Voice For Liberty

Tag: Wichita news media

  • Mark McCormick’s Wichita School Bond Challenge: The Inside Story

    Recently Wichita Eagle columnist Mark McCormick challenged Helen Cochran, spokesperson for Citizens for Better Education, a citizen group opposed to the proposed Wichita school bond issue, to answer a few questions. In Sunday’s column he presented Cochran’s answers.

    I spoke to Ms. Cochran and exchanged a few email messages, and I asked her a few questions about McCormick’s column. Here’s what I learned:

    Q. Helen, how much interaction did you have with Mark McCormick during this process?

    A. I spoke with Mr. McCormick on the phone probably seven or eight times. I had hoped to interact with him face to face but he was unable to do so.

    Q. I read the position paper that’s available on the Citizens for Better Education website. Do you think McCormick’s column fairly and accurately represented the information in your paper?

    A. Mr. McCormick was only interested in covering what I deem to be the “emotional” issues of the proposal. Those are the only questions he formally and publicly posed to our group. And yes, I think, considering space constraints, he accurately represented our response. I was a bit disappointed that he chose to parenthetically counter our points with USD 259’s claims that many suggestions weren’t feasible such as nudging boundaries. They are not feasible because the district does not want to make them feasible. Boundaries will be nudged when, and if, new schools are built.

    Q. In his column where McCormick presented your response, he countered many of your points using information from the Wichita school district. Do you think the school district be used as the authoritative source for all matters relating to the bond issue?

    A. Absolutely not! What about a newspaper conducting its own investigation and research? I do believe in miracles. To McCormick’s credit I think he, too, believes that academic achievement and drop out rates are the number one priorities. My hope was to provide him with enough information and data to question the district’s existing propaganda.

    Q. Do you think that McCormick understands the issues surrounding this bond? I ask because in his column Open letter to Citizens for Better Education he talks about “students at eight or nine schools would have to be displaced in a falling-domino fashion” then immediately talks about busing kids across town. Do things like this give you cause to question his understanding of the issues?

    A. Once we interacted I think McCormick realized that we (CBE) were responsible people and not against everything. I hope a relationship for the betterment of the children in our community comes out of this. And that McCormick will begin to question some of these “critical needs” in his own mind.

    Q. Do you think that McCormick holds citizen groups like yours to a high standard that he doesn’t hold the school district to?

    A. Yes, to a much higher standard as far as being specific to alternatives.

    Q. McCormick has termed bond issue opponents the “naysayers.” Does this describe you and your group? Are you in fact one of the “standard-bearers of this cynicism” as he has called you?

    A. I suggest that anyone unwilling to explore cost effective alternatives is the real naysayer! CBE does not believe bricks and mortar will buy higher test scores, lessen dropout rates or affect the academic performance of our children. And those are, in our estimation, what the district should be focusing on as well as any opportunity that gives children and their parents a choice in how best to educate their children.

  • Wichita Mayor and City Council Prefer to Work Out of Media Spotlight

    In a statement read at the August 26, 2008 meeting of the Wichita City Council (see City Council Acts on Arena Area Redevelopment), Wichita Mayor Carl Brewer expressed his concern that “The naysayers have gotten too much media attention while those who are engaged and do the hard work are too often ignored and criticized.”

    I think the mayor’s assessment is a little overblown. Can a tiny group of citizen volunteers — a ragtag group, some might say — manage to outmaneuver the vast resources of the City of Wichita and its allied quasi-governmental organizations such as Visioneering Wichita, Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce, Greater Wichita Economic Development Coalition, Wichita Downtown Development Corporation, and the Greater Wichita Convention and Visitors Bureau?

    It doesn’t seem likely.

    The mayor has the editorial board of the Wichita Eagle, the state’s largest newspaper, squarely behind almost all of his initiatives. Except for the fiasco surrounding the hiring of would-be city manager Pat Salerno, I can’t recall criticism of the mayor on the Eagle’s editorial page, except from citizens who write letters.

    I can’t imagine any news reporter in town who, upon receiving an invitation from the mayor to come to his office, would not hurry over to City Hall and report on whatever the mayor said. At length.

    The city has a Community Relations Team, consisting of three people (and perhaps other staff) with experience in media. The city’s website fares well in Internet searches, with its pages placing high in the search results pages of Google and other search sites.

    We must also remember that the people doing the “hard work” the mayor mentioned are often city staff working at a job just like anyone else. Or, they might work for quasi-governmental groups like those mentioned above.

    Importantly, remember that many of these people working for passage of the mayor’s economic initiatives stand to profit handsomely from them. These people — Wichita’s class of political entrepreneurs — prefer to earn their profits mining the halls of government power and the pockets of taxpayers rather than by pleasing customers in free markets. It’s a lot easier to please the mayor and a majority of the city council rather than working hard in the marketplace. These people get their share of media attention. They richly deserve criticism.

    I believe that the mayor and the city council thought that passage of the expansion of the TIF district surrounding the downtown arena would be business as usual. But thanks to council member Paul Gray and a few snippets of coverage here and there in the newspaper, things didn’t proceed as usual.

