Here is our ranking of Top 10 issues of 2008 from today’s editorial:
1. Presidential election
2. Economy
3. Iraq
4. School bond
5. Coal plant
6. City manager search
7. City policies (TIFs, smoking ban, etc.)
8. Local elections
9. Child welfare (record number of child deaths, complaints about D.A. Office)
10. Casinos
We tried to base the rankings on political and policy issues that generated the most public passion, not just big news stories. Did we miss something, or get them in the wrong order?
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15 Comments
And, now, drum roll please … the #1 top Wichita tax waste issue: Wasting $500,000,000.23 local taxes on the unwanted, unneeded, no purpose, white elephant (for which sports?) Downtown Arena.
No, its not a figment of your imagination. This albatross is actually being constructed on the west side of the tracks from the Union Railroad Station.
So far, damages caused by this civic wreck in progress:
** Destroyed proposed parking lot for Wichita’s Union Railroad Station formerly reserved for an Amtrak Station parking lot. Now when Amtrak comes to Wichita, the Amtrak passenger station will have to be built in Park City or Haysville.
** Chased out a long list of commercial businesses in a one mile radius who moved to keep out of the potential parking problems.
** More downtown businesses left to get out of the onerous special downtown tax district and TIF districts.
** Froze development of downtown Wichita. Even the downtown Library wants to move out of the downtown business district.
** This government sponsored arena will compete with other privately owned entertainment venues including the beautiful Warren Theaters.
** This government sponsored arena makes questionable the future of the great Kansas Coliseum and its adjacent horse show pavilion buildings at 61st and I-135. Gone will be the 4,000 wonderful car parking lot. Of course the holdover county commissioners, Dave Unruh, Tom Winters and Tim Norton, want to demolish this historic showcase to avoid embarrassment.
A long list of additional downsides but I have to get ready to leave. Have a nice Sunday morning.
The city manager search pulled in that much response? Really? Because hardly anyone talked about it from what I could see. Yeah you missed one: Religion and Gay marriage.
Yeah the arena still sucks. I still can’t figure out what the hail they were thinking.
Did they ever figure out how they’ll manage traffic that is typically two miles long (measuring from what lines are presently on the interstate for the Coliseum). I can’t fathom that nightmare on Kellogg. The city can’t manage the traffic around Walmart.
And the parking…well that was epic fail too. On something everyone said needed to be addressed FIRST but was ignored. I’ll bet Arena supporters also said “they’ll greet us as liberators” too.
I find it funny that all those businesses are leaving after the all knowing Arena Gods said that it would be good for downtown business. Ha.
The arena will be a boon for those in the rickshaw business. You naysayers will learn the great benefits of the arena. With our nation in the second year of a recession, millions of jobs being lost there is absolutely one thing the people of Wichita needs, Hannah Montana concerts at $70 a ticket.
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Political_mama
Posted December 28, 2008 at 6:26 am | Permalink
Yeah you missed one: Religion and Gay marriage.
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Don’t sweat it. It gets stirred up here often enough.
Hannah Montana concerts
WOW SHE IS COMING TO WITHITA!!!!! OMG I….I…I
oh nevermid…
Here’s an issue that kind of goes with #6, or the city council’s apparent inability to look past the end of their nose when they’re spending your tax dollars.
Due diligence, anyone?
Past client: Developer admitted embezzling
The Wichita Eagle
A developer who nearly obtained $11 million in business assistance from the city of Wichita admitted to a former client three years ago that he had embezzled money and pocketed cash rents from apartment buildings he managed, according to letters the client provided to The Eagle.
Developer Grant Gaudreau declined to be interviewed for this report but in an e-mail statement to The Eagle, denied his former client’s allegations and characterized the matter as a business dispute.
Gaudreau until recently was principal developer of the Renaissance Square project, a public-private partnership plan to redevelop nine blocks in Wichita’s Midtown area.
