City of Wichita careers

Wichita is the largest city in Kansas, population 400,991, and the county seat of Sedgwick County. Its government has deep roots of its own: in 1918 Wichita became among the first U.S. municipalities to adopt the commission-manager plan, and today a mayor elected at large sits with six district council members serving staggered four-year terms.

The city's history explains its nicknames. Cattle drives up the Chisholm Trail made it Cowtown in the years after incorporation in 1870; aircraft manufacturing made it the Air Capital of the World, with Cessna, Beechcraft, Learjet, Spirit AeroSystems, and Airbus all in the story and the first local airplane, the Cessna Comet, built back in 1917. Oil arrived in 1914, McConnell Air Force Base was activated in 1951, and Wichita State University started as Fairmount College in 1895. Koch Industries, Pizza Hut, and Coleman were founded here. The settlement story starts earlier still, with Wichita Indians building grass houses here in 1863 and trader J.R. Mead opening a post in 1864, a year before Jesse Chisholm pioneered the trail that bears his name. That's the economy Wichita's government serves: a working aviation and manufacturing town of 400,000, which gives its municipal departments, from parks to public works to the administrative offices downtown, the scale of the biggest city government in the state.