The letters to the editor continue to roll in, bemoaning the Wichita City Council’s decision to loan Bill Warren $6 million to remake the Old Town Warren Theatre money pit. And I continue to wonder what the writers are missing.
The council’s willingness to throw in financially with downtown developers isn’t new, so the Warren support should surprise no one.
There’s a good chunk of city money behind the Minnesota Guys downtown. There’s the downtown Hyatt. There’s independent league baseball and the National Baseball Congress.
And if you want to roll the clock back almost six years, there’s $36 million in tax increment financing tied up in WaterWalk. That’s spending on an area that likely would be bustling today, save the decision of former mayor Carlos Mayans and an earlier council to yank money away. That’s a decision some believe cost WaterWalk a Bass Pro Shop, one of those coveted anchor tenants that brings a boatload of business with it to any development.
The debate on the city’s financial involvement in the Warren isn’t surprising, but the complainers seem a little late to the party. Personally, I wonder what, if anything, would be taking place downtown if the city wasn’t involved.
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The question I ahve is one of fairness: Is it appropriate to tax businesses OUTSIDE of Old Town to subsidize their competition IN Old Town? What ever happened to the idea of the private sector being the private sector?
Interesting to note on another thread that the QuikTrip adjacent to that booming area feels it needs to shut down to protect its people when the bars close. Makes me wonder if these tax-supported bars are really helping adjacent business areas.
You know what I always say.
Economic development, as practiced in Kansas today, is the BIGGEST hoax ever perpetrated on the taxpayer.
I recall downtown Wichita so well in 1996-97 when I moved to Wichita. Even though downtown was on the fence, it did still have occupancy in some of the buildings that are now vacant or nearly vacant.
The little known secret about Wichita’s downtown is that many of the imposing office buildings are basically empty except perhaps a few tenants on the first floors.
I hoped to become involved somehow as a volunteer to renew downtown Wichita in some logical manner.
But high paid elected county commissioners and high paid hired gun gurus mostly from southeastern states got here first. Eventually with taxpayers wallets in their hands, they turned downtown Wichita into a shambles by proposing the unwanted, unneeded white elephant downtown arena.
Now after the initial parties are over, the balloons and grafetti have fallen, the self-congratulatory dinners are finished, the going away parties held for the departing “hired guns,” the up-front cash spent …. all we will have for probably a billion dollars of wasted tax money is an ugly dangerous glass arena WITHOUT a regular tenant. Really really bad business and most taxpayers never even got a free cup of coffee out of the deal.
Additionally, the arena site eliminates the needed 500 car parking lot for the downtown railroad station in the event Wichita does get the north-south Amtrak “Flyer” train from Texas to Newton and onto the regular Amtrak east-west lines.
The list of the former arena cheerleaders is long. But now many, but not all, have left Wichita for greener pastures.
Now renewing downtown Wichita will be extremely difficult because of the white elephant arena and its demands for rogue parking.