The City Council initially approved the plan, but later put it on hold following an Eagle report on Gaudreau’s financial and legal problems.
http://www.kansas.com/news/local/story/644469.html
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The old saw “look before you leap” comes to mind.
“5. Coal plant”
You mean the forward thinking and national precedent setting decision to deny the permit to build a coal plant just because a power company wanted to?
SO SHINES a little brightness in this dim, benighted little state.
I’m surprised the Wichita media — and the public it reports on — doesn’t understand just how much the economy is gonna be trampled by the realization that corporate jets are about as popular with the world as Earth Shoes and mullet haircuts. With similar future prospects.
Someone ought to open a Duesenberg plant.
Old technology. Old status symbol. The future of the Wichita economy.
If only we had an industrial base with established technologies and crafts-people who could shape, say, aluminum into propeller-like objects which could be used to capture the Kansas wind and turn it into non-polluting perpetual energy! If only….
But no. Wichita prefers its politics driven by people who stay up late nights trying to figure out a way to bomb or shoot George Tiller.
Y’know, for God.
The Prez election is number #1. What a ride that was from Iowa to the White House for Obama.
Wall Street fraud from Enron to Bernie Madoff, 8 years of rip off in investments. Bush failure there really matters. Billions of dollars in corporate bailouts, many thousands of jobs are still being lost.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan still going on is not good. Billions of dollars spent a day in those choices.
Locally, the Arena was wonderfully voted for by an election a few years ago! I drive by the construction site occasionally, it’s fine.
The key events are YEARLY KU, WSU, KSU basketball games in it, if possible! One game from each of those colleges shouldn’t be hard to schedule. It is only money they want!
Those colleges have no other reason not to play in Intrust Arena one game a season. No home games will be lessened from their schedules either. KSU and KU drive by all the time! They could stop and stay a couple of days, play one game.
There will be enough parking and access to the Arena. Cars were backed up going to the Coliseum. There is enough parking within blocks near the Arena.
The recent school bond was another win from our community soul.
We had to replace old things when it really matters. The Coliseum had to be replaced. School board has to create new schools to lessen forced busing.
I’m finally over County voters saying No to the Casino.
Hopefully the City Library will be nicely created in their new location and Century II can get some improvement in future years.
I’m saddened by crimes and drug driving deaths. What do we create to lessen those things?
I’m surprised the Wichita media — and the public it reports on — doesn’t understand just how much the economy is gonna be trampled by the realization that there isn’t enough money on earth to pay our national debt, even if we sock it to all the rich people.
Someone ought to open a bong plant.
Old technology. Old status symbol. The future of the Wichita economy.
If only we had an industrial base with established technologies and crafts-people who could shape, say, the dreams of liberals who know nothing of wind power and the horrible affects they have on our environmental skyline, noise, health and ruination of our skys which are not cloudy all day. If only we could capture the dreams of the dwarfs living in Oz.
But no. Wannabees in Wichita prefer its politics driven by people who stay up late nights bloggin and contributing nothing to our city or society.
Y’know, for the democrats party.
BlowJay, ah BlueJay, shows his idiocy again, but what’s new.
The coal plant’s denial was based on poor science and and absence of existing law.
Those plants, wanted by those in western Kansas, meet every existing requirement on the books.
Plus, here are the headlines today.
2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/3982101/2008-was-the-year-man-made-global-warming-was-disproved.html
Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.
First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.
Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the “hottest in history” and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialize.
BlueJay bases is opinions on hysteria not rational thought, the same as the rest of his pathetic existence.
How about this top ten?
The dying newspapers, exemplified by termination of the editorial cartoonist position at the Eagle, and how they are putting much pressure upon the remaining “journalists” to march lockstep as ordered by management, lest they too get pink slips.
The coal plant’s denial was based on the people of Kansas do not have to allow their water to be stolen and their air to be polluted in order for a greedy power company to broker electricity to Colorado.
Get used to it bawksy. Gotta alotta more for ya comin’!
Oh and PS?
The coal plant is not wanted and will not be built.