Commentary by Tracy McCue, Sumner Newscow — One of the most exciting local elections in Wellington history ended Tuesday after several candidates vied to be mayor, city council, and school board.

In this day of social media unrest and depletion of humanity, that’s pretty cool. Wellington should be proud.

The Wellington mayor’s race was very intriguing – maybe the most diversified I have witnessed. There was some very distinct difference in the philosophy of the three candidates. Joe Soria won. He was a shoo-in, receiving 61.8 percent of the Wellington vote.

Soria was the most deserving of the candidates. He is a logical, reasonable figurehead and will be a good spokesperson for the community.

I also had issues with his opponents.

I have nothing against Laura Lombardi and applaud her efforts to make Wellington a better town. But she shouldn’t have been running for mayor. She is the local editor of the Wellington Daily News. That is a conflict of interest.

A newspaper and other media sites have to have a degree of separation to cover the governing bodies objectively.

How does a news source cover the council when it is part of it? That is the equivalent of nepotism and cronyism. Plus, it puts that news source in a bind. Even if the news source’s best effort is to cover the city objectively, there will be people who wearily look with skeptism, wondering about their ulterior motives. Are they promoting the city’s interests? You might as well make your newspaper into a city newsletter.

Democracy only works if there are checks and balances. Newspapers have no business being inside local government.

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My second problem was with candidate Terry Nunemaker.

Nunemaker and his buddy tax-evading state representative Bill Rhiley were the ring leaders of an anti-tax tour brigade to various public hearings that started with the Wellington Rec Commission – a group that administers activity.

While I have no problem with people protesting their budget, it is their American right. I had trouble with their delivery. The group was a bit mean-spirited, lacking in specifics, and at times were bullies.

They were also ineffective. Not one governing board changed their budget.

Here’s the ultimate reason the protests were doomed: local officials will not wipe out a budget they have worked on since January. Yes, they can vote on not increasing the revenue-neutral rate, but in doing so, that would require them to go back and refigure the budget. The most effective strategy is to attend the work sessions in January and February when the budget process is just getting started.

The problem with showing up in great masses to yell at the local elected officials is there isn’t a lot they can do about it anyway. Your elected officials are at the mercy of everybody and everything. They are given revenue figures from the assessor’s office, get proposed budgets from various departments, and must adhere to whatever state and federal mandates.

And if they made radical changes like cutting significant funding of a particular department to save you tax dollars, they will have hell to pay with those employees. Read this 2019 story in a dispute between Sumner County Sheriff Darren Chambers and Commissioner Jim Newell as an example.

The reality is the budget that the county commissioners and other governing bodies just passed is remarkably similar to the ones they passed 5, 10, and 20 years ago, including budgets that Mr. Nunemaker voted to ratify when he was a Wellington City Council member in the early 2010s.

Very few things are more predictable than a local governing budget.

If your taxes are going up, it isn’t because your local government is on a wild spending spree but due to increased costs by suppliers.

I thought it was telling at the commissioner’s meeting — by far the worst of the public hearings held locally (and why do we have to call Wichita stations every time we have a local problem?) — that people kept repeating, “You don’t even work on our roads, nothing is getting done.”

That’s because our local governments have no money.

For instance, the Sumner County Commissioners increased the mill levy because of skyrocketing healthcare insurance premiums for its employees. Due to spiraling health insurance costs, the Wellington USD 353 school district has yet to hammer out a teacher’s contract agreement.

Yes, we can cut taxes and do away with the non-essentials. We can defund the golf course, close the swimming pool, and eliminate the rec commission. We can board up Memorial Auditorium, diminish the number of our law enforcement, cut the road and bridge budget, reduce teaching staff, and ensure nothing goes toward athletic facilities.

But that wouldn’t be a community I would want to live in. You don’t attract —  let alone keep — people in a community if your town has nothing to offer.

Perhaps our taxes are too high for the services we receive. But if you want real government reform,  you should probably look from the top down. And I’m inclined to take a serious look at our suppliers – those who deliver utilities, raw materials, and health insurance. You know, those monopolies who can gouge our broke local taxpayers because, well, they can.

Cutting our own local services in the system we currently have in place only makes the community poorer.

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