The Wichita City Council met on December 3, 2024, at 9:00 AM in City Council Chambers. The meeting lasted into the evening and covered a wide range of topics including a 6.14% water/sewer rate increase, approval of a $5 million ARPA subrecipient agreement for the Multi-Agency Center (MAC), a new FOP contract, and several land-use decisions. The council also heard public comments on homelessness and veteran services.
Welcome to all of you here to City Hall and good morning, Wichita. We'll call this meeting to order, and with us this morning is Reverend Ben Staley of Chapel Hill United Methodist Church to provide our invocation. Following that invocation, we will have the Pledge of Allegiance, and we ask that you please stand for both. Reverend Staley. Let's pray together. Oh Lord, we have much to celebrate and be thankful for in this holiday season. We give you thanks for allowing us to live where we are free and are at peace, and we remember those who are not free because of either troubles in their land or in their lives. We give you thanks for the way that you provide for us all that we need according to your love and care and promises. We give you thanks for the way that you uh touched our lives, but we remember the poor and the homeless and those who are not well. We pray that you would raise them up out of darkness to light and life, and help us know ways that we can serve them as well as one another. Thank you for our mayor and her gifted and compassionate leadership, and for our council members who all faithfully serve us, and we pray that you would lead them in ways with integrity and wisdom. Guide us in every part of our meeting today, and may all of our actions show the character of Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen. Thank you very much, Reverend Staley. Madam Clerk, can you please call the first item? Approve the minutes of the regular meeting November nineteenth and the consent agenda meeting November twenty sixth, twenty twenty-four. Are there any changes or corrections to the minutes? I have one. Um for the workshop meeting on November twenty six. There is an email address that goes to all seven of us, and it should state DL City Council members, plural, at Wichita dot gov, and that is how individuals can contact all seven of us at once without having to look up each email address. DL City Council members uh at Wichita dot gov. Any other changes or corrections? I see none. Is there a motion to approve? I motion to approve. Motion and a second, any further discussion. I see none. Madam Clerk, please open the roll. Motion passes six zero with one abstention. Mayor, I seconded that motion, not Dalton. So correct that. Madam Clerk will correct that. Thank you very much. Madam Clerk, can you please call the next item? Service award for Patrick McKernan, Director of Horticulture. May we please ask Patrick McKernan to please come forward. City manager, would you like to? Okay. Well, this is a distinct honor that I get to do this alongside City Manager Bob Layton. On behalf of the City of Wichita, we want to recognize Patrick F. McKernan in recognition for his dedicated and meritorious service rendered to the community and the citizens of the city of Wichita, Kansas, for the last 42 years. In his 42 years and nine months of service, Mr. McKernan has served as a gardening supervisor, landscape supervisor, and is retiring as a general maintenance supervisor. So we want to congratulate him on his years of service to the city of Wichita. So I I want to just take an opportunity to really highlight uh some of the career of Pat McKernan, because uh he does not grandstand if you know him at all. So I'm gonna grandstand for him just a little bit. I'm Lindsay Banaka, director of arts and cultural services, and have the great honor of uh working alongside Pat who I've only known for a couple of years, but his uh service with the city spans over 40 years, and while he might uh say he's just a gardener, and that's why he told me three years ago when I met him, he's like, I'm just a gardener. Uh, he's really served as the director of horticulture at Botanica for several decades. Uh Pat joined the City of Wichita in 1982, where he was a landscape supervisor and he worked in the parks division. Uh a few years later, he was assigned to help uh get Botanica off the ground.