Enough of Parks’ Visioneering digs

parkskellyHow frustrating to see Sedgwick County Commission Chairman Kelly Parks disparage this week’s Visioneering Wichita visit to Chattanooga, Tenn., as a “little junket” for Commissioners Tim Norton and Dave Unruh — as if the county had no role in the communitywide visioning effort and the commissioners and 60 other local businesspeople and community leaders were on a holiday instead of a fact-finding trip toward the betterment of Sedgwick County. Yes, Norton and Unruh went to Tennessee on the county’s dime, relying on $1,600 each from the commission’s travel fund, according to a county spokeswoman. But the County Commission endorsed Visioneering Wichita from the start, voting in early 2005 to be a Visioneering Partner with leadership to offer on technical training, the downtown arena, healthy lifestyles, solid waste, urban and regional development, emergency response, and elderly and aging. Parks repeatedly has questioned Visioneering-related county funding before and even worked against its goals (in the case of river access, for example). But Parks’ latest dig insults not only Norton and Unruh but all the thousands of people who’ve invested their time and ideas in the 5-year-old Visioneering process.

6 Comments

  1. DavidB
    Posted October 14, 2009 at 12:30 pm | Permalink

    Parks seem to do his “Visioneering” wearing blinders.

  2. Raptor
    Posted October 14, 2009 at 5:25 pm | Permalink

    To his credit, he was one of two commissioners that initially voted against that stupid pond by the airport. Ok, they all joined in AFTER the bird strike crash in NY, but Parks was one of the only 2 who listened to the experts saying that pond was a threat to public safety.

  3. preordained1
    Posted October 14, 2009 at 6:51 pm | Permalink

    Parks reminds me of the guy who all his life was sure that he was the smartest guy in the room, yet nobody ever listened to him. Then suddenly he got lucky and won an election so now he is going to show them all just how briliant he really is.

    So all the rest of us are finding out why nobody ever paid any attention to him before he was elected.

    Time to go Parks, your bus back to obscurity is waiting.

  4. CapnAmerica
    Posted October 14, 2009 at 8:04 pm | Permalink

    1600 dollars to go to freaking KNOXVILLE?

    I go to London for less than that . . .

  5. Freebird1971
    Posted October 14, 2009 at 11:33 pm | Permalink

    Every time some elected official has a visiuon it costs the tax payers money. I say mandatory drug testing for elcted city officials

  6. BobChi
    Posted October 15, 2009 at 5:30 am | Permalink

    $1600 to go to Tennessee? Knoxville isn’t the cheapest place to fly to, but you can easily do it in the $400s. They must have had some awfully nice hotels and meals to run the bill up to $1600 in a short visit. I think Kelly Parks should always ask these sorts of questions. Maybe he’ll be wrong sometimes, but the fact that people know the questions will be asked will tend to keep them more honest. You can tell that Rhonda Holman gets frustrated more easily by people questioning junkets than by people taking them.