Find a table, pull up a chair and talk amongst yourselves.
Broadly, those were the instructions for the several dozen people who gathered on a chilly evening last December for a meeting at The South Branch Library in the Argentine neighborhood of KCK.
The purpose, as stated in a Facebook invitation: “To discover the successes and failures brought about by the unification of Wyandotte County over the last 25 years.”
This bold summons had come from a newly formed group, the Unified Residents of Wyandotte County. Its backers hope to set into motion a process that could alter or even unravel the county’s consolidated government.
Once seated at tables of seven or eight, residents were handed questionnaires and asked to chat while working on their answers.
The questions were designed to measure discontent. At Mike Runyon’s table, he and his new acquaintances underscored their frustrations with the current government.
Queries such as “Would you describe the Unified Government as open and transparent?” and “Do you feel the Unified Government is efficient?” set off snorts and derisive laughter.
Other questions, about budgets, utility bills and economic development incentives, left people looking at one another. What does the Unified Government do? Why are tax bills so high and, in some areas, neighborhoods so shabby?
Runyon, a retiree who has lived all his life in KCK, shook his head. “Everything’s broken. How do you answer all this when everything’s broken?”
A gloomy assessment, but not everyone agrees
Refrains of high taxes, inefficiencies and a dearth of transparency can sometimes spell the doom of a mayor or a manager. They certainly can foster frustration and unhappiness among voters. But are they enough to bring down an entire governmental structure? Should they be?
The concept of a unified government was embraced in a countywide vote in 1997, after Wyandotte County had endured years of economic and political dysfunction. The charter that voters approved effectively eliminated the positions of the KCK mayor, the City Council and the Wyandotte County Commission. They were replaced with a 10-member commission and executive.
Bonner Springs, with about 7,800 residents, and Edwardsville, a city of about 5,000, maintained mayors and city councils. Their residents do elect representatives to the Unified Government, which, besides acting as the municipal government for KCK, is responsible for managing the jail, the district court, elections and other functions formerly performed by the county government.
The new structure has been credited with paving the way for Kansas Speedway, the Legends shopping center and other marquee developments – projects that have filled county and state coffers with new tax revenues. But poverty and blight have stubbornly persisted in older KCK neighborhoods, and some people see those conditions as broken promises of consolidated government.
In October, Tyrone Garner, mayor and CEO of the Unified Government, stood with the mayors of Edwardsville and Bonner Springs at an outdoor news conference and said the government he leads is so flawed it might be best to dismantle it.
Behind the startling announcement lies ongoing political turmoil in Kansas City, which occupies 83% of the county’s land mass, and longstanding resentments in Bonner Springs and Edwardsville.
Garner has been feuding with the Unified Government’s Board of Commissioners since taking office in December 2021. “We’ve had to fight against a culture that’s not accepted the leadership that these voters have brought to the mayor’s office,” he said at the news conference.
He ticked off a list of troubles: “Overburdened taxpayers; crumbling infrastructure; disheartening poverty throughout this town; excessive blight; shameful acts of disinvestment; historic redlining; customer service shortfalls; rampant questions many have posed of continued cronyism, nepotism and a Unified Government on a pathway to complete financial ruin.”
The pathway was a short one, Garner added. The Unified Government, he said, could be bankrupt as early as 2026.
His claim was overstated. Local governments in Kansas cannot go bankrupt and bond raters have said that the outlook for Wyandotte County is stable.
And many Wyandotte Countians disagree with the mayor’s grim overall assessments.
Carol Marinovich, a leader of the consolidation movement and the Unified Government’s first mayor/CEO, was out of the country when she learned about Garner’s news conference.
“It was full of lies and inaccurate information,” she says.
Garner did not respond to numerous requests for an interview from The Journal. Requests were made in December and January before his planned medical leave. (He plans to return to his full-time duties May 2.) His public statements on the subject have been limited since that jarring news conference.
“Everything’s broken. How do you answer all this when everything’s broken?”
resident Mike Runyon
Jeff Harrington, then the mayor of Bonner Springs, told reporters after that event that the current structure often ignores his city’s needs. And Edwardsville Mayor Carolyn Caiharr says her city and Bonner Springs would benefit from a divorce. Caiharr, who was elected mayor in 2021, organized and facilitated meetings around the county like the one at the library.
While she is primarily concerned with getting fair representation for her community, Caiharr says she sees residents throughout Wyandotte County pleading for lower taxes, better services and better representation.
