Wichita City Council whiffs again on proclamations | Opinion
Come on, Wichita City Council, if you can’t even get ceremonial proclamations right, how do you expect us to trust you with important things?
Friday’s Wichita City Council agenda review marked yet another meaningless exercise in getting it wrong on proclamations.
A month and a half later, the council is still reeling from the political firestorm that whipped up following the city’s first official proclamation recognizing Transgender Day of Visibility.
That’s the one proclamation that Mayor Lily Wu didn’t sign and didn’t present at the council meeting, leaving those duties to council member Maggie Ballard instead.
Since then:
▪ Wu has been all over the place with explanations of what happened during and before that meeting.
▪ The city’s Ethics Advisory Board has received a raft of complaints that they’ll have to sort out.
▪ City Hall’s fulfillment of Kansas Open Records Act requests from this newspaper to get to the bottom of this have been unrevealing and are most likely incomplete.
▪ A significant segment of the Sedgwick County Republican Party precinct committee still wants to try to punish council member Becky Tuttle for voting for the proclamation, because they’re bigots and she’s not. The last meeting of the county GOP committee dissolved into an embarrassing shouting match when party leaders announced they were tabling the anonymously filed resolution against Tuttle, and anti-LGBTQ members of the group refused to let it go.
So now that you’re up to speed, what did the council do Friday?
Not a whole lot.
Does it really need to be this hard?
The anger and frustration over the transgender proclamation has spotlighted the selective and secretive process that has been used for years to move items from proposals submitted by members of the public to proclamations by the council.
When City Hall would get proclamation requests from an individual or group, city staff would screen them and then send them to the council members via email, asking them to vote on whether or not they wanted the proclamation to go forward.
If four council members voted yes, the proponents were notified when they could come receive their proclamation at a council meeting, or in some cases at their own events off site.
Nobody paid much attention to this in the past, because almost all City Hall proclamations are slam dunks. There’s little opposition to encouraging people to plant a tree on Arbor Day, or thanking volunteers for picking trash out of the Arkansas River, to cite two recent examples.
Is that a yes or a no, or an abstention?
In response to the self-inflicted Transgender Day of Visibility debacle, the city staff, led by City Manager Robert Layton, is adding the results of the email votes on proclamations to the weekly agenda starting this week.
That’s generating more confusion.
For example, Tuesday’s council agenda includes this entry, on a proclamation for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month: “Yes Votes (Wu, Johnson, Tuttle, Hoheisel, Glasscock, Ballard), Did not Vote (Johnston).”
At the Friday agenda review, council member J.V. Johnston called a time out.
“I don’t remember seeing the Asian Pacific American Heritage Month — probably did, but I don’t remember seeing it,” he said. “Can I change my vote to yes for that?”
As far as I can tell, from listening to the meeting, the answer to that will be yes.
Layton said the proclamations that pass email votes will be put on the council’s consent agenda for a final vote, so if Johnston wants to add his name at that point, he can ask that it be taken off the consent agenda for a separate vote.
Otherwise, the email votes will be recorded in the minutes as they came in.
Wu rightly pointed out that sometimes, council members might need to abstain from voting on proclamations.
As they should. The city gives only three proclamations a week and it’s bad form for council members to vote for their own organizations to get them.
“’Did not vote’ could simply mean not answering an email, which that’s not an abstention either,” Wu said.
In the end, lacking any clear direction from the council, Layton said, resignedly: “We’re going to continue to report it as ‘did not vote’ unless you tell us otherwise.”
What they really need to do is drop the silly work-around and quit passing proclamations by email votes. It’s proven to be a huge headache for the council, the city manager and the public in general.
Put the proclamations on the agenda and put them to a vote — in public, for the public.
Council members, you’re handing out ceremonial proclamations, not picking the next pope. We shouldn’t have to read smoke signals to figure out what’s going on.
