Note to Wichita City Hall: If you want people to trust you, be trustworthy | Opinion

City Hall has trust issues.

Some City Council members seem to recognize that, which is good. But the city’s prescription for fixing the problem isn’t.

Trust issues with the public were explored this week in a rare night meeting by the council.

It could have gone worse, but it’s hard to see how.

The agenda item “Public Participation at Council Meetings” came at the end of the meeting, following such riveting topics as “An Ordinance Amending Section 2.04.005, 2.04.040 and 2.04.270 of the Code of the City of Wichita Pertaining to City Council Vacancies” and “Wastewater Treatment Plant 2 Grit Channel Repair.”

They had a pretty good crowd to start, but by the time the public participation item rolled around, it was nearly 10 p.m., the public had gone home to bed and the council chamber was practically empty.

Council member Becky Tuttle did a fantastic job delineating the trust problem, citing the results from a National Community Survey filled out by residents in September.

“Only 27% of our community members that were surveyed feel that we’re being open and transparent with the public and only 31% said that they feel that we are informing residents about issues facing the community,” she said.

The discussion of what to do about that consisted of three items:

1) The amount of time that citizens get to address the council on their concerns, compared to a list of selected cities, some of which give their residents even less time time to speak than the five minutes Wichita provides to five citizens a week.

2) A lengthy PowerPoint report from the city’s communications department about what an awesome job they’re doing spreading the word about how awesome the city government is — if only that darned media would play along.

3) A move to end the decades-long practice of publishing legal notices in the newspaper.

It’s worth noting that items 2 and 3 were not on the agenda for the meeting.

Did somebody mention trust? A good place to start would be to establish an agenda and follow it.

On the issue of news coverage, Communications Manager Tyler Schiffelbein put up a slide with eight relatively recent city happenings.

They included the boil-water order, the water conservation rebate program, proposed changes to the fireworks ordinance, planned improvements for K-96 and East Kellogg, little free libraries, Naftzger Park turf improvements, Westlink Library expansion and short-story dispensers.

At City Hall’s “Civic Engagement Academy” “They pull up this slide and they ask all the participants . . . ‘Which of these topics have you heard about?’” Schiffelbein said. “And most of the time they’ll raise their hand on the water boil advisory, or proposed changes to the firework ordinance, something that has a little negative connotation to it.

“So the media is more, in general, they will cover more of the stuff that’s negative and paints us in a bad picture, but a lot of these good stories are things we’ve promoted, but people haven’t heard as much about.”

I double-checked Eagle archives and we covered every one of the stories on his list.

We’re not going to apologize for making a bigger deal of it when the city bursts a pipe that renders the municipal tap water unsafe for human consumption, versus a program that gives you $100 back to buy a low-flow toilet — and which ran out of money in August anyway.

And some of these stories, which City Hall tried to spin as positive, citizens saw otherwise.

For example, a lot of people liked Naftzger Park better when it had at least some natural grass, before the city’s “improvement” of making it entirely plastic.

I hesitate to even mention legal notices, because while it’s not my department, I do work for the newspaper and the newspaper gets about $150,000 in revenue a year for publishing them, (a figure I never knew until I heard it from the city this week).

But there were some comments made during the meeting indicating that some council members don’t know what legal notices are, so I’m going to very briefly explain them so they know what they’re voting on.

When the city proposes to rezone some property, or puts a project out to bid, or passes an ordinance, or takes similar actions, those items are published in an advertisement in the paper.

It’s part informative. People do read them, which I know because I get calls about them.

Journalists read them too, and they sometimes lead to important stories you and I wouldn’t otherwise know about. The Kansas Press Association gives an award each year for the best story generated from a legal notice. I’ve won it.

But there’s a second and equally important function. Legal notices and proof of publication establish an unalterable record of government actions.

The classic example was the “birther” controversy, around whether Barack Obama was born in Hawaii or Kenya.

It was remotely plausible that a person with enough wealth and influence could bribe or coerce a government agent to slip a forged birth certificate into Hawaii’s records, as the birthers alleged. But the conspiracy theory was ultimately disproved by birth notices from the Honolulu health department that were published in the city’s two newspapers, The Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin, in 1961. You can’t change those.

Much was made at Tuesday’s meeting about the records being available on the city’s website and in its record-keeping system.

But we’ve had trouble getting to those records and so have a lot of other people who’ve tried.

Celeste Racette was uninvolved in politics until five years ago, when the city went on a campaign to tear down the Century II Convention and Performing Arts Center and replace it with a billion-dollar-plus Riverfront Legacy Master Plan.

Racette, daughter of a former mayor who was in office when Century II was built, got involved on that issue and has been a fierce City Hall finance watchdog ever since.

She’s a former federal bank examiner and on Tuesday she told the council this: “There have been so many instances in the last five years where I’ve used my skills to look at information the city gave me that was incorrect, misstated, or lacking in telling the truth about the situation.”

Trust issues.

And not the kind you can fix with a slick PowerPoint from the advertising department.