Flap over Mayor Wu and transgender proclamation offers good chance to fix a shady system | Opinion
Maybe the problem really isn’t how Mayor Lily Wu handled a proclamation at the March 18 City Council meeting.
Maybe the problem is the shady way that City Hall proclamations get approved in the first place.
For the past week, Wu has been reviled by many members of the LGBTQ+ community and their supporters after she passed the duty of presenting a proclamation honoring the Transgender Day of Visibility to council member Maggie Ballard, who supports it.
And I’ve caught some backlash myself, after writing a column defending Wu’s free-speech right not to present proclamations she doesn’t agree with.
Let me be clear: I fully support the proclamation, because transgender Americans are under dire and direct threat from President Donald Trump’s warped views on American freedom.
Make no mistake here. Unalloyed hatred of transgender people was fuel for Trump’s campaign, and he promised to punish them if elected. And contrary to what you may have heard leading up to the November election, it wasn’t just talk or “Trump being Trump.”
Since he recaptured the White House, he’s issued orders to legally bind transgender individuals forever to the sex they were assigned at birth, to bar trans persons from military service and to roll back anti-discrimination protection. He’s also signed orders to ban them from sports, to move transgender women to men’s prisons (guess what happens to them there) and to work to erase any trace of their contributions — or even existence — from federal web sites.
But I’m still not sure what we’d accomplish by forcing someone who doesn’t want to to recite and sign a proclamation supporting transgender people — even if an outdated and likely unconstitutional provision in city code says mayors must.
I think that sets a horrendous precedent for government, because next time it could be you being forced to recite or sign something you disagree with.
But setting that issue aside for now, I really want to talk about how the city government decides who gets proclamations — a secretive and potentially illegal process.
Here’s how it works:
▪ The person or organization seeking a city proclamation files an application and the proposed language.
▪ City staff reviews and edits it.
▪ Staff then sends it to the council via email, and if four members respond “yes,” it’s a done deal.
▪ The formal presentation is scheduled for an upcoming meeting or event and the recipient(s) who proposed it is invited to come to receive it.
The public never sees this process and who voted how is hidden from view.
That appears to conflict with the Kansas Open Meetings Act, which reads:
“All meetings for the conduct of the affairs of, and the transaction of business by, all legislative and administrative bodies and agencies of the state and political and taxing subdivisions thereof, including boards, commissions, authorities, councils, committees, subcommittees and other subordinate groups thereof, receiving or expending and supported in whole or in part by public funds shall be open to the public and no binding action by such public bodies or agencies shall be by secret ballot.”
That seems pretty clear.
The Eagle had to file a fairly expensive public records request to get the votes that have been taken on proclamations in years past, and the data is incomplete because of missing records and many instances of council members simply skipping the e-mail votes.
In the main, the proclamations are for safe subjects such as Arbor Day, Child Abuse Prevention Month, Small Business Week, Arkansas River Trash Clean Up Day, etc.
“Upchuck the Turkey Vulture Day” threw me for a bit of a loop, because I didn’t know people around here were eating them, much less technicolor yawning them up afterwards.
Alas, despite that promising title, “Upchuck” turned out to be the name of a bird that turned 30 at the Riverside Park Zoo. So happy birthday to buzzards everywhere, and let’s move on.
In the current atmosphere of prejudice and persecution, Transgender Day of Visibility is more important now than it’s ever been.
If there are council members for it and against it, the public deserves to see that debate play out in public, and they deserve to know where each of their council members stands.
Proclamations could easily be discussed and voted on at the regular meetings of the council on Tuesdays, or in the Friday morning meetings when they set the agenda.
It wouldn’t take a lot of time. Proclamations are limited to three a meeting.
But any public discussion and voting before a decision is made would be a huge improvement over the current secret email voting.
We would have a way of knowing which proclamations are getting approved, and which are getting turned aside, and why.
Plus, it would be a whole lot less ethically and legally questionable than the way it’s being done now.
This story was originally published March 26, 2025 at 5:17 AM.
CORRECTION: This column has been updated to remove references to Mayor Wu not signing the Transgender Day of Visibility proclamation. Wu has said that the omission of the signature line, which is digitally signed, was the result of a clerical error.
