Yes! Yes! No!

• More people will get involved and file as candidates. Nonpartisan elections "will permit residents to participate from the perspective of running for county commissioner," says former state Representative Carol Sader. "It helps surface a new breed of leaders," adds her son Neil, an Overland Park city councilman. Since both politicians are Democrats, Republican opponents of nonpartisan elections, such as Sun newspaper columnist Steve Rose, think it's just a "stealth" way for Democrats to get elected.

The reality, however, is that citizens don't run for office because of the amount of time and money it takes to get elected. Though figures on what it costs to run for county commissioner aren't available, the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission reports that state Senate candidates spent an average $24,756 on their 1996 election campaigns, while House candidates spent $9,286. Those amounts have gone up, and they present a big turn-off to anyone from a middle-income background who wants to seek office. Political parties -- with their donations and volunteers -- can lower campaign expenses. But without a party connection, a candidate's power base is money and the influence of special-interest groups with money to give.

• Issues county commissioners face aren't political -- the so-called "pothole" argument. "County issues do not have a partisan component," says Janis McMillen of the League of Women Voters. "It seems unnecessary to deal with party politics."

I don't buy that rationale, and neither does the academic world. "Questions of where to put your resources -- those are political questions that require a political solution ... citizen preferences and the social priorities of a community," says University of Kansas political-science professor Paul Schumaker. "Politics is the age-old mechanism for structuring the debate."

Charter member and attorney Keith Drill points to such issues as the Oz theme park and funding for county social welfare programs and law enforcement, and the commissioners' "impact on the state level in such issues as public school financing" as proof that politics plays an important part in public-policy decisions. Neil Sader admits that some issues, such as sprawl, have a partisan element, as did "the issue of raising the excise tax on developers. The Democrats held firm (in raising the tax)."

Schumaker says economic development is a "huge" partisan issue. "It's highly political. I'm not saying being Democratic or Republican is how people sort themselves out on the issue, but people do decide in a liberal and conservative way that gets away from the kind of boosterism that is not in the public interest." He says the commission's decisions about using government-sponsored tax incentives and development subsidies "go beyond administrative and are definitely political."

• Partisan politics creates conflict and divisiveness. "Tensions are made worse because of party labels," says Neil Sader. Jack Halligan, a Democrat turned independent and Sader's colleague on the Overland Park City Council, agrees. "It reinforces stereotypes and discourages a discussion of important issues based on facts."

Funny how politicians, once elected, want to become just managers and avoid the messy deliberation that goes with representative government. "I've always thought that nonpartisans try to take politics out of politics," says Dr. Allan Cigler, another political-science professor at KU. "The partisan system is more issue-oriented. Nonpartisan is about personalities." Besides, as he points out, "politics is about resolving conflicts."

Comfortable lack of dissention on a public body doesn't make for a healthy democratic institution and won't make up for not knowing how to compromise. And politics is the art of compromise. Nonpartisan candidates will tout their qualifications rather than their stands on issues, making it more difficult to discern a candidate's character. Public-body deliberations generally lose any bite that might grab the public's attention, especially that of young people.

And the media's role expands in the absence of partisanship. "Newspapers benefit from nonpartisan elections," says Schumaker. "With the parties not having an effective role, the newspaper moves into an agenda-setting arena."

The last Democrat elected to the Johnson County Board of Commissioners was Janet Leick in 1982 -- so there doesn't seem to be a partisan element to the elections anyway. The campaigns pit what Cigler calls "an insurance man against an insurance man."

Johnson County's partisan system may not reflect its growing ethnic and economic diversity now, but it could in the future. The county's homogeneity won't last forever -- currently, fewer than 50 percent of the registered voters are Republican, and there are more unaffiliated voters than registered Democrats. That's one reason that Question 3 became an issue.

Passage of Question 3 does nothing to encourage people's involvement in the system. Rather, it guarantees more bureaucratic entrenchment by administrators distanced from policy arguments and reinforces the notion that having money is the only way to get elected.