Sedgwick County budget simulator draws 696 responses; county to send personalized "taxpayer receipts" after adoption

Dr. Ro of Wichita State University presented results from the county's second-round budget simulator on June 23, saying the online exercise produced 696 completed submissions after outreach that included a public link plus targeted email and text campaigns. The simulator ran April 22 through June 6 and was designed to help residents understand tradeoffs and to give county staff insight into public funding preferences.

The presentation, delivered at a Sedgwick County staff meeting, emphasized outreach scale and funnel performance. Dr. Ro said the county sent about 50,000 email invitations (three rounds of sends), and noted the email funnel produced 9,240 opens, 773 link clicks and 196 completed submissions from the emailed list. He said a separate text-message effort of 25,000 numbers used an opt-in two-step workflow and produced a far smaller yield (62 submissions on the first wave and 38 on a second wave). Dr. Ro reported a total of 696 submissions across all channels and an average recorded page time of 4 minutes, 41 seconds, though he cautioned that the average includes many short, non-substantive opens.

Why it matters: staff said the simulator gives officials a view of how residents prioritize county spending and where additional outreach or explanation may be needed. Dr. Ro said the simulator this year started from a budget surplus (rather than last year's deficit) and included five levels of adjustment for departments, with more specific outcome descriptions for each funding level.

Key findings presented included a strong tendency to leave county spending at the current level (roughly three-quarters of respondents in the aggregate), modest appetite among respondents for tax increases (an average rise of about 8% among those who chose increases in the simulator), and continued prioritization of public safety spending. Dr. Ro also said public works saw increased support versus last year and that the county zoo received a marked bump in support after the simulator's focus video featured the zoo.

Dr. Ro described demographic patterns across the different outreach channels: the open public link skewed younger, the emailed and texted samples produced higher shares of respondents aged 50'69 and 70+, and respondents generally reported higher education levels than the county population. He urged caution about self-selection bias: while a 95% confidence-level calculator would call for an ideal sample of 384 for a population of about 526,000 at a 5% margin of error, Dr. Ro and other staff noted that respondents are a self-selected group and that comparisons to county census benchmarks will be part of the post-adoption analysis.

"We really cannot control whether they open the email," Dr. Ro told commissioners, describing the multiple funnel steps (open, click, submit) and the resulting drop-off at each stage. He also said about 30% of respondents supplied an email address and that the county plans to send each of those respondents a personalized "taxpayer receipt" after the budget is adopted showing how county spending and the county portion of property tax apply to a respondent's estimated housing value.

Commissioners thanked staff for expanded outreach and asked for follow-up analysis that compares respondent demographics to Sedgwick County census benchmarks, tracks video views across platforms, and tries to identify whether respondents who completed the simulator spent substantively more time on content before answering. Dr. Ro said additional technical tracking (for completed-user durations and partial-question capture) would require vendor (Poco) changes and will be pursued for future runs.

Next steps: staff will produce the post-adoption taxpayer receipts for respondents who provided contact information and will include comparative demographic analysis in a second-round report after the budget is adopted. Officials asked staff to document video-view metrics and to bring forward further technical enhancements for the next simulator iteration.