With Wichita city manager Bob Layton retiring, what happens next? | Opinion
After months of rumors, it’s now official. The #FireBob contingent won’t have Robert Layton to kick around anymore.
Layton officially announced his retirement as Wichita City Manager, as of the end of this year.
In his 16-year tenure as the most powerful person in Wichita municipal government (the mayoralty is a distant second), Layton has presided over some of the city’s biggest successes — Eisenhower Airport, the Advanced Learning Library and the Wichita Police Patrol East substation come immediately to mind.
He’s presided over some epic failures — the privatization of the Wichita Ice Center under Rodney and Brandon Steven, City Hall’s response to the police killing of Andrew Finch in one of the country’s most notorious “swatting” cases and the failure of City Hall to collect millions of dollars in parking fees owed by businesses, which led to the deterioration of municipal garage assets and the need to implement widespread paid parking downtown.
He’s presided over some projects where the jury is still out — the Equity Bank Park baseball stadium, the new water treatment plant and the soon-to-come Multi-Agency Center to try to alleviate homelessness.
But over the next nine months, there will be plenty of time to write the history of Layton’s tenure. Some will bid a fond farewell, while others will no doubt say “don’t let the door hit you in the butt.”
The immediate and more important question is “Where do we go from here?”
To his credit, Layton has announced his retirement to give the City Council plenty of time for a smooth handoff from him to his successor.
That’s good.
Cautionary tale
Because of term limits, there’s no one serving on the City Council who has been through this process before. The council members need time to get their bearings because for them, these are uncharted shoals.
Speaking of shoals, the cautionary tale here is what befell Sedgwick County when it hired Michael Scholes as county manager to replace former longtime manager William Buchanan 10 years ago.
After 20 years of mostly trouble-free service from Buchanan, a new conservative majority on the commission wanted a conservative manager and hired Scholes, a former Army brigadier general. His three-year tenure started poorly and ended worse.
Scholes sought to run the county like a paramilitary organization, hiring one of his Army buddies, Tom Golden, into a newly created role as his “chief of staff.” Department heads and ordinary employees alike chafed under their autocratic management style and favoritism, and resigned one after another.
The final straw was a consultant report finding, among other issues, that Scholes had forced employees to fabricate and back-date a performance review to help Golden get another job after the county sent him packing.
Layton’s pending departure from City Hall revitalizes efforts to replace Wichita’s “council-manager” form of government with a “strong mayor” form, in which the mayor would be in charge of the day-to-day running of the city.
Russell Arben Fox, a professor of political science at Friends University and a very smart man, raised that possibility in a Facebook post shortly after Layton made his announcement and the city announced it will conduct a nationwide search for a new manager.
“How about the Wichita City Council DOESN’T do this, but instead we do what Tulsa, and Omaha, and Albuquerque, and Colorado Springs, and KCMO, and dozens of other mid-sized cities through the country have done, and return to the more democratically accountable, more politically effective (and, yes, more partisan polarizing, but you take the good with the bad), strong mayor system that built so many of the great cities throughout the Midwest, South, and Great Plains through the beginning of the 20th century?” he asked.
That’s a fair question, and it should be explored. But it requires deep research into what other advantages may have influenced those cities’ growth and perceived success relative to Wichita’s, beyond the organizational structure of municipal government.
Also, none of our recent mayors have been notable for their public-sector managerial acumen.
Current mayor Lily Wu is a former TV reporter and anchor, and her immediate predecessor, Brandon Whipple, came out of academia and the state Legislature.
Former Mayor Jeff Longwell ran a successful printing business, but stumbled in governmental service when he steered the water treatment plant project to a consortium of his friends. That’s business-as-usual in the private sector, but unacceptable in government, which needs to get the best deal for taxpayers and offer an equal chance to all companies competing for contracts.
Hire locally?
Assuming we don’t completely redesign city government, a national search for a new manager is probably necessary. However we should not ignore local talent.
County Manager Tom Stolz, who rose in public management through the Wichita Police Department and Metropolitan Area Building and Construction Department, took over and stabilized county government after the Scholes disaster. The City Council could do a lot worse than trying to lure him back to City Hall.
Another good candidate would be Kathy Sexton, senior management consultant at the Public Policy and Management Center at Wichita State University. In 2022, she served seven months under contract as interim assistant city manager for Wichita. Before that, she spent 15 years as city manager of Derby and 11 years as assistant county manager (and was a Buchanan protege).
Whether either of them want the job, I don’t know. They’re just two examples of people who know the territory and could do the job. There are others.
After 40 years covering local government (and countless city managers), the best advice I can give the council is resist “shiny new object” syndrome.
Whether from inside or outside, the flashiest candidate is not necessarily the best person for the job, so choose substance over style.
And whatever you do, don’t let left-right politics dictate your choice. That was the mistake Sedgwick County made with Scholes.
If your new hire is a 4-3 vote along party lines, you’ll know you’re doing it wrong.
