Voice For Liberty

Tag: Downtown Wichita revitalization

Articles about the redevelopment of downtown Wichita and its impact on the economic freedom of Wichitans.

  • Kansas historic preservation tax credits should be eliminated

    It’s time to recognize historic buildings for what they are: a premium feature or amenity whose extra cost should be born solely by those who chose to own them or rent them.

    Supporters of historic buildings tell us that renovating them is more expensive than building new. Likewise, building a home with granite kitchen counter tops and marble floors in the bathrooms is more expensive than a plainer home. These premium features are chosen voluntarily by the homeowner, and it is right and just that they alone should pay for them.

    There’s no difference between these premium features and choosing to live in a historic building. Those who desire them choose them voluntarily, and should pay their full cost. Forcing everyone to subsidize this choice is wrong. It’s an example of a special interest gone wild.

    Supporters of historic building preservation subsidy tell us that these historic buildings define the character of a city. They have succumbed to the design fallacy, “the notion that architectural design is a major determinant in shaping human behavior.” It may be so for some people. Let each person decide for themselves, and then pay — or not pay — for its perceived benefit.

    It’s often true that historic preservation tax credits go to subsidize the choices of well-off people. For example, at a meeting of government officials with Wichita-area legislators in January, Wichita Downtown Development Corporation president Jeff Fluhr presented examples of several buildings in Wichita that have been rehabilitated, including the Wichita High Apartments, which he said will rent for $1,000 to $2,000. He mentioned condos in the Grant Telegraph building, which he said range in price from $300,000 to $950,000. Do the taxpayers of the state of Kansas need to subsidize people who can afford rents and prices like these?

    Wichita High ApartmentsWichita developer Dave Burk stood to pocket over $1 million in taxpayer money on this project.

    The use of tax credits, however, leads many to believe that what the state is doing is not a direct subsidy or payment. In order to clear things up, maybe we should require that the state write checks instead of issuing credits.

    Indeed, if the state issued checks to real estate developers, citizens would look at things differently. They’d wonder why they’re subsidizing the construction of apartments that rent for up to $2,000 monthly, or condos worth nearly a million dollars. They’d be angry. Using a semi-mysterious mechanism like tax credits shrouds the true economic transaction taking place.

    These expenditures of tax money — being issued as credits rather than appropriations — go through a different process than most expenditures of state money. Recently some have started to use the word “tax appropriations” to describe tax credits. These expenditures don’t go through the normal legislative process as do most appropriations.

    It’s time to recognize these historic preservation tax credits as payments to a special interest group. Unfortunately, as with most special interest groups, the group receiving the payment — tax credits in this case — has an extreme interest in the matter. They benefit greatly. But to the rest of the populace — well, does it really matter to them? John Stossel explains the problem like this:

    The Public Choice school of economics calls this the problem of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. Individual members of relatively small interest groups stand to gain huge rewards when they lobby for government favors, but each taxpayer will pay only a tiny portion of the cost of any particular program, making opposition pointless.

    That’s the situation we face with the historic preservation tax credits. A few real estate developers will enrich themselves at state expense. Well-to-do renters and condo buyers will get a better deal. To everyone else, it’s just another way that government nickels and dimes us to death.

    It should be noted that one of the most vocal proponents of the tax credits is Christy Davis, a historical preservation consultant who operates a company that assists property owners and governments in obtaining funding for historic preservation projects. She’s the very definition of a special interest group.

  • Urban planning: Wichita should reject the fads Portland has followed

    By Randal O’Toole

    Randal O'Toole speaking in WichitaRandal O’Toole in Wichita.

    Urban planners say they can make our cities more livable, our downtowns more vibrant, and our traffic calmer. The problem is that urban planners do not understand how cities work, so all of their plans often turn out disastrously wrong.

    Many urban planners are quite capable of planning a sewer line, a road, a bus route, or a school. But it is huge leap from “I can locate a water main” to “I should have the power to decide how every piece of land in your urban area should be used.”

    That is the power urban planners want. But cities are too complicated for anyone to plan, so giving anyone this power is asking for trouble.

    Take my former hometown of Portland, Oregon, whose planners say they are making streets “vibrant” and the city “livable” by encouraging walking and transit ridership and discouraging driving.

    To stop “sprawl,” planners told rural landowners around Portland that they cannot build a house on their own land unless they own at least 80 acres and earn $80,000 a year farming it. To promote “compact development,” planners rezoned many neighborhoods of single-family homes for multi-family housing with zoning so strict that, if someone’s house burns down, they can only replace it with an apartment.

