ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
Charlotte O’Hara cannot seem to get away from her Irish roots.
“I was raised on a farm in Bourbon County in an area on the Osage River called Irish Valley, an O’Hara raised in Irish Valley,” she said.
O’Hara’s great-great-grandparents came to America from Ireland through Canada in the mid-1840s.
“They actually settled the village on the St. Lawrence River before it was the St. Lawrence Seaway,” she said.
There, O’Hara said Irish immigrants, including her great-great-grandfather, were digging a canal near a set of falls, and this is the start of the family’s legacy in the U.S.
“My great-great-grandmother died there, and my great-grandfather was 2,” she said. “My great-great-grandfather went west. No one ever heard from him again.”
So O’Hara’s great-grandfather was raised by another family who came to Kansas in 1868, and that family has been in the Sunflower State since.
“We’ve been in Kansas a long time,” she said. “I was raised about 15 miles south of where they settled.”
O’Hara, who is one of several Republican candidates for the 2026 gubernatorial race in Kansas, then went on to Pittsburg State for two years and another two years at the University of Lawrence.
“I wanted to take over the farm, but Dad said no,” she said.
Spending her first 18 years on a farm, O’Hara said she felt she had achieved an apprenticeship in farming, but after her father would not allow her to take over the family business, she got her degree in education and temporarily substitute taught in the Olathe school district.
A few years later, O’Hara became a general contractor, building and developing homes. She got out of that business in the early 2000s. She and her oldest son now run a small manufacturing company, and O’Hara owns a few industrial buildings as well.
O’Hara served in the Kansas House of Representatives in 2011 and 2012, and she voted against the tax cuts installed by former Governor Sam Brownback.
“I was bucking the system, asking questions and not being a sheep,” she said.
As for taxes themselves, O’Hara said Kansas is what she called the high tax point on the prairie, especially when it comes to property taxes.
“It’s taking people’s property,” she said.
If elected, O’Hara too wants to fix Kansas schools, which she said are a mess at this time.
“It’s an avalanche of failure,” she said. “The COVID shut down exacerbated the situation, and we really need to do a total redo of how we think about education in Kansas. I’m very much into local control. The federal mandates of Common Core and social emotional learning, throw it out. Throw the computers out. Get back to the basics – reading phonics, writing cursive, arithmetic with no boxes.”
In the past, Kansas has been a battleground state for abortion, and a milestone came to pass in that fight a few years ago with the vote on the Value Them Both anti-abortion amendment. The amendment was turned down by Kansas voters, and it came after the U.S. Supreme Court had overturned the Roe v. Wade decision, putting abortion rights in the hands of states.
O’Hara said she found the amendment poorly worded and the timing horrific for the vote.
“People were like abortion rights are going to be totally taken away,” she said. “I would hope someday, every woman would choose not to have an abortion. We need to address the whys. Why are women seeking abortions? As Kansans, we should be holding these women up and helping them, and not just the women, but the men. Men have to be in the equation of the pro-life movement. As governor, I would appoint someone on the Kansas Department of Health and Environment who would investigate every abortion on girls under 16 to make sure there is not something nefarious going on and to protect those girls. That will, in my opinion, decrease the number in that age group.”
O’Hara also wants to look at supporting crisis pregnancy centers in the state.
“These pregnancy centers are doing a fantastic job,” she said. “They’re not state controlled. State-controlled programs are abysmal failures. We need to make sure it’s the private sector that’s supporting, and where the state can step in and help, absolutely.”
Taxes are always an issue at any level of government, and in Seward County, a recent vote to exceed the Revenue Neutral Rate by more than 14 mills has many locals up in arms. O’Hara has experience as a county commissioner in urban Johnson County, and she said she saw similar results from meetings there as to those in Seward County.
“You’d have budget hearings, and very few people would show up,” she said of Johnson County. “This last year, at least 200 people showed up. All of the taxing entities were exceeding Revenue Neutral. There were probably 40 speakers, and 10 of those 40 were connected with the county. They were supporting the increase. The rest of the people, some were in tears. How do I pay this? We are taxing unrealized gains.”
A recent issue too has come with corporations receiving tax incentives to locate to Kansas. O’Hara said this is nothing new for the state, though.
