From the Alvin and Rosalie Sara Check studio PBS Kansas Presents Kansas Week.

A Kansas mayor is reelected and then charged with election fraud the very next day.

Also, the Republican push to force a special session on redistricting appears to have failed.

We'll look at how a handful of GOP members stalled the plan to remap Kansas, and a progressive blue wave sweeps Wichita.

We'll break down the election night results that reelected liberals and ousted conservative incumbents.

Join us right now for Kansas Wheat.

Hello and welcome to Kansas Week.

I'm Jaren Cirillo.

We saw big election wins this week for progressive candidates in Wichita.

In a major political shift, they swept six of seven races for city council and the USD 259 school board on the city council.

Incumbents Michael Hazel and Maggie Ballard fended off GOP backed challengers on the school board.

GOP incumbents Hazel Stabler and Kathy Bond were both ousted by progressive challengers.

The results a stunning reversal from four years ago when a conservative slate was largely swept into power amid frustration over Covid mandates.

Here to discuss this, and some of the week's other big news is Sedgwick County Republican Commissioner Ryan Beatty.

Former Democrat state Representative Tim Hodge of Newton, Friends University, political science professor Russell Urban Fox and Chase Billingham, WSU associate professor of sociology.

Thank you all for for joining us.

Doctor Fox, I'll start with you.

This is you've been analyzing politics in this town for a long time.

What do you think of this overall?

I first of all, I would question the term that's been used so often to describe it as a bunch of progressives that are winning.

Certainly some of these folks would so identify.

I'm kind of doubtful that Amy Johnson or Amy Warren would, self-identify that way.

Maybe they do.

I haven't asked them.

They are, in fact, members of the Democratic Party, but I suspect that they would probably present themselves as having brought forward a pragmatic, common sense agenda to distinguish themselves from some explicit conservatives that ran and were presented as such when they ran four years ago.

This sweep, obviously, you can think about it in terms of national dynamics.

I mean, as you were saying earlier, Ryan, before we started filming, you know, Donald Trump is literally on every single ballot in one sense or another.

And so for certain people that are presenting themselves as pushing back against some broadly, sometimes incorrectly defined conservative agenda, certainly it benefits them.

But at the same time, these were people that were running very, very locally oriented races.

Michael Heidel, Maggie Ballard, Joseph Shepherd in district one, all of them focusing very, very explicitly on local issues of affordability, local issues of police reform, local issues of investment.

Same thing for the school board races.

So there's something that we can say about it in a broader political sense, but let's not read too much into that.

Commissioner.

Baby.

There were some changes made in the districts.

How how voters voted on these school board races.

Do you think that had anything to do with what happened?

I think it had, in my view, probably the major contributing factor to what took place on the school board side was the way that they're actually counting the votes now, when these same slate of individuals ran four years ago as an entire community, entire city of Wichita district, vote that was counted and now it was by district.

I think that had a lot to do with, I think the low turnout, 11.5% turnout, throughout the entire county.

I think a low turnout seems to, extrapolate, some of these things.

And ultimately, I don't agree that this was a sweeping ideological win that took place across Wichita.

I think, there was an open seat in district one.

District six was a very popular candidate.

And Maggie Ballard, down with Michael Heyes were very popular, again, focusing on local issues.

I don't think the slate of candidates on the right and from the Republican Party was competitive.

So I think it had more to do with the way the school board is now being decided in the electoral process.

And the low turnout was what factored there.

But we also saw across the entire county now we saw conservatives hold seats and in Mayes and Valley Center and Park City.

So I don't see this as an ideological wave across our county.

Yeah.

Professor Billingham, what do you think this says about the leadership of the local Republican Party?

But the local Republicans have been very outspoken about the local Republican Party.

What do you think this says?

Losing six out of seven important races.

What do you think this says about the leadership?

I think it was a very weak performance.

I think that there are two real main takeaways from the results of Tuesday.

One is that moderation prevailed in the city council.

What you saw was Mike Hodges on and Maggie Ballard, these are not radical people.

These are people who are interested in community issues, who are there with their neighbors trying to solve problems for their local neighborhoods.

And the GOP just put up very, very weak candidates.

As Commissioner, Beatty said, people who are really underqualified, unqualified for the seats that they were running for and couldn't really even answer very basic questions about what city government does, and really ran on some empty talking points about things like public restrooms on the school board side.

