Commentary by Tracy McCue, Sumner Newscow – The last thing I wanted to do before writing my annual story of the year, was to write another one of those “we should all play nice on social media” articles.

I might as well write you shouldn’t drink too much alcohol, drive without your seatbelts, and not yell at the refs at a sporting events. It sounds good, but you aren’t going to do it — no matter how much I plead, cry and postulate.

Tracy “Cueball” McCue

So I’m done writing about it. Whatever. Be a insufferable jerk. I don’t care. Social media is more about you than the person you are trying to embarrass anyway.

But as I was sitting here thinking about what to pick as my story of 2017, something kept coming back to me. No matter the subject — whether it be the hospital, the tragedies, the scandals there was always something that linked it together.

Social media played some kind of part in the subject. And it is why I am making “the effects of social media on Wellington” as my story of the year.

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I was thinking about this the other day as I closely follow the people circulating a petition drive to get the automated trash system on an election ballot. Could such a petition drive have been humanly possible before the advent of Facebook and Twitter? Oh, there have been local public initiatives before. I remember in the late 1990s, local option budgets could be protested via petitions. Wellington USD 353 voters used to trek to the polls every other year to pass a protested local option budget. But we haven’t done that since the turn of the Century.

In 2013, Wellington voted on whether or not to allow sale of certain cold medicines over-the-counter in hopes of fighting the local methamphetamine epidemic. It was overwhelmingly defeated.

But I can’t remember forcing a vote on what is essentially an administrative purchase. Basically, people want to vote on a trash truck.

Now I’m not saying people should not have a say. But we elect city council people to can make those kinds of decisions. If we are going to force a public vote every time the council needs to make a tough decision then that’s a tedious way of doing business. What next? A vote on road graders? Toilet paper for the city administration office?  Elections should be for changing laws, raising money for public works projects (i.e. new schools, prisons), and/or approving or renewing tax initiatives.

That is why we have city council elections, which only 19.15 percent of you registered voters participated in last November. Voting on a trash trucks should be up to your council representative.

Nevertheless, the sequence has been fascinating to watch. A former council candidate issues a Facebook post saying she is gathering petitions signatures for a public referendum on the issue. Then suddenly she has volunteers to carry around the petitions and a movement is afloat.

What happens next will depend on several things. Whether the petitions are valid, whether there are enough legitimate signatures, what exactly will be placed on the ballot – and who calls for the election. I may not agree with this making trash a public initiative, but I most certainly support the process. More power to the people.

The Internet most certainly has taken over how we do business, and in 2017 it seems as if anarchy, however you define it, has arrived in Wellington, Kans.

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Perhaps, the defining social media moment in 2017 for Wellington came in June during a city council vote to approve a public consumption area for the Kansas State Wheat Festival. The Wellington Area Chamber of Commerce was proposing an area in which people could openly purchase alcoholic beverages while listening to the various street dances. I’d explain it in more detail but this column is long enough (read here if you want to know more). There was also going to be a beer tasting booth of the various craft beer from private state vendors.

For years the two downtown restaurant/bars — The Dore and Barefoot Jerry’s — had wanted to open the doors to allow people to freely walk in and out to purchase a drink during the festivities. State law, though, wouldn’t allow it until last May.

Ironically, it was the Republican dominated legislature that loosened up the public consumption laws allowing more leeway to serve alcohol during these types of occasions. They passed the bill in May and on May 16 Wellington Police Chief Tracy Heath came to the council asking for the group to define a public consumption area for the Festival because of the new law.

That meeting was marked by Councilman Vince Wetta stating that alcohol and guns don’t mix. I’m not sure if Wetta meant this comment to be in jest or sincerity, but it started things up on Facebook.

By the time the next meeting rolled around on June 5, it nearly became a full-fledged riot. With help of a few local social media warriors, who I am convinced hates Wellington, the consumption proposal became a major societal referendum all things evil with alcohol/drug abuse and how it is destroying the family fabric of the town.

One thing I have learned in 30 years of covering city councils or school boards, there is nothing more unsettling for them than facing a room full of irate people.  The public consumption proposal never even got to a vote. As always, the Wheat Festival left people to do their drinking inside a tent — far away from the music — or in the confines of the two bars. 

I’m not sure, but there may have been more people at the June 5 meeting than some of those Festival concerts.

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Road graders were shown moving dirt long before the Wellington City Council signed the Developer’s Agreement. 

Social media was most certainly a contributing factor in a controversy a few months later over the Cowley College – Sumner County Developmental agreement in early September that hammered out such things as who pays for sewer, roads, street lights, etc.

Wellington and Sumner County as a whole overwhelmingly voted to build a secondary Cowley campus in 2016 and designated a half-cent sales tax to fund its construction. Nevertheless, many of the same people who derided the alcohol consumption question above, decided the development agreement was not to be signed. It again became a social media controversy.

And the council was split right down the middle that Tuesday of the question. Council woman Jan Korte, who was said to have been in favor of the developmental agreement, was gone on vacation at the time. The agreement was in peril. There was even talk of getting Korte to vote over the phone from overseas to make sure the agreement passed.

Tuesday’s meeting turned into an all-out Jerry Springer event, minus the throwing chairs. And the decision was tabled until Thursday.

I’d like to think that my come-to-Jesus column on the Thursday morning (see here) before the vote was the turning tide in the council’s resistance, but I’m sure it was more that reality set in and the college could split and end up in someplace like Mulvane — kind of like that casino.

This was one time social media did not alter the reality of a situation. But it came close.

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I waver on how much social media changes the views of people or even affects our world. I’m more inclined to think that social media is about reaffirmation – confirming one’s biased beliefs. After all that is why Fox News on the right and MSNBC on the left exist. They cater to a specific audience.

But does it really “change” anyone’s minds?

I remember when I first started Sumner Newscow six years ago and it was shortly thereafter Sumner Regional Medical Center officials were asking for an additional half-cent sales tax to help fund our beleaguered hospital.

At the time, Newscow’s comment section was the primary social media source in Wellington since Facebook was still in its infancy as far as Wellington was concerned.

During the campaign, I had probably four or five comment posters who were vehemently opposed to the sales tax initiative – so much so they were posting several comments a day. If you judged from the comment section alone, this issue was going to go down for an overwhelming defeat.

I was sweating bullets. The city movers and shakers were antsy and had the resolution fell to defeat ultimately I and/or this website was going to be blamed. I thought Sumner Newscow’s days, as far as making revenue, may be coming to an end and the site hadn’t been in existence for even a year.

But come election time, Wellington voters overwhelmingly approved the half-cent sales tax by 75 percent. And it confirmed my suspicions. Social media opinion didn’t really matter.

Whether it be on this site, Facebook, Twitter, My Space, radio talk shows, political conventions, etc… very few are really swayed by unsubstantiated opinion.

The power of persuasion usually lies squarely on the leadership proposing the project.

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However, that is not to say, that there is not power in social media. It isn’t what is being said, but about perception. Thanks to social media, people of like minds can mobilize themselves and proceed to wield public policy their way, because of the perception their views are bigger and more contagious than they really are.

For example, there may be 20 percent of Wellington who believes that $1.5 million was stolen from the city coffers — a recurring Facebook rumor going on two years now. But if that 20 percent is making 80 percent of the noise then that becomes an issue no matter how irresponsible that argument is.

Wellington is a great town. The fact we are building a college in 2018 is testament just how collectively intelligent and visionary this community can be.

But if we are going to allow the influence of social media to get to the point that we are holding special elections on trash trucks or toilet paper, then whatever we accomplish elsewhere will be negated.

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