    Planners believe your only property rights are the rights planning commissions decide to give you — subject to change any time.

    Portland has spent well over $2 billion building light-rail and streetcar lines. To encourage transit ridership, planners allowed rush-hour congestion on all major freeways and streets to increase to stop-and-go levels. Doing anything to relieve congestion, planners feared, “would eliminate transit ridership.”

    To further encourage transit and walking, planners zoned all the land near light-rail stations for high-density, mixed-use development, so people could walk from their apartment buildings to a cafe or grocery store. When nothing got built — developers said Portland already had a surplus of multi-family housing — the city started subsidizing it, and has so far given around $2 billion in public funds to developers.

    The results are attractive if you like the idea of dodging trolleys as you wander through canyons of four- and five-story apartment buildings. But the practical effects on Portland residents are mostly negative.

    Planners successfully increased congestion by more than six times since 1982, about the time most of these plans began. But that hasn’t gotten people out of their cars: the share of commuters taking transit to work declined from 9.8 percent in 1980 to 6.5 percent in 2007.

    Planners more than doubled housing prices, so a $150,000 home in Wichita would cost well over $300,000 in Portland. But that hasn’t made high-density housing particularly successful: many of these developments have high vacancy rates and several have gone bankrupt.

    High housing prices forced many families with children to move to distant suburbs, and the remaining childless households eat out a lot, so Portland has lots of restaurants. But it also has high taxes and urban services have deteriorated as funds once dedicated to fire, police, public health, and other programs have been diverted to subsidies to developers.

    Terrible traffic, unaffordable housing, high taxes, and reduced property rights: those are the legacies of Portland planning. That’s the future planners want to bring to Wichita. I recommend you just say no.

    Randal O’Toole (rot@cato.org) is senior fellow with the Cato Institute and author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future. He recently visited Wichita for a series of speaking engagements and meetings.

  • Randal O’Toole discusses urban planning in Wichita

    Randal O'Toole in WichitaRandal O’Toole in front of WaterWalk Place in Wichita, a monument to the failure of TIF districts, eminent domain, and urban planning by government.

    Last week Cato Institute Senior Fellow Randal O’Toole was in Wichita. He delivered a public lecture Thursday evening to a crowd that braved poor weather to attend.

    O’Toole said he spent 15 years studying urban planning, and he said he’s learned this: “Urban planners promise us paradise on earth, but first we have to give them the power to create it.”

    Imagine an urban planner in 1950 writing a 50-year plan for Wichita. O’Toole showed illustrations of some things we take for granted today but were unknown at that time, such as direct dialing a long-distance telephone call, using a personal computer, and flying on a commercial jet aircraft. But, he said, nearly everyone had rode on trains.

    We know that predictions made in the past often turn out to be nowhere near accurate. But urban planners still make these type of long-range plans. The problem, O’Toole said, is that when plans are made, someone is going to benefit from that plan. Those people will lobby to keep the plan in effect so that they continue to benefit. This will be true even if the plan turns out to be totally wrong and a disaster for everyone else.

    Cities are too complicated to plan, O’Toole said. There are too many people, and there are too many parcels of land with too many possible uses. Despite this complexity, planners think they should be allowed to dictate the use for each parcel of land.

    Since planning is so complicated, planners follow fads. As an example, O’Toole showed an example of a city that created a pedestrian mall downtown, as did some 200 cities across the country. Almost all have since been reopened to traffic.

    Another fad was slum clearance, where high-rise housing projects were built to replace slums. These buildings proved to be unlivable, and many have been torn down.

    One of the latest fads is “smart growth,” which seeks to increase the density of urban development. O’Toole’s hometown of Portland has embraced this fad. There, an urban growth boundary limits the expansion of developed areas. Instead of growing out, planners want the city to grow up. Minimum density zoning means that high-density housing replaces single family housing.

    Row houses in PortlandRow houses in Portland. These replaced a single-family home.

    O’Toole showed a photograph of a nice house that he said sells for $160,000 in Houston. In Portland, at the peak of the bubble, a similar house would sell for $380,000. He said that Portland planners are proud of the fact that developers will buy a house on a quarter-acre lot, tear it down, and replace it with four skinny row houses.

    Could this happen in Kansas, he asked? O’Toole said that President Obama’s Secretary of Transportation has decided to require all metropolitan areas to write plans to include compact development.

    Light rail is another favorite tool of urban planners that hasn’t worked. O’Toole told how Portland built light rail rather than highways. Federal dollars encouraged this. But light rail was so expensive that Portland had to cut back on its thriving bus service. Bus fares were raised and service was cut, so bus ridership plummeted.