What she saw was the opposite, which was that radicals were really ousted and replaced by more moderate and more pragmatic people, and a real reversal of that, wave that came in in 2021, people that honestly embarrassed the city and the school district by shutting down school board meetings, by opposing the forward looking or not campaigning actively for the forward looking bond issue earlier this year.

So I think what you saw was that voters chose a more forward looking, set of candidates on both the school district side and on the city side.

The other major takeaway, I'll just say is that the campaigns that worked harder were the ones that prevailed, the ones who were knocking on every single door.

You saw that most evidently in the campaign of Amy Warren, who won by the biggest margin of the night by 40 percentage points.

That campaign was out every single day, knocking on every single door in that district.

More yard signs, more phone calls, more door knocks.

That's a testament to the vision that Amy Warren had, and also to the really strong campaign that she ran, especially her campaign manager, Olivia Vest.

There were some, questions raised in the Eagle by Dion Lefler, the opinion editor, about in that district three city council race about, Jenna Howerton not attending any campaign forums she has scheduling conflicts for.

She seem to not be very engaged on you know, on several in several of these cases, you definitely saw a huge gap as Chase was just talking about between the people that were really, seriously committed to playing the role of reaching out to people, knocking on doors, making the phone calls, asking for votes, and the people that were maybe for good reasons, maybe for less than good reasons, assuming that they could kind of coast.

Yeah.

Tim Hodge, I know you're from Harvey County, but what's your takeaway from looking down on the big city?

Well, we saw the same type of thing happen in Harvey County.

We saw, some, the incumbents on the school board in the city commission.

They basically lost their seats and were replaced with other candidates who worked.

There was some discussion about whether they they were supposed to win or not, but they worked and they got the job done and they got elected.

We had a 22% turnout.

So it's not exactly a wave, but a lot of interested people.

And compared to 11 in Wichita, Sedgwick, right, in Harvey County, we've had a series of financial issues with our city and to where we have our mills and bills way too high.

Our water bill and our mill levy is way too high.

And so therefore, we've had difficulty with our school being able to do a bond.

And that's a problem when when you have your schools and you need to have people move to your town and you have your water bills too high and your mill levy too high, because the city has made questionable moves with their economic development programs.

And then stuck the city with those bills.

And you have the people that lived in Newton for 30, 40 years getting the highest water bills in the region.

And that's what hurt our incumbents.

It wasn't the fact that, these people worked too hard.

I don't know why, but they they lost their seats because they were tone deaf on what they had done to the city.

It was an ideological shift.

I don't think it's ideological.

I think it was a class shift.

It was people that that they didn't want to talk about bathrooms and what books were going to be in the library anymore.

They wanted their school bond passed.

They wanted their water bills lowered, they wanted their property tax lowered.

And the people that were in the office never did that.

And so the issue, the question I have is the people that got elected the other night, are they going to do that?

That's it's this I don't know if I agree with Doctor Fox, ideological, maybe, but this is more, are we going to have people that actually look at budgets, lower the bills, lower the mill levies, and put the bills where they they should be on folks who can afford them versus people on low income, no income, fixed income folks.

We are going to talk about schools as well.

Kansas voters are sending mixed signals on school bond issues this year, while Hayes Bills latest bond issue passed, which is or excuse me, Hutchinson now joins Wichita and Goddard as voters overwhelmingly rejected a $109 million bond proposal, with nearly 75% saying no.

Voters interviewed by Kake news called the price tag too high and the timing wrong, noting that they are still paying off a bond.

From 2006, voters said that they support education, but believe that the money should be better spent on personnel and programs instead of new buildings and construction.

The district says the needs remain and they will now have to find alternative solutions.

Professor Billingham, I'll start with you on this one too.

You've been very outspoken about school bond issues.

You were, a big proponent of the Wichita USD 259 bond issue that failed last year.

What does this say as an overall sentiment about bond issues?

It seems to me like bond issues for our school districts in Kansas have become the norm.

Should should bond issues be a normal thing, or should we be funding our schools appropriately from the outset, when bond issues are usually related to capital campaigns, and public schools and public school infrastructure, our investments, their investments in our community, just like police stations, just like roads, just like bridges, just like libraries.

They're things that make our communities stronger, that strengthen our communities, that make our communities better places to live in.

Wealthy communities know that.

They know that having good, strong, new public schools are ways that they can attract new residents and new jobs, new businesses, new investments.

And that's why you've seen bond issues pass in recent years in Andover and Derby and Goddard.

