List of U.S. State Partition Proposals - Kansas

Kansas

• In 1992, a group in southwestern Kansas advocated the secession of a number of counties in that region from the state. The group was nominally headed by Don O. Concannon, a lawyer and former gubernatorial candidate from Hugoton. Various media reports indicated as few as five or as many as two dozen counties were involved in the movement. The state was to be called "West Kansas", and early meetings included proposals for official state bird (the pheasant) and state flower (the yucca). The proposal stemmed from state laws raising the state property tax and shifting state education funding away from rural school districts and into more urban areas, though the secessionists' call was the fairly generic "Give us equality or set us free." Though organizers arranged for a series of straw polls that demonstrated widespread support for secession in at least nine of the counties, the movement died out by the mid 1990s.