  • Wichita’s Naysayers Are Saying Yes to Liberty

    Wichita politicians, newspaper editorial writers, and sometimes just plain folks are fond of bashing those they call the “naysayers,” sometimes known as CAVE people. An example is from a recent Opinion Line Extra in the Wichita Eagle:

    An acquaintance in another city refers to the anti-everything people as “CAVE” people (Citizens Against Virtually Everything). I fear the GOP voters of western Sedgwick County have selected the ultimate CAVE person in Karl Peterjohn.

    Naysayers, too, can’t be happy, according to a recent statement by Wichita Mayor Carl Brewer: “And I know that there’s always going to be people who are naysayers, that they’re just not going to be happy.”

    If you read all of Mayor Brewer’s remarks at Wichita Mayor Carl Brewer, August 12, 2008, you’ll learn that without government management of economic development in Wichita, we’d be back to the days of covered wagons. (I’m not kidding. He really said that, and I think he really believes it.)

    Wichita’s news media, led by the Wichita Eagle, continually expresses a bias in favor of government. Even in news reporting this bias can be seen, as shown in the post The Wichita Eagle’s Preference For Government. On the Eagle’s editorial page, we rarely see an expansion of government interventionism opposed by the editorial writers. I can’t think of a single case.

    But saying no to government doesn’t mean saying no to progress. It does mean saying “no” to the self-serving plans of politicians and bureaucrats. It means saying “no” to the dangers of collectivist thinking, as expressed in The Collectivism of Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius.

    It means saying “no” to Wichita’s political entrepreneurs, who seek to earn profits through government coercion rather than meeting the needs of customers in the marketplace. It means saying “no” to the public-private partnership, where all too often it is the risk that is public and the profit that is private. It means saying “no” to a monopoly on the use of public money in the education of children, and “no” to an expansion of that monopoly through a new bond issue.

    So yes, I guess I and Wichita’s other naysayers are saying “no” to a lot of things.

    But what we’re saying “yes” to is liberty and freedom. We’re saying “yes” to the rich diversity of human individuality instead of government bureaucracy. We’re saying “yes” to free people cooperating voluntarily through free markets rather than forced government transfers from taxpayers to favored individuals and programs.

    We’re saying “yes” to consumers choosing which businesses in Wichita thrive, rather than politicians on the city council choosing. We’re saying “yes” to people making their own choices, rather than government “incentivizing” the behavior it desires through TIF districts and tax abatements, those incentives being paid for by taxpayers.

    So let me ask you: what do you say “yes” to?

  • Tiff over Wichita TIFs

    A post titled Keeping TIFs from a public tiff by Wichita Eagle business reporter Bill Wilson on the Eagle’s Business Casual blog reveals his bias in favor of government over individual action and preference.

    My post The Wichita Eagle’s Preference For Government documents one such example from the past. In this blog post Mr. Wilson reveals more of this preference and the faulty assumptions that go along with it.

    For example, he speaks of the need to “incentivize development.” Incentives are designed to get people to do something they wouldn’t do on their own. That pretty much describes downtown development. I’m sure that Mr. Wilson is aware that there’s lots of development going on in Wichita. It’s just not where politicians such as Wichita mayor Carl Brewer and council member Sharon Fearey want it to be. Add journalists like Mr. Wilson to this list, apparently. The Wichita Eagle editorial board has been on this list for a long time.

    There’s nothing magic about downtown. The fact that people, when spending and investing their own funds, overwhelmingly choose to take action somewhere other than downtown is direct evidence of that. How arrogant is it for politicians and bureaucrats to overrule these decisions made freely by people acting in their own best interest?

    In a comment, Mr. Wilson states “I have a hard time equating TIF money with a direct government handout …” I would encourage him to read the post Wichita City Council’s Misunderstanding of Tax Increment Financing, in which the author explains how TIF financing is, in fact, a direct subsidy to developers. I would be interested to see if Mr. Wilson can develop a refutation to this argument.

    Mr. Wilson also writes of the need for “proper analysis and monitoring” of TIF district proposals. But government is ill-suited for either task. Politicians and government bureaucrats face a different set of incentives from private developers. Politicians seek to please their campaign contributers so they can be re-elected. Bureaucrats seek to preserve their own jobs and increase their domain of influence and power.

    Market entrepreneurs, however, are directly accountable to their customers through the profit and loss system. If they do a good job anticipating what customers want, and if they are able to efficiently deliver what customers want, they’ll earn a profit. If not, they either change or go out of business.

    Politicians and bureaucrats do not face such a stern taskmaster. When their decisions turn out to be faulty, the usual response is to pour more money into something that should be allowed to die. An example is the Old Town Warren Theater.

  • The Things Wichita Eagle Columnist Mark McCormick Omits

    In his Wichita Eagle titled Taxpayer watchdog seems to target city, columnist Mark McCormick asks “What does Karl Peterjohn have against Wichita kids?”

    His basis for asking, as developed in the column, is that since Karl Peterjohn, head of the Kansas Taxpayers Network (and now Republican nominee for the Sedgwick County Commission) opposes a bond issue for the Wichita public school district, but hasn’t opposed bond issues for surrounding suburban school districts, he must hate Wichita kids.