    Light rail in MoscowA light rail train in front of an apartment building in Moscow …
    Light rail in Moscow… and the same in Portland.

    Portland built still more light rail, however, urged on by campaign contributions from rail contractors. Land near the light rail stations was zoned for high-density development. But no one wanted to develop there, because there was a surplus of high-density development and no parking around these light rail stations — except for train riders, and few people rode the trains. So Portland subsidized high-density development along light rail lines.

    Portland also created tax increment financing (or TIF districts) along the light rail lines. O’Toole referred to the money allocated to TIF districts as stolen from police and fire services, and from public schools. But still more TIF districts were created along even more light rail train lines.

    Cars parked illegally in PortlandCars parked illegally at a high-density, transit-friendly development in Portland. Management knows that if parking regulations are enforced, tenants will leave.

    The claim by government officials is that light rail promotes economic development. But it’s a zero-sum game, O’Toole said. Development is promoted in one place at the expense of development elsewhere. The added tax burden of TIF makes it a negative-sum game, as the cost of TIF financing slows the economic growth of cities that use TIF compared to those that don’t.

    O’Toole showed a photograph of a mixed-use development in Portland with three floors of apartments upstairs, with shops on the bottom floor. But all the stores are empty, because there is no parking for shoppers.

    All the spending on light rail in Portland has led to a decrease in the share of commuting trips taken using transit, O’Toole said.

    So what is the result of following urban planning fads in Portland? O’Toole said: “If your goal is to make housing unaffordable, make your streets more congested, increase taxes or reduce the quality of urban services, then by all means follow the kind of fads that Portland is doing.”

    O’Toole said that cities should follow the type of planning efforts that Anaheim, California has followed in the Platinum Triangle. Instead of using TIF financing to sell bonds and take land by eminent domain, cities should not rely on eminent domain and subsidy. Government should get out of the way, he said.

    Randal O’Toole’s appearance on the KPTS Television public affairs program Kansas Week may be viewed at Urban planning discussed on Kansas Week.

  • Urban planning discussed on Kansas Week

    Economist, author, and Cato Institute Senior Fellow Randal O’Toole discusses urban planning and redevelopment on the KPTS Television public affairs program Kansas Week. Tim Brown is the host.

    Coverage of O’Toole’s visit to Wichita is at Randal O’Toole discusses urban planning in Wichita.

  • WaterWalk hotel subsidy passes

    Not that it matters much now since the measure has passed, but here are a few things that haven’t been discussed much regarding the subsidy to a proposed hotel in Wichita’s WaterWalk development.

    Good public policy requires tax fairness

    When people pay taxes, they feel that their tax payments go towards funding the general operation of government, including paying for some services that benefit them specifically as well as everyone else. Police and fire protection, for example.

    There’s also the idea of joint sacrifice. Citizens may not like paying taxes, but most are comforted in the knowledge that everyone else pays, too.

    The tax policy surrounding this proposed hotel, however, violates sound principles of public policy. On January 12 the developer of this proposed hotel told this council that the hotel would pay property taxes. That’s true, but only on the surface. The property taxes this hotel will pay for many years will go towards retiring bonds that provided benefits exclusively for the WaterWalk development, not the general operation of government.

    So when citizens pay their property tax — knowing that some goes to provide public safety protection for their home and neighborhood — that doesn’t apply to the proposed hotel. But will it consume fire and police protection, and other city services? Of course it will, but it won’t be sharing in the cost of providing those services, as do regular citizens and businesses that don’t operate in this special tax-privileged environment.

    The same goes for the transient guest tax, or bed tax, that guests of this hotel will pay. That money, according to city budget documents, is designed to be used for certain specific purposes. “The Tourism and Convention Fund, financed through a six percent transient guest tax on hotel and motel rooms in Wichita, provides monies to support tourism and convention, infrastructure, and promotion of the City.” Further, from the same document: “Fund priorities are: 1) debt service for tourism and convention facilities, 2) operational deficit subsidies and 3) care and maintenance of Century II.” But in the case of this proposed hotel, the transient guest tax generated by the hotel will be used to pay off bonds that benefit only this hotel. Is this consistent with the city’s stated policy for use of the transient guest tax?

    Who can we trust?

    There’s a big issue of trust at stake here. Several members of this council, along with the mayor and city manager, last month heard a consultant from Goody Clancy (the firm that’s helping plan the revitalization of downtown Wichita) tell Wichita that downtown hotel occupancy rates are high, above the level that indicates a need for new hotels. In the consultant’s own words: “There’s a market for additional hotel rooms downtown.”