“Multiple years in a row I’ve heard the same answers,” she says. “And it was, ‘We’re so sorry. We understand. We’ll work on it next year.’” Her mission, Caiharr adds, is “to help residents who are struggling and quite frankly are in fear of their future in a community that they love.”
Based on the responses to the questionnaires that she drafted for the community discussions, Caiharr thinks a vote to end the Unified Government would receive strong support. She’s also not sure it has to come to that.
The next step, Caiharr says, “would be having a discussion with the commission and saying, ‘Hey, are you guys willing to make some serious changes that are needed, and start at the ground level?’”
A bold new way of governing, followed by explosive growth
When voters overwhelmingly approved consolidation, Wyandotte County faced far greater challenges than dissatisfaction with taxes and government services. The county regularly recorded the state’s highest collective property tax rate. Patronage politics sowed numerous inefficiencies, as did a duplication of some services in city and county operations.
And those were just the start of the problems facing the county and KCK.
Residents were fleeing at a rapid clip. The county’s population had nosedived, from more than 185,000 in 1960 to roughly 162,000 in 1990. Those left behind endured high rates of crime and unemployment. Economic development cratered. The county lacked a single indoor movie theater. Leaders struggled to attract even one new grocery store.
County and city officials clashed over matters big and small, making it difficult to attract new businesses and enact policies to tackle seemingly intractable problems.
Corruption, real and perceived, further tarnished the county’s reputation. A KCK mayor was indicted for bribery. A Wyandotte County sheriff appointed his son as undersheriff. Illegally operating topless bars went unpunished. And the still unsolved 1987 murder of Democratic Party Chairman Chuck Thompson, shot multiple times outside of a popular restaurant, fueled rumors of a political hit job.
As one pro-reform voter told The Kansas City Star the day of the consolidation vote: “Something has got to change here. Kansas City, Kansas, is the armpit of the metropolitan area. It doesn’t have to be that way.”
“The explosive growth after we consolidated governments is measurable by any demographic of before and after.”
retired businessman Mike Jacobi, who championed consolidation
Over the last quarter century the Unified Government made strides toward proving that voter right.
- With help from tax subsidies called STAR bonds, a 400-acre entertainment development in west Wyandotte County broke ground soon after consolidation. The development, anchored by Kansas Speedway and the Legends Outlets Kansas City, vastly diversified the county’s sales tax base.
- Prior to consolidation, few nonresidents ever ventured to Wyandotte County for entertainment. Today, the county is the state’s most visited tourist destination.
- The population drain has reversed: Over the last two decades, the county has seen its population increase 6.7%.
- Housing starts, virtually stalled in the 1990s, have since increased at a steady rate.
- Spurred mostly by Hispanic and Latino business owners, areas around downtown that used to be havens for drug deals and prostitution are spurring economic growth. Restaurants and Latino grocers alone generate $8 million to $10 million in revenue every year.
- The county’s combined property tax rate (including county, city, school district and community college taxes) no longer ranks as the state’s highest.
- Consolidation is also credited with generating new revenue for the state.
“The explosive growth after we consolidated governments is measurable by any demographic of before and after,” says Mike Jacobi, a retired businessman who helped lead the grassroots movement that championed reform.
In the early 1990s, Jacobi teamed up with fellow businessman Kevin Kelley and soon-to-be Mayor Carol Marinovich to build support for consolidation. The years-long process included 35 public meetings, countless speeches at civic clubs and neighborhood organizations, ads, a media campaign and lobbying lawmakers to help get consolidation on the ballot.
The charter that voters approved represented a radical change for the county, one designed to weed out corruption, promote ethical governance and streamline operations.
In addition to creating a single executive and legislative body, the charter gave the district court’s administrative judge the authority to appoint and dismiss the legislative auditor and gave members of a newly formed ethics commission the power to subpoena witnesses to investigate ethics complaints.
Consolidation champions also wanted the chief executive/mayor to have more than a bully pulpit. They gave the person holding the position the power to appoint standing committee members, set an agenda, hire and fire the county administrator and veto legislation. But they didn’t want that person to have too much power: The commission can override vetoes with a two-thirds vote and must give its consent before the CEO/mayor hires or fires the administrator.
For Jacobi, these checks and balances are the bulwark behind consolidation’s success.
“The government now has a strong, single policymaking board that can fight what the problems actually are instead of the two warring governments that we had before,” he says. “And for a quarter of a century, every administration up until now has contributed to real solutions, proving the validity of our vision with unparalleled success and stability.”