    Now when McCormick criticizes Peterjohn — and this has happened a few more times since this June 11 column — the columns are full of phrases like “It is difficult not to like Peterjohn …” and “He’s one of the most pleasant people I deal with regularly.”

    Why McCormick includes material like this is beyond me, especially when he omits something he surely knows. This fact provides an answer to the question posed, whether Peterjohn hates Wichita kids: Karl Peterjohn has two young children who attend Wichita public schools.

  • In Sedgwick County, New Technology vs. Old School

    I was one of the two campaign co-managers for Karl Peterjohn’s successful campaign for the Republican nomination for Sedgwick County Commissioner, third district. As such I was invited to the election night party where we watched the returns roll in.

    I had my laptop computer with me, connected to the outside world by a wireless network connection. Several others did the same. We all were viewing the Sedgwick County Election Office’s website. Every once in a while we’d hit the refresh button to see if new returns were posted. Not really new or advanced technology at all; just something that many people have today.

    A lone small television sat in the corner, its poor reception more static than anything else. Not many people watched. A Wichita Eagle reporter covering the event remarked he’d not seen a return-watching party like this, where the computers, rather than television, were the focus.

    The next day we learned of a party where Sedgwick County Commissioner Tom Winters (our opponent) and friends were gathered. They were relying on television to get election results. The Wichita Eagle reporter there had her computer, and upon seeing on the election office website that all votes were counted, and that Tom Winters had lost, she told the party the sad (for them) news. Commissioner Dave Unruh didn’t believe it, and insisted on seeing the results on a television screen before he’d believe his colleague had lost. Then, “Unruh tossed a napkin on a bar table when he learned of Winters’ loss.” (Peterjohn overwhelms Winters in county race, Wichita Eagle, August 6, 2008)

    But where, Commissioner Unruh, do you suppose the television stations get their data?

    Link to Wichita Eagle photograph: Old school politicians watching election returns.

  • Predictions of Downtown Wichita Arena’s Success are Premature

    Several Wichita Eagle editorials in recent weeks have mentioned the success of the Intrust Arena being built in downtown Wichita.

    Success, I might ask, at doing what?

    The fact that the arena structure is rising is evidence of only the smallest measure of competence by Sedgwick County officials. Having entrusted them with some two hundred million dollars, it’s the least we can expect.

    We won’t know the success or failure of this arena for five to ten years.

  • Wichita Old Town Theater’s Bill Warren: No Ideas?

    Recently the Wichita City Council approved a no-interest and low-interest loan to Old Town Wichita theater owner Bill Warren and his partners. Citizen opinion in Wichita seems to be mostly outrage at this giveaway, and rightly so. See Wichita Old Town Warren Theater Public Hearing Remarks and Wichita and the Old Town Warren Theater Loan.

    Now, a post by Randy Scholfield on The Wichita Eagle Editorial Blog (Bill Warren wants your ideas!) comments on how Bill Warren wants Wichitans to send him ideas. According to the Wichita Eagle news story Warren wants filmgoers’ ideas, “Warren, who typically plans his theaters and renovations down to the detail, plans to turn much of the planning for the Old Town Warren remake over to the downtown moviegoing public.” (I guess that’s only fitting, as he asked the citizens of Wichita for a subsidy to help pay for it.)

    Wrote Mr. Scholfield in the blog post: “You’d think he and his partners in the Old Town Warren might have a revival plan worked out already, as a condition of the loan, right?”

    Now, when it’s too late, Scholfield asks the question. Perhaps he can recall his editorializing in favor of the Warren theater loan.

  • Wichita Eagle Voter Guide Responses

    I am running for Republican precinct committeeman. The Wichita Eagle sent me a request to answer some questions to appear in a voter’s guide. These are the questions asked (to the best of my recollection; I didn’t record the text of the questions and now I can no longer log in to the system to see them) and my responses.

    1. What do you believe should be in the party’s platform?

    I believe the Republican party has strayed from its commitment to individual liberty, limited government, and free markets. The party should commit itself to nurturing economic prosperity by reducing government control of the economy. We should allow people to decide how to best spend and invest their time, money, and talents. By reducing the intrusiveness of government, we can create a laboratory of economic freedom in Wichita that would restore Wichita’s tradition of entrepreneurship.

    2. What is your position on social issues?

    Government should relinquish its monopoly on the financing of education by allowing school choice through tax credits. Parents would then have more control over the education of their children. Government’s ability to take private property through eminent domain should be severely restricted. All elected officials should be subject to term limits. Governments should respond to citizen requests for records in a reasonable way.

    3. What is your position on fiscal issues?

    Voter approval should be required for all tax increases. Governments should pledge to limit their increases in spending to the inflation rate plus population growth. The use of tax increment financing (TIF) districts and tax abatements should be eliminated. Giveaways such as the interest-free loan to the Old Town Warren Theater must be stopped. We should be careful that trading a higher sales tax rate for property tax relief doesn’t lead to more taxes overall.