“This started back in 1986 when we passed to constitutional amendment of equalization and reclassification, and the same year, we passed economic development tax incentives,” she said. “Every time you get a tax incentive, it increases the taxes on everybody else. It’s been a 40-year experiment that has been an abysmal failure. It has not broadened the tax base. It has not lowered the taxes. Therefore, we need to stop it.”
Like eduction, O’Hara said property values need to go back to basics.
“If we had actually had a benchmark of value where we would take new properties and value them down to it and then have a reappraisal every 10 years and reset things and go back to zero increase in revenue, reset the mill levy on the valuation,” she said. “If the local governments want to raise taxes, they have to raise the mill levy. It’s been this game of trying to hide from the public what is happening, but the property taxes have gotten so high. We’re taxing people out of their home. The value you had on your house is what you were taxed on. You buy in. I don’t have all the answers on that, but certainly as a business owner with these industrial buildings plus my personal home, I pay $57,000 a year in property taxes.”
Raised in a rural area and having worked in an urban area, O’Hara said, gives her a unique insight to shrinking the divide between the two.
“I never really thought of that as being an asset, but it is,” she said. “I’ve been in both worlds, especially as a county commissioner. Looking at the levels of waste, you can’t even believe it. We have a building. Half of it was a nursing home, and half of it was public health. It’s still functioning. They’re going to tear that building down. They’re building a new 150,000-square foot building with all of the cost of $900 a square foot. It should be no more than $400.”
With Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly currently heading up the state, a divide has likewise been created between the executive and legislative branches. O’Hara called Kelly’s administration an absolute disaster, and she said some Republicans have stepped alongside her on corporate welfare.
“The APEX building, attracting powerful economic expansion that sent originally $829 million to Panasonic with a promise of 4,000 jobs,” she said. “There’s 1,100, and the future does not look good. Ty Masterson was applauded by Laura Kelly for fast tracking that bill through. That’s a problem. When you stand side by side with Laura Kelly as the Republican Senate president, that’s a problem.”
O’Hara said companies are welcome to come to Kansas, but they need to pay their fair share. She added a large majority of the money given to companies, $3.5 billion, came from state sales tax.
“That could be coming out and helping Western Kansas instead of going into the pockets of billionaires,” she said. “It was always intended to be for distressed areas, and Wyandotte County and Johnson County are not distressed economic areas. They do not fit the definition.”
So how do you fix problems? O’Hara said this starts with visiting local city councils and school districts.
“Go and visit and see for yourself what’s going on and encourage them to be more fiscally responsible,” she said. “We’re all in this together. The schools, we absolutely have to reduce. It is an absolute disaster at this point. We are so cheating our children. You have a visible governor who’s willing to use the bully pulpit and focus on the successes.”
O’Hara said local communities should have the ability to create their own curriculum at all education levels.
“You have your industrial arts at the community college,” she said. “Industrial arts in a farming community is extremely important. Every farmer needs to know how to weld. You would have people, ‘Oh my gosh, look what’s happening in Liberal. These kids are succeeding. What are they doing? Maybe we want to move there.’ The state is not giving you the money for your community to succeed. Your community is going to succeed on its own, and every community needs to understand that.”
O’Hara added lifelines for education and other areas are not going to come from the state.
“It’s coming from you, and the state needs to get out of your business so you can be successful,” she said. “The light is going to be shown on the local politicians if they do not manage the money correctly. The local people have to take action. They have to stand up and say no.”
Elections are becoming more of an issue at all levels, and O’Hara said correcting that problem starts with a return to paper ballots and hand counting.
“Norway tried online voting, and they came running back to paper ballots and hand counting,” she said. “They actually scanned them and also hand counted all of them. Ireland tried machines. They ran back to paper ballots and hand counted. So did France.”
O’Hara said current Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab is not giving federal workers information they want to see how bloated Kansas’s voter rolls are.
“It’s inexcusable,” she said. “He’s acting just like Laura Kelly.”
Schwab likewise ordered the destruction of 2020 ballots in Johnson County while that county was under investigation.
“If you say you’re a Republican and you don’t act like a Republican, I might have an issue with that,” O’Hara said.
