By Kylie Cameron
The Wichita Eagle
The failed city sales tax vote shows that trust needs to be restored in City Hall, Wichita Mayor Lily Wu said Sunday during her annual State of the City address.
Wu has made those claims about the need to restore trust for years, including when she was on the campaign trail.
“This debate sparked meaningful conversations about how to improve Wichita,” the mayor said during her speech. “That conversation should continue, but now it must be grounded in the trust voters have asked us to rebuild and the fiscal discipline people deserve.”
City Council members, as well as Wu, have reiterated in the past week that trust needs to be restored as the city determines its next steps after the failed vote.
Wu said trust in city government was lost during former City Manager Robert Layton’s tenure, and that the city needed the new leadership it hired last year in Dennis Marstall.
“After a series of public private partnership mistakes, skepticism has been building for years, and I get it,” Wu said. “It’s one of the reasons I ran for office, and though it wasn’t a campaign promise, it’s also why I encouraged the former city manager’s retirement. Restoring trust starts at the top with transparency, accountability and disciplined governance. No matter how uncomfortable, it means openly addressing past mistakes.”
“It’s hard to boil down a city policy or a city initiative in a sound bite,” he said, “and so people do have to understand there’s more to the story. But clearly we want to be good stewards of the taxpayer dollar. That’s always been my focus.”
A new sales tax vote is not on the horizon, Wu said, but city leaders will talk during the budget process about how to pay for several of the initiatives the sales tax would have funded.
That includes at a budget retreat Thursday and Friday and during other future budget discussions.
“We know that there were five initiatives, and some of them were top priorities that we have heard from this community. So we’re going to be definitely talking about those,” Wu said in an interview with The Wichita Eagle.
The mayor said that process will also help restore trust in City Hall by prioritizing funding for what she said are its core services: police, fire and public works.
“If we’re serious about rebuilding trust, our budget must reflect discipline,” she said.
The mayor only briefly mentioned a topic she’s continued to highlight during her tenure and one of the initiatives in the sales tax vote: homelessness.
She reiterated her stance on the city’s illegal camping ordinance and said that Second Light, the city’s homeless shelter, needs funding.
“Giving money or food in an uncoordinated way may feel compassionate,” she said, “but it can undermine the coordinated system we’re working to build.”
Wu warned listeners to not look to City Hall to solve all of their problems.
“If you’re looking to government to solve your problems, you’re going to be disappointed. There will always be more problems than solutions.”
This article is being shared with permission from The Wichita Eagle.
