WICHITA — Office This developer Max Cole isn’t giving up his dream of a progressive southeast library without a fight.
In September, Have You Heard?reported that Cole made an offer to the city to do a 60,000-square-foot library at the development in the former Wichita Mall at 4031 E. Harry. At the time, Cole said he would charge $5 a square foot and throw in an extra 20,000 square feet for storage.
“I thought the economic downturn would cause the Library Board to be more realistic about the Central Library plan,” Cole wrote. “But I was wrong!”
He called the plan a “proposed book museum with computers in the downtown area.”
“The plan is so out of touch, it’s embarrassing,” Cole wrote.
He copied the e-mail to several others, including District 3 City Council member James Clendenin.
“He doesn’t pull any punches – ever,” Clendenin says of Cole. “I was somewhat speechless at first.”
He says he’s not against Cole’s proposal.
“What is the library of the future going to look like? I think Max has a really good idea of what that could look like.”
Cole wrote that he’s proposing “a digital-age vocational library that is intended to close the achievement gap in Southeast Wichita, where it is most needed … .”
“It was an incredibly unique moment for those of us that have been there for 30 years watching.”
– City lobbyist Dale Goter, referring to this week’s legislative tax debate, which he described in a report to the mayor and City Council by saying, “Feelings were hurt, bridges were burned, the rules and decorum of both houses took a major beating.”
The city of Wichita has produced an official response to a recent skit on Kimmel’s show that spoofs the city as a “Wichitawesome” place for spring break.
The video itself isn’t so official, though. Instead, it takes off on a spring break theme where a cardboard cutout Jimmy Kimmel gets drunk off a beer bong at an Old Town bar, vomits by the Arkansas River and gets some handsy treatment from a TSA agent at the airport.
“It went right there to the edge, but it does have natural attention, and individuals are looking at it,” Mayor Carl Brewer says.
He says staff in the city manager’s office, including spokeswoman Lauragail Locke, produced the video. Brewer first saw it Tuesday. By this morning, it had 3,000 views.
Brewer says if he and City Council members had produced the video, “we’d probably have been a lot more conservative than that, but then if we had done it, we’d have a lot less than 3,000 hits.”
“So I think we were on the mark,” she says. “Our goal was to produce a video that would appeal to his late night talk show television audience in the hopes of getting on national TV. … We just want to draw more attention to our city and show that we are a fun place, and we have a lot to offer.” Locke says the main point was to invite Kimmel here.
She adds, referring to the city’s cable network, “It was definitely not meant for a City7 audience.”
Locke says she’s not sure how much the video cost, but she says money spent was mainly for the cutout that a company produced and a sound effect that was used in the video. It was shot with city staff and equipment.
The mayor’s response was to call Kimmel field producer Sarah Robe, a native Wichitan, and invite the talk show host to town. That’s when he says he heard that “many of the staff there thought Wichita was a fictitious city.”
“She had to educate them and tell them no, whoever did it did their homework, and it was a real city.”
Robe tells Have You Heard? that staffers do in fact know of Wichita, but they didn’t realize that places in the video, such as Scotch & Sirloin, are real.
“That’s why it’s funny, too, and why it resonates because it’s a town that everyone’s heard of,” she says.
Writer Jonathan Bines is responsible for the original Wichitawesome video spoofing Wichita as a great spring break destination.
“Whenever a comedy writer thinks about the top anything, they immediately try to think of what the bottom might be,” he says. “It’s nothing against Wichita.”
UPDATED — Epic Sports, a Wichita-based team sporting goods supplier, is asking the city for a 90 percent 10-year tax abatement to help it purchase and remodel the former Coca-Cola plant at 3001 E. Harry.
Currently, Epic Sports has a 75,000-square-foot warehouse at 1730 S. Laura and an office at 400 S. Emporia. It would move both facilities to the 160,000-square-foot former Coca-Cola space for an almost $2.5 million expansion.
“I’m actually worried that Coca-Cola building may not be big enough,” says Epic Sports president Gary Proctor, who founded the company in 1998.
When he moved into the 75,000-square-foot current space, Proctor says, “We overflowed it in two years.”
He’s eyeing another building that could work for any future overflow.