    The finding that there’s a market for hotel rooms should mean that there’s no need to pay someone to build a hotel downtown.

    We can’t have it both ways. We can’t have our planning consultant telling us there’s a market at the same time we’re ready to believe a hotel developer who tells us it’s unprofitable to build a hotel downtown.

    In light of the Goody Clancy findings, we need to examine the assumptions used to produce the “gap” in financing that the hotel developer claims makes it unprofitable to develop this hotel. It’s not sufficient to check the arithmetic, as Mr. Bell tells us his department does. We need to seriously examine those assumptions, remembering that they are provided by someone who has a multi-million dollar motive to show the existence of a financing gap that the city will fill.

    We need to also remember that as long as this city is willing to fill financing gaps, no one will submit a proposal to this city without showing a gap. This sets the template for the development of the remaining empty parcels in WaterWalk, and for all of downtown, for that matter.

    This issue of trust extends to Jack DeBoer, the WaterWalk owner, telling us that he doesn’t want any more city money. In response to citizen inquiry, the city has produced a statement of sources and uses of funds that shows that the money to be paid to DeBoer won’t come from the city’s contribution to the project.

    This contention would be laughable if it wasn’t disingenuous and self-serving. It’s not credible to tell citizens that money from one source is used only for one purpose. The fact that the city is making a contribution to the hotel developer makes the payment to DeBeor possible. It doesn’t matter whose pocket the dollars come from. As far as public policy is concerned, all dollars are the same.

    Leveling the playing field?

    Some on this council have said that the subsidy provided to this proposed hotel actually levels the paying field instead of distorting it. What is the source of the burden that downtown developers face? Often it is said that land assembly issues are troublesome, but that isn’t the case for the proposed hotel.

    What, exactly, are the difficulties that this proposed hotel faces that require city subsidy?

    Pursuit of conventions: good public policy?

    One of the reasons Wichita city leaders say we need to provide subsidy to a proposed hotel in the downtown WaterWalk development is that the rooms are needed to support the city’s effort to gain convention business.

    But the convention business is in a structural decline that has been declining for many years. At the same time many cities — both large and small — have built vast conventions centers and related infrastructure. The promised economic development impact of this public investment rarely materializes, but cities continue to pour in public investment, chasing something that just isn’t there.

  • Wichita’s pursuit of convention business: a wise strategy?

    One of the reasons Wichita city leaders say we need to provide subsidy to a proposed hotel in the downtown WaterWalk development is that the rooms are needed to support the city’s effort to gain convention business.

    On its face, this pursuit of convention business seems like a noble effort by city leaders. Vast streams of economic development will follow if they are successful, they say. Providing subsidy to a hotel in support of this effort, they say, should be a simple decision. Especially when supporters like Wichita city council member Jeff Longwell tell us that much of the subsidy to the hotel will be paid by visitors to Wichita.

    But I’ve not seen discussion in Wichita on whether this pursuit of convention business is wise. Heywood T. Sanders, who is professor in the Department of Public Administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio, is a noted critic of public efforts to chase convention business for economic development. His report 2005 Space Available: The Realities of Convention Centers as Economic Development Strategy was published by the left-leaning think tank The Brookings Institution. It provides a look at the realities of the convention trade.

    Heywood writes that convention center business has been on the decline, and it started well before the terrorist attacks in 2001. In a section titled “Trends: Portrait of a Faltering Industry” we can read that attendance is down, exhibit space demand is down, and hotel room demand in cities has fallen too.

    The author notes that the decline in convention business is a structural decline: “[Reasons for decline] are the product of industry consolidation, particularly in the hardware and home improvement industry, reductions in business travel in the face of increasing cost and difficulty, and alternative means of conveying and gathering information.” These are not cyclical trends that are likely to reverse in the future.

    Despite shrinking demand, cities are building more convention space: “Despite diminishing demand, the last few years have seen a remarkable boom in the volume of exhibit space in U. S. convention centers.” The building of larger convention centers in many cities means that more cities are able to host the larger events, or, cities can now host several smaller events simultaneously. The result, says the author, is fierce competition for both large and small events.

    Then, what about the costs? The author introduces a section on costs with: “The studies that justify both the new center space and the publicly-owned hotels paint a picture of tens of thousands of new out-of-town visitors and millions of dollars in economic impact. Despite that rhetoric, these projects carry real risks and larger potential costs, particularly in an uncertain and highly competitive environment.”

