Dick Bond was at a loss.

The former Kansas state senator from Overland Park, one-time Senate president and chairman of the Kansas Board of Regents, was asked a simple question: Tick off the top five or 10 leaders in Johnson County today.

Bond named Ed Eilert, chairman of the Johnson County Commission. He cited Carl Gerlach, mayor of Overland Park.

Then he paused.

The man who has been one of the county’s central players for decades, who was once named Johnson Countian of the Year by the Johnson County Community College Foundation, couldn’t come up with another name.

There’s the problem, Bond said. No leaders. No long-range targets. No united push to work toward a better tomorrow.

That, he said, is not like it used to be.

“We are almost leaderless, because we can’t come together to support a single person or a common goal,” Bond said. “We’ve met the enemy, and it is us.”

Leaders? Years ago in Johnson County they stood out like fancy office towers.

Bond was a member of the so-called Prairie Village Mafia, a group of well-to-do, hard-charging Republican moderate insiders who came together to fight for common goals.

Besides Bond, the group, which would morph into the Overland Park Mafia, included Audrey Langworthy, a longtime state senator from Prairie Village; Steve Rose, the former publisher of the Johnson County Sun who now writes for The Star; lawyer Fred Logan, who ran a series of civic campaigns between 1998 and 2008; Nancy Wallertstein, a Johnson County park board member; Bill Franklin, a former Prairie Village mayor; and Mary Birch, who was president of the Overland Park Chamber of Commerce from 1984 to 2002. And there were others.

To say the Mafia singlehandedly changed Johnson County might be a stretch. But there’s little doubt that the group was inordinately influential.

“They chose to get things done,” said former Johnson County Commission Chairwoman Annabeth Surbaugh. “No one asked them. But they were in charge, and they made it happen. They did the right things at the right time.”

There was the first bistate sales tax in 1996 that Langworthy spent years struggling to get the Kansas Legislature to authorize. Johnson County passed it, sending tax dollars for the first time across the state line to help renovate Union Station.

Two years later came a $6 million plan to buy up to 1,400 acres for a big new park — Big Bull Creek Regional Park — in southwest Johnson County. With Logan at the helm of the campaign, that passed countywide, too.

In 2002 there was the campaign to authorize use of the sales tax to fund public schools, which was renewed in 2005. In 2008, Logan was co-chairman of a public safety campaign. It passed with a 53 percent majority.

Later that year, just as the recession was digging in, county voters passed the “research triangle” tax increase — a one-eighth-cent boost aimed at raising $15 million a year toward helping Kansas City secure a top 20 spot as one of the nation’s leading bioscience research hubs. Money would go to expand the University of Kansas Cancer Center, KU’s Edwards Campus in Overland Park, and a food safety and animal health institute at the new Olathe campus of Kansas State University.

“It’s a challenging environment to bring a tax measure forward,” Logan said at the time. “But this is about the future.”

It passed with 57 percent support.

During all this there was steady support for one of the county’s gleaming jewels — Johnson County Community College, which has seen its student population explode in recent years.

But that was then.

Some longtime county leaders think the days of successful countywide tax initiatives may be a thing of the past, although individual school districts may fare better.

Langworthy recently took part in a panel discussion that looked back on the 1996 Bistate I vote. One topic was whether another bistate vote could pass now.

“I think it would be exceedingly difficult today,” she said.

Getting a positive vote from the Kansas Legislature to put the issue before voters is probably out of reach, she said, because of a divided Johnson County delegation to Topeka.

“I’m just not sure with the current players in the Legislature that you could get enough cohesion to pull along the rest of the state,” Langworthy said.

Cohesion? There isn’t as much of that as there used to be. Langworthy remembered that in the 1990s it was almost a cardinal rule that Joco state lawmakers vote together on chool finance issues.

“There’s no sense of that any more,” she said. “There are too many different agendas.”

Two of those agendas belong to the conservative Republicans and the moderate Republicans, who have been battling each other since the mid-1990s. So enduring is the political divide that politicians these days are routinely identified in Johnson County as hailing from one camp or the other.

Back when the Prairie Village Mafia reigned, the mods dominated. Since then, things have flipped. Johnson County’s delegation to Topeka is decidedly conservative. According to one count, four of the county’s seven state senators are conservative, as are 16 of the 21-member House delegation.

The Johnson County Commission is tougher to figure, but it’s regarded as closely divided.

The county’s conservative bent begins to explain why Tim Golba, a longtime conservative political activist in Johnson County, agrees that passing any kind of tax increase in today’s Johnson County is highly unlikely — whether it’s for a bistate tax, cancer research or anything, really.

“I don’t know of anything that voters would be willing to pass countywide right now,” he said. “I really don’t.”

This fall, the issue of a dedicated sales tax for the Kansas City Zoo went before voters in Jackson and Clay counties on the Missouri side — and passed. Zoo officials tried to get the issue before voters in Platte and Cass counties, but county officials there declined to place it on the ballot.

But the idea of asking Kansas voters to weigh in, even for a community amenity like the zoo, was barely considered. And maybe for good reason. Few think it would have passed.