Wealthy school districts know that that's what makes their communities really, really attractive.

But what you really have here is politically motivated, anti-tax zealots who most of whom don't even have children in local public schools, who are trying to disinvest in local public school infrastructure.

And honestly, they're really just shooting themselves in the foot because they're making their communities less attractive places to live in.

Hutchinson is a community that's losing population.

It's a community with a population that is aging.

It's a community that is losing.

That's that's failing to attract new families and new investments.

And this failure to pass the bond issue is likely to exacerbate that problem.

In Wichita, we have a similar problem.

But most rural communities are losing population, especially in western Kansas.

Hutchinson is not a rural place.

Hutchinson is one of the state's largest cities.

And do you see a similar issue in the city of Wichita that this is a city that is that is growing very, very slowly and failed to pass that bond issue to invest in itself?

But what I think you saw in the results on Tuesday, to come back of what we were just talking about, is that the the voters swept out of office, those candidates or those candidates who had either opposed the bond issue or who had been lukewarm in their support of it and brought in new leadership that is likely to support new investment in our public school infrastructure.

So I think that you see voters looking for a new direction.

Commissioner Beatty, let me move to you, though, with he calls people zealots who didn't want their taxes to continue to rise.

We've had a lot of complaints out in the streets these last five, ten years about property taxes out of control, all kinds of taxes out of control.

You know, there's a lot of factors to consider here.

Historically, school bonds were almost guaranteed election wins.

There wasn't always a whole lot of combativeness on a school bond for some of the reasons that Chase had mentioned have, but we need to understand what the voters are feeling and how they're interpreting some of these things.

We hear a lot, and we heard it a lot in the 259 bond, as there was skepticism that this was needed about the buildings in the capital campaign.

And we all have to really acknowledge that there is property tax fatigue with people.

And it's not just simply because they don't like the property tax or they it's it's a general environment of inflation that have impacted people's lives, their gas, their, all the utilities, the property taxes and property insurances, all of these things have put a squeeze on people, and it's an easy target when they begin to look at incremental taxes, like a school bomb that might be coming into consideration.

So, I mean, a lot of it is skepticism.

A lot of it is real, genuine tax fatigue and property taxes.

I disagree with the professor that it's a tax zealot.

I think people are really struggling.

I saw data that the 259 bomb that failed, it wasn't just conservatives and tax outlets that opposed it.

There were several Democrats and Democrats in my district that were very frustrated because they're feeling the same squeeze that all middle class Americans are feeling right now, and it's tax fatigue.

Tim, hard.

You've been a state legislator before, so you've had a little bit to do with funding, school funding.

What do you think about this?

Well, I I've also been on a school board and I've also been in on a, a situation where we were trying to get our budget passed after the city and the county had raised their mill levies, and we were we were third in line to get hit by the people.

If you maybe tax zealots is a word, but the people who are irritated and we had we listened and and that was a difficult situation.

So we I agree with everything that's being said.

It's there is tax fatigue.

There is utility costs, fatigue, house insurance, fatigue, insurance, mortgage interest, fatigue.

There's costs at the grocery store fatigue.

And when you come at these folks, a school bond on its own is affordable on its own.

But you add all those other things in and it's going to have an uphill and almost impossible no matter how much a community needs it.

Newton needs it, but it's going to be an uphill battle to get it done.

We have high interest rates now.

Ten years ago, interest rates were a lot lower.

Now it's almost out of reach for our community.

So I we are in a spot where we have to the the locals, the city and county commissioners have to look at their budgets and bring these property mill levies down, because the state can only do so much.

I mean, they'll go up and talk about, oh, we can do this, we can do that.

But it's up to the locals.

Let me let Professor Fox in here.

Oh, I think it's all pretty much been covered.

I mean, I'm fairly sympathetic to the points that Chase was making, but I also confess, I don't know a lot of the details about the Hutchinson Bond proposal.

It's possible that in the case with the Wichita bond proposal, you know, I do think a lot of the attacks against it were unfair, but not all of them were.

There were some real concerns about the way that was being targeted and the way it was being messaged when people were presenting it.

So, you know, I hope they come back with a different bond proposal, one that's more specifically targeted.

Hopefully Hutchinson will be able to do the same.

Yeah.

And of course, in the USD 259 issue last year, there were a lot of accusations about misspent money, not money not being accounted for.

Very well.

That's that's I think that that's some of the stuff that was probably, you know, more rhetoric than the actual.

