Nearly a dozen Wichita polling places will not be available for the March special election on a proposed 1% sales tax.
The announcement, made Friday, is expected to impact about 26,000 voters — many of whom vote in church buildings across central Wichita. Here are the impacted voting sites:
Notifying voters in the impacted 26 precincts will require a massive mailing campaign. The cost of the informational postcards will add about $20,000 to the cost of the election, bringing Wichita’s total cost to about $170,000.
Wichita city officials said the cost of the election will be covered from the city manager’s contingency budget. The 2026 budget allocated $288,320 to that budget.
Wichita is covering the cost of the election entirely because it is a special — or off cycle — election. Wichita and the surrounding communities typically divide and then pay a portion of the election costs for primary and general elections.
Timing for the election came at the request of Wichita Forward, the nonprofit group proposing the citywide sales tax. In early December, members of Wichita Forward told the city council that a March 3 election was the only way to use revenue from the sales tax to help support Second Light, the city’s multi-agency center and homeless shelter.
Wichita city officials allocated $14 million to Second Light. About $8 million of that amount went to renovations of the former Park Elementary School building that houses the shelter and $5 million went to continued operations of Second Light. That money was part of the city’s pandemic era American Rescue Plan funds and is set to run out in October.
Steve Dixon, chair of Second Light’s board of directors, told council members in October that the shelter is currently serving between 200 and 300 people a night, bringing the shelter’s yearly budget to about $4.5 million.
Wichita Forward expects the sales tax, if approved, to generate about $850 million over seven years. The nonprofit’s ballot measure would direct up to $150 million to establish a fund that would support Second Light operations and other housing initiatives.
