The 2020 federal census will be used to guide another reapportionment of seats (and power) in the Kansas House of Representatives, State Senate and State Board of Education. The process has rekindled controversy as the state’s rural population declines and metropolitan areas grow. This is the fourth of five articles about a Kansas lawsuit that ignited national reforms.
A Kansas battle for delegated rights started in late 1961and reached epoch in early 1966, when a special session of the Kansas Legislature complied with court orders to reapportion on the basis of population.
It was a grinding process. Shifts in population, and the law, insisted that rural Kansas surrender its minority rule to the state’s cities and suburbs. After long and passionate debate, dozens of rural legislators put allegiance to the Constitution above political zeal. In complying with court-ordered reapportionment, at least 38 members of the House knew they could not possibly return because of new boundaries.
Legislative reapportionment had been the hottest political issue in Kansas since the prairie freedom marches a century earlier. The House of Representatives was dominated by members from small, under populated counties. In the early 1960s, the people of Greeley County, for example, had five times as much representation in Topeka as those in Finney County.
The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled out such aberrations. Congressmen from the outback howled; the First District’s Bob Dole had introduced legislation to permit states one house based on population, the other on geographic area.
Before reform, each county had elected a member of the House. With reform, even islands of population in rural areas were affected. In Greeley, Wichita, Scott, Hamilton and Kearny Counties, the combined population in1962 was 18,000, the same as Finney County. Thus, the people in five counties had five times as much representation as the citizens in Finney.
Under reform, the five-county area became the123rd district with a population of 17,434; the western two-thirds of Finney County became the 117th district, pop.17,528.
Today these counties are part of the 122nd and 118th districts. The city of Garden City alone, based on a 2010 population of 26, 665, is the 123rd. This was the idea behind one-man, one vote.
There have been more than a half-dozen changes since. As people shift and move, so does the apportionment of seats and power in the legislature. With wild growth in the east and continued migration from rural lands to city centers, the legislature is now an urban one.
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The 2020 U.S. Census reflects growth in the metropolitan northeast and the Sedgwick-Butler County region. For the rural west and southeast, the census tells of loss. Of 60 counties in the state’s western half, 12 have population losses of ten percent or more since the 2010 census; 37 counties saw population losses of one to nine percent. Ten counties had slim gains, one to five percent.
Of the 2020 Kansas population of 2,937,880, only 18 percent (516,795) live in those 60 counties, from Republic south to Harper and west to Colorado.
Add a 15-county southeast core for a combined rural population of 718,993. Of these, 30 percent – 219,181 – live in five counties – Saline, McPherson, Reno, Ford and Finney.
Less than one fourth of the state’s 2.94 million population live in three-fourths of its 105 counties.
Sixty percent – 1.75 million – live in seven counties: Sedgwick and Butler (pop. 591,204) in south central Kansas and Leavenworth, Wyandotte, Johnson, Douglas and Shawnee in the northeast (1,158,683). Growth in these areas is as much as 12 percent.
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Rural lawmakers in 1966 feared that reapportionment would bring urban domination of the legislature. For roughly 20 years, this didn’t happen. Speakers of the House came from Tribune, Yates Center, Greensburg, Winfield, Clay Center. One, from Prairie Village, could be considered urban. Senate Presidents were more balanced – from Prairie Village, Topeka, Concordia, Iola.
Governors? For the first two decades after 1966 reapportionment, only one (Bob Bennett, of Overland Park in Johnson County) was from a metropolitan area. Bill Avery of Wakefield, Bob Docking of Arkansas City, John Carlin of Smolan, and Mike Hayden, Atwood, were not.
That has changed. Since 1990, Kansans have had seven governors, four of them – Joan
Finney, Kathleen Sebelius, Sam Brownback and Laura Kelly – from Topeka; two (Mark Parkinson and Jeff Colyer), were from Johnson County, lieutenant governors who ascended briefly when their chiefs left office early. Bill Graves was from Salina, but he had worked and lived in Topeka for more than 20 years.
Today, more than half the members of the Kansas House and Senate are elected in seven counties – the metropolitan northeast (Johnson, Douglas, Wyandotte, Leavenworth and Shawnee), and the Sedgwick-Butler County region.
(Next: A tyranny of the majority?)