“We have enough problems here to take care of what we need to take care of without shipping tax dollars to someplace else,” said sate Sen. Ray Merrick, a Stilwell Republican.

Bond bemoaned the change, saying the county’s single biggest issue is apathetic moderates who don’t even bother to vote.

“If all the moderates came out in numbers like the right wing, there wouldn’t be all this divisiveness,” he said.

Conservative control has meant less support for public schools, Bond said. It’s quality public schools that built Johnson County.

But Golba countered that the days of insider dealing that marked moderate control are gone for good. Those moderate leaders wanted to control Johnson County for control’s sake, he said. Conservatives emphasize the issues, and that has gained them traction over the years, he said.

“You can motivate people on the issues, but not on a power grab,” Golba said.

‘Gotten so big’

Politics is only one factor driving the county’s new power dynamics. Census numbers show that the county is a different place today than it was in the 1990s when that first bistate vote passed. The county is far more diverse with way more people. There’s more poverty and — maybe most significantly from a political standpoint — more spheres of influence scattered throughout Joco’s 480 square miles.

Take population. The suburban burg of 143,792 in 1970 boasts a population nearly four times that today at about 550,000 people, making Johnson County the state’s largest.

With nearly 126,000 people, Olathe grew faster than any other city in Kansas over the last decade. Its population jumped 35 percent during those 10 years, pushing it past Independence as the second-largest suburban city in the Kansas City metropolitan area.

“We’ve just gotten so big,” Birch said.

The county’s African-American population is seeing the same heavy growth. From 2000 to 2010 it doubled to about 23,600. Hispanics? Nearly 18,000 in 2000 and almost 39,000 in 2010.

The county’s poverty level has jumped from 15,323 persons living below the poverty level in 2000 to more than 37,000 in 2009.

With that size and diversity, the days when Overland Park was the county’s unquestioned center of influence has passed. As the county’s largest city, it remains vitally important. But other towns now compete for attention.

“Shawnee has come into its own. Olathe came into its own,” Birch said. “So have Lenexa and Leawood.”

With so many power centers, and so many players, the notion that any one group can dominate is an idea that now is fading away.

“No one can control the county or run the county any more,” Surbaugh said. “It can’t be done. It’s too diverse by age, ethnicity and development style.”

Various chambers of commerce have been launched, taken root and become centers of influence. The county’s mayors have grown in stature, and the tea party has become a force.

What was once a bastion of moderate Republicanism has now morphed into something far more complex.

Take the 2008 sales-tax election for the research triangle. To pass it, Birch and other triangle supporters crisscrossed the county from Shawnee to Stanley, visiting virtually every organization with any pull.

In a sign of just how vast and complex the county has become, the final number of presentations reached 226. To Birch, that was a clear sign that the days of calling a few key leaders to get something done were long gone.

“These days, leaders rise out of so many different factions,” said former state Sen. Karin Brownlee, an Olathe Republican.

No wonder Bond can no longer tick off a half-dozen leaders.

“It’s a totally new day,” he said.

New priorities

Yes, it’s a new day. Conservatives who control so many elected offices in the county aren’t by nature inclined to push bond issues and tax increases, or pursue massive new building projects. They are, after all, conservatives.

“We don’t want tax increases or increased government spending,” said state Rep. Scott Schwab, an Olathe Republican and leading JoCo conservative.

The county has reached a different phase of its development, Golba said. The mafia that did so much to put the county on the map are moving on. The push to build, build, build hasn’t disappeared, but it’s not the priority it once was.

“Let’s face it: Everybody’s broke,” Golba said. “You can’t spend money anymore. We just don’t have it.”

Langworthy agreed: “It’s maintaining more what we have instead of reaching for the stars.”

At least a few think that something has been lost. They say that the county no longer can pass tax issues that will move things forward. That, they say, could cost the county in such a competitive era.

One example, they say, is mass transit, an issue that has dogged Johnson County and the entire metropolitan area for decades.

“I tend to be somebody who thinks there’s value to having a power structure and having things happen behind the scenes,” said Andy Wollen, who for years worked to elect moderate candidates.

But others, mostly conservatives, think that’s hogwash.

“It’s not always in the best interests of a larger body of people to give that much influence to a few people,” said state Sen. Julia Lynn, an Olathe Republican. “Those days are gone.”

Said Merrick: “We’re better off. I can’t see where power concentrated in the hands of a few people was good. I think that repels people. I think it’s a lot more of an open process now.”

State Rep. Lance Kinzer, an Olathe Republican, said the county may no longer travel in a straight line to complete an objective. But the process, even if it zigs and zags and consumes a lot of time, still works.

“My sense is, it really is possible for individuals to get engaged in politics and make a difference in Johnson County without having to conform to any particular checklist,” Kinzer aid.

That more Johnson Countians are skeptical about tax increases funding new government programs “is indicative of where the population is in Johnson County these days,” he said.

Steve Rose isn’t so sure. He worries about the years to come.

“Who’s there to look ahead and look into our future to say, ‘What are we going to do to make this a greater community than it is today?’ ” he said.

“It doesn’t seem like anyone has picked up the torch. We talk about it all the time. The golden era appears to be over.”