makes Hoheisel an effective representative.

If she has any experience in community advocacy, she hides it well. Her website lists no participation in any organization working for the betterment of District 3.

She did appear once before the City Council to support a call to delay the Planeview Community Center project for further study, although it’s already been studied to death and back.

We would have asked her about this, but she’s consistently ghosted us, and by extension, the people of the district.

When the Wichita Journalism Collaborative sought to host a campaign forum for the 3rd District’s voters, organizers attempted to reach Howerton for over a month to arrange a date.

Days before the forum, we were forced to announce that the event would be converted to a town hall format featuring Hoheisel alone, because Howerton didn’t return repeated phone calls, emails or messages left at her office.

After that column ran, she responded with the excuse that an email inviting her to the event had gone to her spam box (no mention of the multiple attempts to reach her by other means), and she said she had a prior commitment. The collaborative offered to hold a forum when she could be there. She declined, because of the column in The Eagle.

Then she claimed on social media, “For the record, we have responded to their invitation to this event invite on more than one occasion.”

We’d like to see the receipts on that, because we tried every way we could think of to reach out to her, with no response we can find.

Howerton’s campaign hinges on name recognition (her mother is a state representative), endorsements from career politicians and outside spending by political machine interests.

If there was ever a time not to be fooled by slick mailers from political operators in Washington, D.C., this is it.

Howerton is a wannabe politician. Hoheisel is south Wichita.

Choose wisely.

— For the purpose of endorsements, the Eagle Editorial Board includes opinion editor Dion Lefler, opinion correspondent Joel Mathis, online producer Julie Mah and McClatchy Media executive Tony Berg, who lives in Wichita. The news department is separate from the board.

This story was originally published October 29, 2025 at 5:07 AM.