But yeah, this this comes down simply to you being able to communicate to the electorate what the needs are.

And there are significant needs.

You're looking at the school district.

We're talking about the Hutch School district.

But in two, five, nine, 82% of these kids live under the poverty level.

Some of these buildings, like North High and others are very old buildings.

And yet here we are on the local level over dependent on property taxes.

And we just are.

And I agree with you that counties, cities, townships and the like that we've got to find other sources of revenue to fund the basic services of government, because the schools are dependent in this model on property taxes.

And this is an investment in the last.

We're in 30s.

Okay.

I think there's going to be a litmus test coming up for a lot of communities.

I live in North Newton, Kansas.

We have what's called an intangibles tax you get for W-2s when you when you get your W-2, one for your individual, the state, the federal.

And guess what the municipality they there is an intangible tax option there.

We had a candidate up in Newton that broached the subject.

And it's a spooky subject for for the most fortunate among us, but it is a method.

We're looking at other ways of looking at revenue.

It is a way to bring down mill levies, is a way to bring down sales taxes.

And what does it mean, Peter, to pay Paul one tax for another?

It's robbing.

Well, it's it's it's Robin Hood.

It's, the rich going or the robin going after the rich to help the poor.

That's what it is.

So understood.

The mayor of Coldwater, Kansas, now charged with election fraud.

Just one day after he was reelected as mayor of the community.

Attorney General Chris Kovach announcing Wednesday that his office has filed six felony counts against Mayor Joe Ceballos, alleging that Ceballos is not a U.S.

citizen and voted illegally multiple times.

These charges include election perjury and voting without being qualified.

That carries a potential sentence of more than five years in prison.

The Coldwater City Council says it will let the legal process play out while the city attorney determines if Ceballos is eligible to remain in office.

This is a tricky one.

He's been a member of the community for many years.

Ryan.

Go ahead.

You know, I'm getting ready to canvass an election here next week.

And these are conversations that happen a lot when we talk about election law and how do we police elections and how do we make sure we have safe, efficient, effective elections?

And, in this in this state, if you are not a citizen, the United States, you cannot register to vote.

And if you live and if you go and vote and if you're not registered, then you've cast an illegal ballot.

So, so this is a situation, and here we are.

This is the gentleman that's serving an elected office.

And is he registered?

He's got to be registered.

He's got to be registered to vote.

So yeah, I think he is a citizen.

He I don't think he was a citizen.

That was the problem.

I think so so this is complicated.

This, is a microcosm of a larger discussion that we're happening across the country right now under immigration and immigration law and, and election law.

And, and my hope is that we can have a sensible conversation about some of these things.

And of course, we don't want people that are not citizens of the United States being registered to vote and vote in local elections.

That is a challenge.

But the entire immigration conversation is really off the tracks, and we've got to get to some sensible conversations of what really is practical and managing this in this country.

Well, part of the challenge and finding something that's practical and sensible is we have to internalize the reality that it's been off the track for a long time, for a long time under Democratic and Republican administrations.

Under Congress's under both Democratic and Republican control.

There's a lot of powerful forces that have wanted change, a lot of powerful forces that haven't won and changed in the meantime, you have a lot of people who are just trying to find jobs, trying to build their families.

I bet that we could find literally dozens of really small examples, just like this cold water mayor all across the country.

Usually they won't get a lot of attention.

In Iowa, turned out that the, that the, the superintendent of the largest school district in Iowa, you know, somebody who had a really good reputation locally, not actually a registered citizen.

They live their lives in the United States for over 20 years.

So, you know, part of the problem here is that we have accustomed ourselves to a certain way of kind of ignoring this issue.

Professor Billingham, is this another political stunt from Kris Kobach?

Yes.

I mean, why, first and foremost, let's just say that this man is innocent of all charges until and unless he's proven guilty.

This is a green card holder who's been in our country for many years.

By all accounts, he was doing a great job as mayor, but by all accounts, he's a strong member of the community.

Pursuing the American dream.

He came to this country as an immigrant.

It's contributing to his community, contributing to the local economy, contributing to our democracy.

And he was only flagged and charged with these crimes because he was in the process of trying to apply for American citizenship, pursuing that full American dream.

Isn't that exactly what we want in our country, in our society?

It was this attempt to play by the rules, to try to become a full and proud American citizen, but that got citizen that got him in the crosshairs of our quixotic attorney general, who has failed so thoroughly over the past decade in his attempt to uncover some vast criminal conspiracy of illegal voting, that he has to hold press conferences and issue press releases when he finds one potential illegal voter in the state.