Jacobi attended one of Caiharr’s meetings. He left unimpressed. “Her questions were clearly biased,” he says. “She repeatedly stated that unification was a failure in every news statement that preceded her surveys, including at Mayor Garner’s news conference appointing her to lead these surveys.”
The mayor’s overstated bankruptcy claims
That news conference and the mayor’s claim of impending bankruptcy, besides raising the hackles of Jacobi and others, left a former Unified Government chief financial officer dumbfounded.
Kathleen VonAchen, who served from February 2016 until December 2022, declined to assess the Unified Government’s current finances, but says its financial position was strong when she left. What’s more, she says, under federal law, local governments cannot declare bankruptcy unless their state has laid out a process for doing so. Kansas has not.
Last year, the Unified Government website even boasted about positive bond ratings from Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s. The government’s financial outlook, the agencies said, remained stable, even as it faced the prospect of increased debt from pensions and other projects.
Garner’s bankruptcy claim could actually compromise the Unified Government’s credit rating. “Any mayor that makes public statements about an imminent bankruptcy of its municipality in Kansas is simply demonstrating to the credit rating agencies that its management capacity is diminished,” VonAchen says. ”If it persists, the rating agency could put the city on a watch and then subsequently downgrade the city.”
Marinovich warned that Garner’s claims were planting seeds for distrust among community members.
“To me a mayor should never come out and say you’re going bankrupt,” Marinovich says. “The mayor is supposed to be the cheerleader. Now I’m not saying to say things to people and sugarcoat everything. But you deal with those problems.”
Marinovich suggests that instead of blaming consolidation for the Unified Government’s financial crisis, Garner should tighten the budget.
“Budgets are always going to be hard,” she says. “People are always wanting more services.”
Marinovich says she is worried that Garner’s statements will go unchallenged in a community that’s a news desert. A local newspaper in KCK folded years ago, as did The Kansas City Star’s Wyandotte County bureau.
“Word of mouth goes very far and very quickly,” Marinovich says.
Even with positive credit ratings, the Unified Government does have fiscal challenges. The most recent budget cautions that the KCK general fund faces “the fundamental issue of a structural deficit through 2028.” The outlook for the smaller budget affecting the part of Wyandotte County outside of KCK also projects a deficit.
Cutting expenses to reduce that deficit won’t be easy. Public safety accounts for 69% of the expenditures for KCK. Nearly 75% of the budget is for salaries and benefits. Those are unpopular areas to cut.
The county administrator’s budget message for 2024 calls on his staff and commission “to dive deeply into UG operations and budget to ensure that we are on course for the future that keeps us out of the red while meeting our community needs and working to address a desire to mitigate the tax burden on residents.”
Also, the mayor’s annual update, a 26-page document that Garner released on Dec. 5, outlines a number of priorities, including more businesses in the urban core, better community health and less debt.
Neither document mentioned the prospect of bankruptcy – or deconsolidation. That puts Garner’s utterances at odds with his government’s official publications. After a Nov. 20 forum, and again in early December, after his State of the Unified Government address, he said the government is “on a path to bankruptcy.”
“To me a mayor should never come out and say you’re going bankrupt. The mayor is supposed to be the cheerleader. Now I’m not saying to say things to people and sugarcoat everything. But you deal with those problems.”
Carol Marinovich, former mayor
What was lost and gained by consolidation
In 1997, the consolidation question failed in Edwardsville and Bonner Springs. And the Edwardsville mayor thinks it would be rejected today.
“I can tell you that in Bonner and Edwardsville, (deconsolidating) would serve the people best,” Caiharr says. “Because the consolidation didn’t take the needs of anyone outside of Kansas City, Kansas, into account. That’s just baked into the fabric of the Unified Government.”
However, Marinovich says the smaller cities’ voices were significantly muted under the former county government. Because of how districts were drawn, their residents were unlikely to hold a seat on the County Commission.
The idea that Edwardsville and Bonner Springs are under-represented also doesn’t ring true to Suzanne M. Leland, a professor of political science and public administration at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Leland helped lead the consolidation meetings while finishing her doctorate at the University of Kansas.
Edwardsville and Bonner Springs, she says, kept their local councils. They also got seats on the Unified Commission, and the chance to vote for two at-large commissioners, as well as the mayor/CEO.
Wyandotte County’s turnaround has been so significant that Leland cites it in publications and lectures. The ability to draw in sales-tax dollars is particularly noteworthy in a place where the mayor once noted that retail coverage was so spotty she could barely buy a pair of socks.
