Four candidates vying for two seats representing parts of Olathe, Gardner, Spring Hill and Edgerton in southwestern Johnson County laid out their priorities in a live forum hosted by the Johnson County Post on Wednesday evening.

The Post is hosting seven nights of forums for Kansas Statehouse and local races ahead of the Nov. 3 general election.

The two districts covered in this forum were:

• House District 5, covering parts of Edgerton, Gardner, Olathe, Spring Hill, Gardner Township, McCamish Township, Olathe Township and Spring Hill Township in Johnson County; Baldwin City, Marion Township and parts of Palmyra Township and Willow Springs Township in Douglas County; Wellsville and Franklin Township in Franklin County; and parts of Osawatomie, Spring Hill, Marysville Township, Mound Township, Osawatomie Township, Richland Township and Stanton Township in Miami County, generally between East 1st Road/Woodring Road and U.S. Highway 169, and from North 900 Road south to U.S. Highway 169.
• House District 43, covering parts of Edgerton, Gardner, Olathe, Gardner Township and McCamish Township in Johnson County, and parts of Palmyra Township in Douglas County, generally from Winchester Road to Clare Road, and from 159th and 151st streets south to U.S. Highway 56 and West 199th Street.

Who is running?

House District 5

• Democrat Henry Johns, of Lawrence
• Republican incumbent Courtney Sappington, of Baldwin City

House District 43

• Democrat Kristen Schultz, of Gardner
• Republican incumbent Bill Sutton, of Gardner

How to watch the Post’s forum

The Post livestreamed Wednesday’s forum on our Facebook and Youtube pages, and a recording of it is embedded below.

Following the embedded video are the questions each candidate answered during the forum.

Timestamps are included in bold at the end of each question to help you navigate through the forum video if you’d like to jump around.

Questions and timestamps

1. Opening statements [14:53]

2. Name your priorities: What are your biggest priorities or the biggest challenges going into the next legislative session and how you would address them?  [19:54]

3. Property taxes and state tax policy: What would be your approach to address rising property taxes? Property taxes are readers’ No. 1 issue, and the Legislature plays a key role. This past session, a valuation-cap amendment cleared the Senate but failed in the House. A local-spending cap was vetoed, so Kansans again got no meaningful tax relief from Topeka. … Did you support the bills last year and would you try to do it again? [25:04]

4. Appraisals: Most of the increase people feel comes from valuations, not mill levies. Is there anything the state can do to change how properties are appraised? [31:01]

5. Public schools and special education funding: Here’s a question from the audience. How will you help with funding gaps in public education, specifically special education? … Four Johnson County school districts are moving toward potentially suing the state over special education funding. … State law says Kansas must pay 92% of excess special ed costs.  It’s currently paying roughly 64–70%. What would you do to fully close that gap? [34:54]

6. Data centers: Another question from the audience. What role do you see state representatives having in protecting Kansas citizens and children from what this person calls “out-of-control construction of data centers and out-of-control release of AI”? What do you see as the state’s role, your role as representative, in regulating this? This person clearly has a negative sense of data centers. Where do you stand? [43:31]

7. Gut-and-go legislation and transparency: A couple of questions from the audience — and in other previous statehouse forums this fall — on transparency of the legislative process and giving Kansans more opportunities to participate. … Multiple readers brought up the common legislative maneuver of “gut and go” … where a bill passes one chamber, the text of which gets completely changed in the other chamber to an entirely different bill and is then passed back to the first chamber for an up-or-down vote. Readers say it’s practices like this that taint the bill-making process and lead to Kansans losing trust in Topeka. Do you support any moves to limit this type of procedure? [49:25]

8. Mid-decade redistricting: Three questions from the audience related to mid-decade redistricting. There was an effort last year to attempt to go into special session, didn’t quite get all the signatures needed in both chambers to do that. There’s some wariness this could happen again before the next decade is up, and worry that Johnson County could be split up. Would you support going back into session and redrawing Congressional district lines at some point before the next census? [54:34]

9. ALPRs (such as Flock cameras): We have a question from the audience. Kansas currently has no state law governing automated license plate readers like Flock cameras. Should the state establish uniform standards? [1:00:20]

10. Why voters should pick you: What distinguishes you from your opponent? What’s going to make you the person that best represents your district over the person sitting next to you? [1:05:02]

Keep following our election coverage: Read 5 takeaways from the Post’s Johnson County commission candidate forum