KSHB 41 reporter Rachel Henderson covers neighborhoods in Wyandotte and Leavenworth counties. Share your story idea with Rachel.
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The Unified Government Commission voted Thursday night to completely lift its residency requirement for all city employees, except for department heads like the county administrator or police and fire chiefs.
There is also no radius limit, something the commission initially considered.
This is something that has been discussed for years. Only now, the conversation is taking a turn.
Mayor Christal Watson and Unified Government Commissioner Andrew Davis were on different sides of Thursday’s vote.
I caught up with them on Friday afternoon as several leaders gathered to celebrate a new development with a ribbon-cutting in the Northeast.
Watson voted in favor of lifting the requirement, breaking the 5-5 tie with her vote.
She said the city sent approximately 2,100 surveys to employees, and 54% returned them.
Of those, 91% said they wanted to lift the residency requirement.
"Most importantly, it’s what the employees wanted,” Watson said. “And we need to put our employees first because after all, they’re also residents in Wyandotte County.”
Watson noted that many city jobs pay less than $20 an hour, and part of the residency issue is a lack of housing, hence the relevance of Friday’s event.
"I just think they want to have the freedom to live where they want to live, and if that helps us bring in new talent, then that allows us the opportunity to continue to be innovative, out of the box, creative, so that we can continue to reset, renew and rebuild Wyandotte County," Watson said.
She addressed claims of a "mass exodus" of residents after this vote.
"I want to trust Wyandotte County that we won’t see that kind of mass exodus," Watson said. "It’s going to take a lot for people to go. Are some folks going to leave? Absolutely. They probably were going to leave anyway. We want people who want to be here."
Davis voted against the measure.
He pointed to preliminary results of a community survey showing 60% of respondents wanted to keep the residency requirement.
He also noted that in exit surveys, only about 20 out of 90 employees said they left because of the residency requirement.
"I would have preferred a different approach that would have included analyzing pay, analyzing compensation, analyzing perks, analyzing how we compare to other counterparts before we just say, ‘It’s residency,’" Davis said. "I see this as not the end, but the beginning because we’re going to have to have very hard conversations on pay, on compensation, on benefits, and on other incentives to keep folks at the Unified Government and attract talent.”
KCK resident Steve Sessions, who runs the "We the People of WyCo" Facebook group, was excited with the outcome.
I caught up with him after we first spoke about the topic months ago.
"We spent decades of not having enough police force, enough fire staff, and it’s not because we don’t have the open positions,” Sessions said. “It’s because people are not applying for the positions, meaning you need to go to a bigger pool of applicants to be able to fill these positions.”
Sessions said his background in real estate factored into his stance on people potentially moving because of the requirement being lifted.
He says a person would have to buy a seller’s home before they can move.
"The best thing that could happen is 1,000 new people move here,” Sessions said. “Buy a house at an inflated market, which makes the property tax go up.”
Terrance Henderson knows the staffing issues firsthand.
He is a lifelong KCK resident who served on the KCK Fire Department for 25 years and is the president of the Black Firefighters Association.
He still helps recruit for the fire department, especially in minority communities.
Henderson said he has been asked a specific question several times during recruiting.
"Hey, do I have to live there?" Henderson said.
Even then, he is against seeing the residency requirement lifted.
He worries about losing the local tax base.
"It’s not just a thing of property tax,” Henderson said. “It’s a thing of those folks who were going grocery shopping. Those folks were going school shopping. So you lose all of that in terms of that tax base to the city. If our city is good enough to come in to work…then we should be good enough to live with, be with.”
Henderson also emphasized the importance of city employees reflecting the community they serve.
"That kid that sees me and sees me go to work with that uniform on and sees me out working, and I’m a neighbor of his, they see me at the grocery store, they see me come into their schools, that makes a big difference," Henderson said. "That’s how community is built. With all those folks, all those entities working, doing everything together.”
Both Davis and Watson say they’re open to exploring other incentives, such as benefits and pay, to address the county's overall hiring issues. They say that residency alone is not the end-all be-all.
This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.
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