“All the shopping was in Johnson County. All the growth was in Johnson County,” Leland says. “They were not coming to Wyandotte.”
Consolidation success isn’t typically measured in cost savings, Leland stresses. “Success can be defined by efficiency, effectiveness, equity and accountability.”
Consolidation also ended the Democratic Party machine’s stranglehold on the county and introduced a merit-based approach to hiring. Marinovich fears patronage and political dysfunction could return if consolidation opponents succeed.
Ending unification would also mean adding layers of government and pricey department heads, Marinovich says. And the Unified Government is struggling: Since Garner became mayor in 2021, it has lost at least 16 key people, including the county administrator, two chief legal counsels, the CFO and the head of planning.
Neglected neighborhoods, impenetrable government
Mike Runyon says he can’t remember whether he voted for consolidation 27 years ago. But today he knows this much: The Unified Government is impenetrable to him.
“I can’t make an impact,” Runyon said at the December meeting.
Runyon isn’t apathetic. He’s friendly with his neighborhood’s community police officer and the parks maintenance supervisor. He reproaches loiterers and litterers and welcomes new families to the neighborhood.
Runyon loves KCK for the reasons he’s loved it all his 72 years.
“In some ways, my neighborhood’s as good as it’s ever been,” he says. “We’ve got kids playing; we’ve got neighbors that talk to each other.”
But Runyon is dismayed by the number of traffic violations he witnesses. He’s been told the city doesn’t have enough money to fully staff enforcement. And a 40-acre wooded park behind his house in the Argentine neighborhood, which Runyon calls “a natural hidden little jewel,” has been closed off and barricaded because the city can’t maintain it.
“Neighborhoods, communities, which includes schools and parks, that’s the heart of the city right there,” Runyon says. “And you just drive around Kansas City and it’s obvious all that’s neglected.”
Marilyn Alstrom does remember the consolidation vote. She was a solid yes.
“There was a lot of hostility about unifying the two governments,” she says, recalling the meetings she attended at the time. “But it just made sense because of the cost savings that it would bring to our community.”
Alstrom, who founded a nonprofit, 20/20 Leadership, is now retired and living in the Piper neighborhood near the speedway. In her view, the consolidated government brought retail, tourist attractions and amenities to a place where no one would invest.
“I’m concerned,” Alstrom says. “We hear the mayor, and he says we’re going bankrupt without even knowing that you have to have a balanced budget. You cannot go bankrupt. For him to share that information with people that don’t know – that’s frustrating.”
Derrick Goodloe is “pretty sure” he voted against consolidation. “It was so long ago,” he says.
Today, Goodloe owns a contracting business with his wife, Latanya. She is building a nonprofit to support women and children affected by incarceration.
“We are invested and interested in all things Wyandotte County,” Latanya Goodloe says. They attended the library meeting and detected a sense that the Unified Government is out of touch.
“The government hears the cries of the people, yet they take none of it into consideration. They just keep going and doing whatever. That amount of taxes Wyandotte is paying … what are we getting?”
resident Latanya Goodloe
It’s not lost on the Goodloes that the Unified Government has had three mayors since 2013. The last two, David Alvey and Mark Holland, were defeated after one term.
“I believe that every mayor comes in and finds that the task is overwhelming,” Derrick Goodloe says. “They don’t tackle the big issues. They go for the low-hanging fruit and hope that’ll get them through, and it doesn’t. Come next election, and they’re out of there.”
The Goodloes credit Garner for talking about substantive change, and they take his bankruptcy warnings seriously. “If we’re tentatively going bankrupt, that’s not responsible on any level,” Latanya says.
High taxes but where are the services?
Bette McGill runs a sign-making business in KCK’s Turner neighborhood in a shop whose size, she estimates, is about 1,300 square feet. She used to make T-shirts in a larger building next door, but she sold that property when the taxes got too high.
Even in her small building, McGill saw her bill increase from $2,000 to $3,000 over the last two rounds of assessments.
“That’s $250 a month that I have to make before I get anything,” she says.
McGill has overcome a lot to keep her small business running. A shop she operated on Southwest Boulevard was flooded in 1998, and she lost everything.
“Luckily, I scrape and save every dime I can get my hands on just in case of an emergency,” McGill says. “And there’s always an emergency.”
Prompted mostly by what she considers unfairly high taxes and some problems in her neighborhood, she began watching the Unified Government carefully a couple of years ago and even ran for the commission last year. She tied with an opponent in the primary and lost a coin flip to be on the ballot in the general election.
