Nothing in there is specific to Kansas, or really small town America. See if you haven't read it yet, the amazing Ferguson Report - extremely concise and readable for a government report - which collected testimony of corruption every which way and concluded with doing nothing and a full trust in the locals sorting it out for themselves. And then again and still higher scale, cities around the San Francisco Bay Area and all the way to San Francisco. The specifics vary greatly and creatively (?) but the overall theme is there.