How Wichita picks its board members invites chaos, political patronage | Commentary

The city of Wichita has more than three dozen citizen boards and commissions.

These boards do vital work that is critically important to the smooth operation of the city government, such as overseeing city agencies, advising council members and serving as a watchdog on issues like sustainability and civil rights.

As such, they serve as a bulwark of democracy, promoting transparency in government and ensuring that residents’ voices and concerns are brought to the attention of the city manager and the City Council.

Unfortunately, the method through which residents get appointed to these boards is anything but transparent, and recently it has become chaotic.

This has led to a situation in which, as Council Member Becky Tuttle explained in a recent City Council meeting, residents are reluctant to put their names forward for consideration to serve on boards.

In Tulsa, Omaha, Oklahoma City, and other major cities, nominations to boards are announced before a City Council meeting.

The names of nominees are printed in meeting agendas, often with supporting documentation specifying their qualifications. This allows elected officials to review and scrutinize nominees in order to make informed votes for or against the appointments.

This is not how it works here.

In Wichita, board appointments are typically a complete surprise.

At the very end of every City Council meeting, during the “appointments and comments” section, council members read the names of people they want to place on various boards.

After all the names have been read, they are all voted on — and almost always approved — as a group.

No one in the public — and, indeed, usually no one else on the Council — knows who will be appointed, and no one has a chance to vet candidates before voting yea or nay.

In this way, board appointments in Wichita provide an easy vehicle for corruption and political patronage.

This has become more evident in recent years, as the increasing partisanship on our ostensibly nonpartisan City Council has led council members to place political party activists — including, at times, their own campaign staff — on city boards to further partisan interests.

Nearly every nominee for a board appointment is approved unanimously.

This is a throwback to an earlier, less partisan era when Council members deferred out of courtesy to the choices of their colleagues, and it also reflects the procedural challenge of trying to sort out individual appointees when they are usually voted on as one bloc.

When Council Member Brandon Johnson attempted to reject the appointment of a right-wing talk radio host to the city redistricting commission, it was shocking precisely because of how rare a move it was.

As with so many structures of our city government that worked adequately in the past but are failing in this new era of hyperpartisanship, the appointment process is broken.

This constant source of conflict and tension in City Council meetings is a result of mistrust among current council members, but it also works to exacerbate that mistrust.

Fixing the problem will require changes to city ordinances related to the order of business at council meetings and the procedure for appointing people to boards.

Requiring advance notice of all names submitted for nomination, supplying information regarding the qualifications of each nominee, and holding individual votes on each nominee would be straightforward measures that could help to tamp down the rancor.

To ensure that the dangerous disengagement predicted by Tuttle does not come to pass, the city manager and the City Council should begin working immediately to implement these and other sensible reforms.

Chase M. Billingham is an associate professor of sociology at Wichita State University.