Last month, residents of Countryside, Kan. (population 295) voted to dissolve the city and merge with surrounding Mission, Kan. The election marked the fourth time residents of the six-square-block city had voted on the issue since Countryside was incorporated in 1951. It sets up the first municipal merger in the state since the 1960s. Ken Davis, mayor of Countryside since 1995, was a major proponent of the merger, which becomes official this month.
Q: How would you describe the operations of the Countryside government?
Davis: It's the only place in Johnson County where church and state meet. We would meet in the basement of the Trinity Lutheran Church for our city council meetings. We have no city building at all. Throughout our history, Mission has provided Countryside with police service. We have also paid them for municipal court service and judicial service. We have always been to a great degree dependent on the city of Mission. Furthermore, the area of the county in which we live is served by a consolidated fire district. It's also serviced by the county for water and wastewater service. The only thing we contract for is trash pickup. Then we have franchise agreements with the various utilities (cable, power, gas, telephone).
Q: Where did the idea come from to merge with Mission?
A: In 1959 and again in 1960, there was an attempt to have Countryside merge with Mission. It was brought to an election, and it failed in consecutive years by almost a 2-to-1 margin.
In 1997, I [suggested] that a merger might be an appropriate thing to do. We had a lot of different speakers talk to our council about why it would make sense to be a consolidated part of Mission. [After several months], we had a general discussion, and the sentiment was people really did not want to do it. They did not want to consolidate with Mission because they valued their identity. They were worried that their property values would go down and all sorts of reasons. The government body decided not to put it to an election at that time. In January 1998, one citizen filed a petition to bring it to a vote. In April 1998, it again failed [by a ratio of] 2 to 1.
Q: What happened since then to get residents to approve a merger?
A: I spoke with the Mission mayor, and we agreed to establish a joint task force of the two cities to study merging. [The task force met weekly in summer 2002 and] conducted a survey of the residents of Countryside to understand what their concerns and fears were. [In October, the task force] finally recommended that it did make sense to merge. [It found that merging] would save Countryside taxpayers money in terms of property taxes. It would save because we pay for trash pickup separately on our tax bills, and Mission pays for that out of the general fund. Plus, many of the Countryside residents were paying non-resident fees for participation in the pool and the community center activities of Mission, which is only within blocks of the city.
Mission also tried to accommodate the concerns of residents in Countryside. Some people were worried about things like not changing the trash pickup day from Monday to another day. We have a street that is a dividing line between our two cities that has some very old hedge trees. A lot of people didn't want to see those cut down, and there was a lot of concern that, if we merged, Mission would decide to take them out. Also, some residents thought Mission would rezone part of the area to be commercial as opposed to residential.
Q: As head official in the city, why would you push to get rid of it? Won't you lose your position?
A: [In January 2002,] I decided that I was not going to run for mayor again. My term is up in April. I just didn't see anybody willing to step forward to learn the process that I had to learn over the course of my [time] in office. I just thought that one last action that I should take — if I'm going to take any action on behalf of the future of the city — was to try to bring people around to understand why it doesn't make sense to maintain a six-square-block city.
