The requisite large urn of coffee and boxes of glazed doughnuts sat on the back table as men and women, many clad in fluorescent orange and green, gathered in the Great Bend Columbus Club on a Tuesday morning in February.
The occasion was Barton County’s annual township meeting, and officers from many of the county’s 24 townships were on hand. There were updates from county officials on roads, floodplains, 911 and noxious weeds, and sales pitches from vendors selling road graders and culverts.
One of those reports was a broken-record ask from County Clerk Bev Schmeidler, who repeatedly makes the pleads for candidates for township offices.
“I have a fun discussion for this morning. Township clerk positions are up for election this year,” she said. “I even brought a stack of filing packets with me.”
The clerks are on the ballot this year. Trustees and treasurers will next stand for election in 2028. She reminded those present the filing deadline is noon on June 1 and the filing fee is a mere one dollar.
“The old joke is that there are two ways to stop serving — move or die,” she said after her presentation, admitting that service is a hard sell. Being on a township board can be viewed as a lifetime appointment or sentence, depending on how one looks at it.
As if the filing cost was prohibitive, she said most bypass it and just allow their family, friends and other fellow residents to write them in on primary election day in August. And, with only a handful of people living in these townships, there is a limited number of folks to fill the openings.
An anachronism?
Welcome to a world of muddy gravel roads and rain-swollen drainage ditches, existing beyond the fringes of urban sprawl and paved streets. Kansas’ 105 counties contain 1,404 townships.
Subsisting in the vast, remote stretches of sparsely populated rural Kansas, the realm of townships remains hidden to most. Yet, they stand as the most basic level of government, many complete with property tax levies and elected officers.
But “it has been a challenge to find people to get involved in townships because of declining populations,” said Jay Hall, deputy director and general counsel with the Kansas Association of Counties.
Only about 20 states, primarily in the Midwest and Northeast, utilize townships. The amount of authority these units of government carry varies from state to state.
While in Kansas all counties have townships, they differ in the number, size and method of governance.
“It depends on the county,” Hall said. “Each county kind of does its own thing.”
Some are autonomous, in others, the county clerks handle budgeting and a few are merely road maintenance districts. And “some don’t do anything at all.”
“I think they will eventually become obsolete,” he said. “As more and more people move into incorporated areas, there are fewer and fewer in the townships.”
This is sort of sad, he said. These districts, while small, represent democracy at its most basic level. All the constituents are neighbors with a vested interest in the township’s success.
“There are a lot of people who like their townships,” Hall said.
Kansas counties have the Kansas Association of Counties and cities have the League of Kansas Municipalities to lobby for their issues, offer support and share resources. There used to be a similar organization for townships, but it is no longer active.
A solemn duty
Kent Romine has served as the clerk for Buffalo Township in south-central Barton County for years. “It’s like being the mayor of this area,” he said.
He, along with a treasurer and trustee, oversees the township that encompasses 34 square miles of not only crop and pasture land, but also the Great Bend Municipal Airport and Expo Complex, the Anchor Way subdivision on the outskirts of the county seat, Great Bend and the small, unincorporated community of Heizer.
“I take this very seriously,” Romine said. “I actually get out and drive the roads and talk to the people. They need to have someone to call who’s in the know.”
But, “it can be a headache,” he said. “I get calls all the time, day and night.”
One of the township’s key responsibilities is to maintain miles and miles of latticework dirt roads. “With all the rain, they’re terrible,” Romine said.
There are also legal entanglements that involve a judge and the intervention of the County Commission.
Although the pay varies from township to township, Romine said he gets $650 per year. “If someone wants to do this for the salary, they can have it.”
These are nonpartisan positions, but local politics that can pit neighbor against neighbor do come into play, he said. “These are farmers who don’t want to piss anybody off.”
Even with all this, “it’s truly an honor,” he says. His family’s farming roots run deep in the area. This is his way of giving back.
The same, just smaller
Even though they may be small in geographical area and population, there was a reason for the vendors to attend the township meeting, Romine said. His three-member board faces big-time decisions.
“We may not look like much, but we have a lot on our plate,” he said, adding they aren’t that different from much larger governing bodies. “We’re buying equipment, fuel and other things, and we’re having to pay for labor, it’s just on a much smaller scale.”
This doesn’t make what they do any less important. “We are touching people’s lives at a very basic level. What we do makes it possible for them to get from their homes and into town, and making sure there is safe access to emergency help when necessary.”
This is all being done on a small budget. The township gets its only funding from a property tax mill levy, in Buffalo’s case this year, 12 mills which netted $120,000 to service about 40 miles of gravel roads and offer services to around 400 residents.
While most townships are rural and remote, they still can’t escape the realities of geopolitics, Romine said. The war with Iran impacts the cost of fuel needed to power the road grader, and tariffs influence the cost of steel, and therefore the cost of the culverts.
And then there are the legal requirements of being a public taxing entity, he said. “We hold public budget hearings and are subject to open meetings and open records.”
Also, they must comply with the Kansas “truth in taxation” law. The 2021 act holds taxing bodies to a revenue-neutral rate, or the property tax rate that produces the same amount of revenue as the prior year, using current assessed valuations. It requires local taxing entities to hold public hearings if they intend to exceed this rate, aiming to curb property tax increases.
“We just do all of this with a lot less,” Romine said.
In fact, they cut this year’s $15,000 compared to last year’s, but Romine said with the current economic conditions, the board wishes they had left it untouched.
He walked among the culverts, the sprayer and batwing mower at the township’s yard on a recent warm afternoon. He is certified to spray herbicides to knock back the weeds, something not all Barton County townships offer. They also mow all the ditches several times annually to improve the line of sight at intersections for safety purposes.
What is a township?
Dating back to the founding days of the Sunflower State, the legal foundation for townships rests in Article 9 of the Kansas Constitution. The relationship between townships and the state was envisioned as markedly different from that of cities and counties and granted constitutional “Home Rule” authority, meaning they can manage their local affairs more independently.
In their purest form, Kansas township boards are comprised of three nonpartisan elected officials who serve four-year terms: a trustee, a clerk and a treasurer. The trustee serves as the chief officer, managing township property and dividing the area into road districts. The clerk handles record-keeping and the filing of all official proceedings. The treasurer takes care of financial oversight and the receipt and disbursement of funds.
These independent boards are responsible for overseeing and managing essential community services, including road maintenance, cemeteries and fire protection. They are allowed to hold property, enter into contracts and engage in legal action.
However, they may be a relic of a time long past. Hall said it is a struggle to find people willing to serve in sparsely populated regions.
Townships function solely on delegated powers from the Legislature, which defines their responsibilities.
Under state law, townships may also transfer their duties to the county if approved by voters, a process that typically leads to the township being abolished.
Could that start happening more often in Kansas if interest in running townships continues to fade? Not necessarily — yet.
Back at the meeting in Barton County, Schmeidler got ready to leave, somewhat heartened. She had at least one taker on filing materials.
This story previously appeared in the Kansas Leadership Center Journal.
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