It's just really, really embarrassing for the state of Kansas.

Play by luck.

It's not surveillance.

Yes, play by the rules.

But he's.

If he's not a citizen, you can't vote.

I hear you, that's it.

That's the law.

It's the law.

We need to follow it.

What?

What I am what I do on the question is, I mean, we have a, we have a situation where the people liked him enough to elect a mayor.

And it doesn't seem like he's a dangerous person.

I don't know if we need the state's top lawyer going after a low level felony.

This should be something that could be handled by a, a district attorney's associate.

His vote's not going to change the election, the outcome of the election or anything with that.

But this is a low this.

We are still a nation of law and order.

And this is to Doctor Fox.

His point is, the hypocrisy of the immigration system is that we all know these things are happening, and yet we continue to do this well, instead of taking a reasonable approach to this.

And it's not just a low level felony.

He's now the elected mayor of a city.

So this is if we turn our face yet again to these challenges, we're not dealing practically with the things that we as a country, whether we do it through the way we're doing it now or not, we've got to deal with this situation.

I got I gotta move on.

Thank you for that point.

I have to move on to our last story.

Sorry.

The Republican push to force a special legislative session on redistricting has now appears to have failed.

House Speaker Dan Hawkins admitting this week that he did not have the votes from his own GOP caucus.

The goal was to redraw the congressional maps to oust Kansas.

Only Democrat in Congress Sharice Davids.

While the Senate had the votes.

The plan failed in the House when a handful of Republicans refused to sign on.

Republican leaders vowed to continue the fight in the regular session.

Now, while Davids calls the news a win against gerrymandering, and just today, there's some something else happening today, Speaker Dan Hawkins has stripped a number of these Republicans that refused to sign that petition from their committee assignments.

Right or wrong, is this retaliation?

Is this Trumpism?

What is this?

A couple points real quick.

One, of course, it's retaliation.

It's retaliation that the Republicans who refused to sign on to the special session knew it was almost certainly going to come.

This is something that's within the power of the speaker of the House to decide.

They stood up for what they understood to be principle.

And, Hawkins, who was standing up for what he understood to be an agenda, that he was committed to pursuing an agenda that had been, you know, hammered on, state Republican Party by President Trump.

That was going to create a clash.

And the clash meant that some people were going to be sacrificed in their position.

Second point that I'm going to make real quick, and this can connect with our earlier story.

We have a well-understood process for redistricting.

It's supposed to be tied to the census that takes place every ten years.

Somebody looks for an opportunity to make their political interests more secure, and they start insisting that redistricting has to happen mid-decade.

People look at this and they say, well, okay, I guess it's technically not unconstitutional.

I guess I'm going to go along with it because this is the agenda that seems important.

You have a man who comes to the country illegally.

He knows that he's supposed to go through the process, but people support him and he gets involved in things.

And he says, well, nobody's, told me I can't do this, so I'm just going to go ahead with it.

Yeah, there's some deep inconsistency here.

Let me get the response from the conservative at the table.

Gerrymandering has always been a thing.

It happens all across the country.

Trump is asking for a mid census plan.

Missouri's responded Texas, North Carolina they wanted to do something here.

Listen I want to be honest with you.

I'll break with my party.

I don't like this approach.

I think the better approach and the better ideas.

Let's get great candidates with great ideas that outwork other people on the ballot.

That's the way to secret sauce in Kansas to win elections.

Chase Billingham, is it about time some Republicans are standing up and fighting against some of these things that are happening?

Yes, absolutely.

Commissioner Beatty is right.

Let's call this what it is.

It's gerrymandering.

It's in the craven it's a craven attempt by legislative leaders to try to sneak in new legislative districts outside of the normal process in order for political parties to choose their voters, rather than the other way around.

It's a really dangerous process.

It's happening all over the country, and it really needs to stop.

Tim Hodge 20s they would probably, worry the Republicans that didn't sign on and were probably worried about their own close elections.

This issue will will resonate.

It's an activating issue.

They just drew the districts about 2 or 3 years ago.

They could have drawn this map they wanted to.

And lastly, if they if they do redistrict and make these margins instead of 60, 40 down to 55, 45, they might end up with more Democrats in the Congress.

That's a good point.

That's a wrap for this week.

Thank you to all of you for joining us.

We'll see you next week.