WE Blog

You know, there is an Art Deparment, Anthropology Department, Business Department, History Department at Wichita State.

Surely someone from the local university set is qualified and wants to lead.

Nobody wants to apply to be the Captain of the Titanic either!

(the attraction needs strong leadership and new ideas) RIGHT. The board is really looking for someone they can control and who will be submissive to their every whim.

The concept of Wichita, USA as a tourist attraction just isn’t a dog that will hunt. It’s not going to happen, even with sky-high gas prices keeping people closer to home. Cowtown is more than likely going to die a slow death over the next few years.

Now, if Wichita had a tourist attraction that would draw people in, perhaps there would be some possibilities. Perhaps something like a casino.

Whoops, that idea is dead.

So, is the problem Wichita’s the demonstrated incompetence of Wichita’s governance and their appointed personnel in properly promoting things or is the problem what Cowtown has to offer?

I would say more that Wichita is LOUSY at promoting itself in what it has to offer. This has been demonstrated time and again in the various things the City gets behind only to drive in the ground and/or out of town. BUT we citizens of Wichita don’t get a pass on this either. We ourselves are LOUSY at supporting what we have, don’t patronize things and then sit around and whine that there’s nothing to do in Wichita and how boring it is. All the while we’re whining we have museums, sports teams, performance arts venues and on and on sitting within a few minutes drive time away.

I used to work with clients who would come to Wichita from all parts of the country – big name cities like LA, Atlanta, Boston, and all parts in between. Many of them would rave glowingly about how surprised they were to find all these venues available in Wichita. No, we didn’t have a baseball team on the equivalent of say, the NY Yankees, but 1) we weren’t NY and 2) we weren’t paying $65 a ticket to see our team play from the nosebleed section. So how much more “worth it” is it to see a major league team play?

And many were pleasantly shocked to find out we have a couple different symphonies and live theater venues to attend. No it wasn’t the equivalent of NY, but again, it wasn’t as expensive and certainly far from poor quality entertainment? See my/their point?

And when you calculate in our relatively low cost of living, low crime rate, short commute times, etc of Wichita/Sedgwick County compared to those areas they came from, Wichita looked pretty good to them.

So is our problem that our venues suck? Or are we just ignorant, whiners that would rather see our self-fulfilling prophecy of “There’s nothing to do in Wichita” come to pass rather than get off our butts and support some of this stuff better? God forbid we should fork over a few bucks at the ticket window and try to provide our kids an educational experience or risk learning something ourselves. And God knows, we wouldn’t want to give up any of our own precious time to volunteer at one of these venues to help them put on a quality show.

But again, our city leadership and their appointed promoters don’t get a pass either. They’ve demonstrated time and again they don’t have the first clue how to properly promote what they have. And when they try, they try to eat the whole elephant in one bite and go from smaller city USA level of activity to trying to become a major tourist destination all of our own which, as one previous poster said, just ain’t gonna happen. Something between sleepy, dyin’ li’l nothin’ville and thinking we’re gonna become Manhattan Island and Disneyworld all rolled into one would be more realistic.