Proctor says he’s also considering buildings in Oklahoma City and Hutchinson.
“We’ve got some real good opportunities in Oklahoma City,” he says. “They’re pretty aggressive right now.”
City Council member James Clendenin, whose district the former Coca-Cola plant is in, is traveling and hasn’t had a chance to study the Epic Sports proposal yet. He’s looking forward to it, though.
“My ears always perk up, and I’m always very happy when people show a little bit of interest in southeast Wichita, and so I’m extremely interested to get more up to speed on this,” Clendenin says.
WICHITA –Former City Council member Sharon Fearey is one of the most recognizable proponents of Midtown, where she lives, but she’s a downtown supporter, too. Now, she’s also a downtown property owner.
Fearey and her husband, Alan, have purchased the two-story building at 323 N. Market where Sheila Floodman has her Floodman Family Law office. Floodman previously owned the building.
“It just makes sense for her to lease her space versus own the entire building, which she wasn’t utilizing,” says Brent Stewart of KW Commercial, who handled the deal.
Floodman is in the 1,930 square feet on the building’s first floor. There’s also the same size apartment on the top floor. Fearey says she’ll rent that for now, but she and her husband have plans to eventually downsize and live there.
That’s also where former Mayor Joan Cole used to live and have her consulting firm.
Alan Fearey first became interested in a buying a downtown building, then Fearey considered a business venture in the area.
“That has kind of fallen through now, but it did make us start looking at buildings more,” she says.
She says an interest in downtown is a natural progression from Midtown.
“We’re just excited about downtown and excited to be part of it.”
After more than six years of working in sales for Clear Channel Radio, O’Donnell is going to work for Wink Hartman Sr. He’s done some past work for Hartman, but never full time.
“He’s spread so thin,” O’Donnell says. “He owns over 50 companies. I don’t know how he does it.”
O’Donnell will handle public relations, communications and government affairs for Hartman, which includes his Hartman Arena, restaurants and other companies.
“Everything,” O’Donnell says.
Although Hartman occasionally has a zoning issue that comes before the planning commission, O’Donnell says he’s not a regular in front of City Council, so he doesn’t expect a conflict of interest to arise.
“He never asks for any sort of incentives,” O’Donnell says. “Wink’s a do-it-yourself kind of guy.”
He adds, “If there ever was an issue … I would obviously recuse myself from that.”
“For the record, Ms. Miller does not have cooties.”
– Wichita City Council member Pete Meitzner, joking about the vacant seats between himself and Janet Miller, who is acting mayor while Mayor Carl Brewer and Vice Mayor Lavonta Williams are out of the country on an economic development trip
WICHITA — Office This developer Max Cole was reading a Wichita Eagle story about the city’s proposed almost-$50 million library, and it got him thinking.
“I started on YouTube looking around the world at libraries and seeing what the difference is between the time I used to go to them and today, and I got really excited about it,” he says.
So he wrote District 3City Council member James Clendenin with a new library offer for his Office This development in the former Wichita Mall at 4031 E. Harry.
“I’m proposing to do a 60,000-square-foot super deal,” Cole says.
“I’m offering them the world. It’s a paradigm shift, believe me. I know I shocked them with the offer, but it’s the right thing to do.
“I want that southeast part of town to succeed. I invested 10 years and a lot of money.”
He got the attention of Clendenin and others.
“Tell you what, I’m very intrigued by Max’s presentation,” says Clendenin, who has visited the property several times, including with library board members.
“I think everybody sees the extreme potential that the Office This space gives District 3,” he says. “That location is smack dab between two of the most underserved neighborhoods in Wichita.”
He’s referring to Planeview and Hilltop, but Clendenin says Office This is ideally situated for most of the district.
Director of libraries Cynthia Berner-Harris says the library board has invited Cole to make a formal presentation at its Oct. 18 meeting.
Cole’s offer was discussed at the board’s meeting Tuesday.
“They also were very intrigued by the possibilities, but they do have concerns that 60,000 square feet is beyond our capacity at this time,” Berner-Harris says.
She says southeast Wichita is an area scheduled to be addressed with the library’s master plan. The plan calls for a neighborhood facility of 7,500 square feet.