At one commission meeting she attended recently, McGill says a commissioner noted that “everybody doesn’t want their taxes raised but yet they want all the services.’’
That didn’t sit well with McGill. “I pointed out to him that I have lived on my street now for 40 years,” she says. “Forty years. And they have never yet asphalted my road. So which services are we talking about? I don’t want new services. I want services. Period.”
High taxes are an overwhelming source of discontent in Wyandotte County. But Jacobi contends they would be much higher without the development that consolidation delivered. Twenty-five years ago, he says, the 400 acres now home to the development surrounding Kansas Speedway generated just $175,000 in property taxes. Retail sales were nonexistent. Some 20 years later, this land yielded nearly $30 million in annual property and sales taxes.
In Jacobi’s view, the Unified Government shouldn’t be blamed for high property taxes in Edwardsville and Bonner Springs. The county portion of their tax bills is based on a property tax rate that last year was in the bottom 10% of the state’s 105 counties.
But the perception that taxes are high in Wyandotte County isn’t entirely off base. Although it no longer has the state’s highest property tax rate, it still ranks in the top 12% when all of the county’s taxing jurisdictions are factored in.
“The simplest answer is the commission saying, ‘Hey, we’re taking this seriously and we’re going to make some changes right away.’”
Carolyn Caiharr, Edwardsville mayor
What’s next for Wyandotte County?
Whatever their views on consolidation, everyone interviewed agrees that dismantling the government would entail a monumental effort, requiring cooperation from state legislators and likely an expensive campaign to win public support.
Garner’s absence from office this past spring made it harder to gauge the extent of interest in the effort. Caiharr remains convinced that Wyandotte Countians are hungry for a more transparent, accountable government.
“I will be following up with the Unified Government soon,” she wrote in a March email.
A big change would require political capital. And Garner would face strong opposition from founders of the Unified Government and some members of the Unified Government Commission.
Caiharr, who is leading the discussion at this point, says she understands that deconsolidation would be a long process.
“The good news is: I think we have some options.”
People who attended the community meetings expressed interest in charter amendments aimed at making the Unified Government more efficient and transparent, Caiharr says.
“The simplest answer is the commission saying, ‘Hey, we’re taking this seriously and we’re going to make some changes right away,’” she says.
To effect any sort of change in Wyandotte County, Caiharr and others will have to confront deep-seated inertia. While some of the community meetings were well-attended, and some residents monitor the Unified Government faithfully, only about 14,000 people showed up to vote in last November’s election for five commission seats — a turnout of 15.5%
Garner became mayor in 2021 with just 5,202 votes, only 230 more than David Alvey received.
Runyon votes. But he remains pessimistic. “My whole life, it’s seemed to me that there’s too much cronyism and nepotism and outside interests against the public good,” he says. “But, I don’t know, I think that’s true everywhere.”
Runyon’s friends often tell him he should run for public office.
Mike Runyon was a consolidation supporter back in 1997. He loves Kansas City, Kansas. But now, he says, “Everything’s broken. How do you answer all this when everything’s broken?” Credit: Zach Tuttle 
Mike Runyon was a consolidation supporter back in 1997. He loves Kansas City, Kansas. But now, he says, “Everything’s broken. How do you answer all this when everything’s broken?” Credit: Zach Tuttle 
Mike Runyon was a consolidation supporter back in 1997. He loves Kansas City, Kansas. But now, he says, “Everything’s broken. How do you answer all this when everything’s broken?” Credit: Zach Tuttle
“I don’t have that in me,” he says. “My family, my friends, my neighbors, I can make a difference. And that’s where I focus my energies.”
Bette McGill has more of a stomach for politics. She stood behind Garner, Harrington and Caiharr at their October news conference, and she assisted with table discussions at Caiharr’s meetings.
But as a new year began in Wyandotte County, McGill says it wasn’t clear how the fledgling movement for change would shape up. She just hopes something will happen.
“I definitely know that we need some answers,” she says.
One possible answer is dismantling a form of government whose champions contend has transformed Wyandotte County for the better.
Whatever the future holds for the Unified Government, the current unrest reflects a fractured community. And a messy divorce rarely leads to prosperity.
A version of this article appears in the Spring 2024 issue of The Journal, a publication of the Kansas Leadership Center. To learn more about KLC, visit http://kansasleadershipcenter.org. Order your copy of the magazine at the KLC Store or subscribe to the print edition.
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