City May Lose 316 Area Code
The Kansas Corporation Commission's staff recommends
that rural areas retain the 316 area code. Metro phone lines
would get a new area code Jan. 1.
By Dion Lefler
The Wichita Eagle
August 30, 2000Wichita and the surrounding metropolitan area will get a new telephone area code early next year if the Kansas Corporation Commission follows the recommendation of its staff.
Rural communities in a wide swath of southern Kansas would keep the existing 316 area code under the recommendation. Cities to remain in 316 would include Dodge City, Garden City and Great Bend to the west, and Parsons, Coffeyville and Emporia in the eastern half of the state.
Splitting the area code is necessary because of the explosion in recent years of line-gobbling fax machines, cell phones and computer modems.
The North American Numbering Plan Administrator's office, a multinational agency that establishes area codes throughout the continent, projects the 316 area code will run out of numbers by 2002.
Commissioners will review its staff's recommendation on splitting 316 and either issue a decision or schedule a public meeting on the issue in mid-September, said commission spokeswoman Rosemary Foreman.
Public comments to the commission have run 4-1 in favor of keeping the 316 code in rural Kansas. According to the report, 1,094 people who wrote or called the commission favored rural areas keeping 316, while only 327 said Wichita should keep it.
Foreman said the commission will take that expression of public sentiment into account as one factor in its decision but emphasized that it's not considered to be a public vote. Rural residents tend to respond to such issues in greater numbers than city dwellers, she said.
Wichita Mayor Bob Knight said the Regional Economic Area Partnership informed the commission that it strongly favors keeping 316 for the metro area. The consortium of 30 city and county governments represents about a half- million people in and around Wichita, he said.
"I can assure you that the mayor of the state's largest city, representing 342,000 people, prefers keeping the 316 area code," Knight said.
Regardless of the area code change, what is now a local call will remain a local call, even if it crosses the new boundary, Foreman said.
Still, the change would be big for small businesses such as the Wyldewood Cellars winery, based in Mulvane with a retail outlet at the Wichita Farm & Art Market.
The company markets its fruit wines across the nation and is sending out 20,000 mailings between now and the Christmas holiday. An area code change "would invalidate all of the information on how to contact us," said owner Merry Brewer. "We're talking megabucks."
The commission staff recommends that the area code change take place Jan. 1. Callers would still be connected even if they dial the old area code for four months following the change. For two months after that, they would get a recording informing them of the new area code.
The main reason the staff recommended that rural Kansas keep 316 is that the larger geographic area would have more phone lines than the Wichita area after the split, thus disrupting fewer phone consumers, Foreman said.
There are now about 653,000 lines in the 316 area. Fifty-six percent of those lines would stay with 316 if the rural areas retain the area code, she said.
Debbie Giskie, the city clerk in Liberal, said she thinks "it's a toss- up" which part of the state should get the new area code. But she thinks it would be easier for callers to remember that Wichita had a new area code than it would be if the new code encompassed hundreds of small towns across rural Kansas.
Opinions in Wichita range from strong opposition to a willingness to accept the change so the rural areas won't have to.
"I think they ought to do it just the opposite (of the commission staff recommendation)," said Robert Laswell, who lives in Newton and works in Wichita. "It seems like there are so many more businesses in the metropolitan area, it would be less changes for everybody" to keep 316 for Wichita.
But Wichita resident Linda Hayes had a different view. She said Wichitans are more used to change than rural Kansans and could more easily adapt to a new area code.
"A lot of people in (rural) Kansas, they don't want to change," she said. "That's why they're out there in the rural area."
