Four years after Mike Hoheisel was elected to represent the people of South Wichita’s District 3, the City Council member said there’s still work to be done to improve the everyday quality of life for his constituents.
In a town hall on Thursday night, Hoheisel noted what he saw as the accomplishments of his first term — the completion of Clapp Park renovations this summer and greater investments in gunshot detection for the Wichita Police Department, to name a few — but added that he didn’t come to office looking for quick fixes.
“Four years ago, that’s what I said is (that) when I get out here, I’m looking for long-term solutions,” Hoheisel said. “We can’t keep playing Whac-A-Mole with problems.”
The event was sponsored by the Wichita Journalism Collaborative, a coalition of 10 newsroom partners and community organizations.
Hoheisel told The Eagle’s Dion Lefler, the moderator for the event, that he’s still championing those kinds of solutions on homelessness, tax relief and community development during an hour-long conversation before a modest crowd at the Alford Regional Branch Library.
The event was originally scheduled to be a forum, a meeting between Hoheisel and his challenger Genevieve Howerton. Instead, plans shifted when Howerton said that she was unable to attend due to a scheduling conflict.
That left Hoheisel with a format he said he prefers, one in which he could talk about the state of the city with some depth, instead of “trying to fit in on a 30-second sound bite.”
He used that time to talk about some of the projects that, while long-winding, are part of his ethos on long-term solutions. Among them was the multiagency center, now known as Second Light.
“We actually need to catch people before they become homeless,” Hohesiel said. “But giving people an avenue to get out of the cycle that they are in is one of the major issues that, quite frankly, we’ve been putting off for far too long.”
The city has allocated more than $13 million for the renovation of the former Park Elementary School into a shelter and social services center. Hoheisel is supportive of that decision while critiquing recent calls by some city leaders to pair the work with greater enforcement of Wichita’s camping ban.
He said those calls would “just going to keep stressing our resources, turning one big campsite into 25 or 30 smaller campsites,” particularly in South Wichita.
When it comes to revitalizing District 3 neighborhoods, Hoheisel said he was excited about plans for a new community center in Planeview Park.
Hohesiel said the neighborhood around the park “is one of our most impoverished neighborhoods that needs a lot of love and a lot of care.” The current center, attached to Colvin Elementary School, isn’t big enough for the community groups that hope to support the neighborhood.
A new center in neighboring Planeview Park will fix that, Hoheisel said.
“This is not just a center for Planeview, this is a center for all of District 3,” he said. “This is a place that we can all go and meet and have town halls, where people can come up there for resources.”
The project is currently in the design phase. A site neighboring the current community center has been selected and $10 million in funding for capital improvement projects has been reallocated to the project.
Taxes — and a proposed sales tax — was one of the few areas that Hohesiel waffled during the evening. When asked by a constituent about his thoughts on a sales tax, Hohesiel labeled himself noncommittal.
Various city leaders have considered issuing a citywide sales tax — of up to 2% — with the goal of either finding additional revenue to support strapped services or reduce the property tax levy.
When it comes to calls for tax relief, Hoheisel said his preferred method is a homestead tax refund. It exists on the state level — and briefly at the city level in 2023 — and refunds a portion of the property taxes paid by low-income seniors, disabled veterans and low-income residents with underage dependents.
He said parliamentary procedure kept him from being able to propose revisiting that program during a vote to cap the city’s mill levy earlier this year.
“I was given two different turd burgers to really take a bite out of, and I went with that one,” Hoheisel said of his vote to reduce the mill levy.
He added that he feels that a sales tax is a regressive tax that would hit renters and low-income people the hardest. He said his biggest concern is the potential impact on low-income residents’ ability to purchase food — which would be taxable under a city sales tax.
Hoheisel said he’d work with state officials and legislators to try and exempt food from sales tax.
“We’ll see how it all shakes out,” Hoheisel said. “I can’t dedicate myself one way or another on it at this point.”