    The convention center is just the start of costs: “A new [convention] center is thus often followed by a subsidized or fully publicly-owned hotel.” Wichita, of course, has a fully publicly-owned hotel, the large 303-room Hyatt. Now Wichita seeks to subsidize a hotel in the WaterWalk development. This proposed hotel does not provide as many rooms as Wichita convention planners say the city needs, so it is likely not to be the last such proposal for a subsidy to hotel developers.

    Other things Heywood says that are likely to be proposed are a sports arena. Wichita, of course, just opened a taxpayer-financed and government-owned facility. Entertainment, retail, and cultural attractions are often proposed, he writes, and Wichita downtown planners have indicated their desire for these. Downtown boosters are likely to propose a sales tax to support these efforts.

    The conclusion to this paper describes Wichita’s current situation and foreshadows what is likely for the future of Wichita:

    But if taxing, spending, and building have been successful, the performance and results of that investment have been decidedly less so. Existing convention centers have seen their business evaporate, while new centers and expansions are delivering remarkably little in terms of attendance and activity.

    What is even more striking, in city after city, is that the new private investment and development that these centers were supposed to spur — and the associated thousands of new visitors — has simply not occurred. Rather, city and convention bureau officials now argue that cities need more space, and more convenience, to lure those promised conventions. And so underperforming convention centers now must be redeemed by public investment and ownership of big new hotels. When those hotels fail to deliver the promises, then the excuse is that more attractions, or more retail shops, or even more convention center space will be needed to achieve the goal of thousands of new visitors.

    We already see some of this excuse-making taking place: Private investment in downtown Wichita has been weak, it is said, because there’s not yet a critical mass of development. It is promised by downtown boosters that given enough public money critical mass will be achieved, and private investment will rush in. But since there is no definition of what constitutes critical mass, this excuse is always available to justify failure.

    Listen to an interview with Sanders from 2009. A transcript of an interview with Sanders from 2004 is at “A Lot of Hooey”: Heywood Sanders on Convention Center Economics.

  • Urban planning to be explored in Wichita

    As Wichita is presently engaged in a downtown planning process that holds the promise of more centralized planning, more government spending, and tax increases, Wichitans need to be aware of alternatives.

    Noted author and Cato Institute Senior Fellow Randal O’Toole will be in Wichita next week for several events. O’Toole is author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future and more recently Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It.

    O’Toole’s biography at the Cato Institute states:

    Randal O’Toole is a Cato Institute Senior Fellow working on urban growth, public land, and transportation issues. O’Toole’s research on national forest management, culminating in his 1988 book, Reforming the Forest Service, has had a major influence on Forest Service policy and on-the-ground management. His analysis of urban land-use and transportation issues, brought together in his 2001 book, The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths, has influenced decisions in cities across the country. In his most recent book, The Best-Laid Plans, O’Toole calls for repealing federal, state, and local planning laws and proposes reforms that can help solve social and environmental problems without heavy-handed government regulation. O’Toole is the author of numerous Cato papers. He has also written for Regulation magazine as well as op-eds and articles for numerous other national journals and newspapers. O’Toole travels extensively and has spoken about free-market environmental issues dozens of cities. An Oregon native, O’Toole was educated in forestry at Oregon State University and in economics at the University of Oregon.

    O’Toole will deliver a free public lecture titled “Is There a Better Alternative to Urban Planning?” on Thursday February 4. The location is the Bank of America auditorium at Douglas and Broadway, starting at 7:00 pm.

    The Kansas chapter of Americans for Prosperity is the sponsor for this event. While there is no charge for admission to the lecture, it is helpful if those planning to attend would register by clicking on Is There a Better Alternative to Urban Planning?

  • With downtown Wichita hotels doing well, why the need for subsidy?

    At a recent presentation by Wichita’s downtown revitalization planning firm Goody Clancy, data was presented that is at odds with the city’s plans.

    Goody Clancy consultants presented data showing that downtown Wichita hotels are doing better than hotels in the entire Wichita market. Data from the charts shows that Wichita market hotels command an average daily rate of about $78. The rate for downtown hotels is about $110.

    Occupancy rates tell a similar story. For all Wichita hotels the occupancy rate is about 65%, while for downtown hotels the rate is 70%.

    According to Goody Clancy consultant Sarah Woodworth, when occupancy rates are at 65% or higher, the area is ready for new hotel rooms. So it seems that more hotels are needed in downtown Wichita, and that new hotels could be profitable.

    But we’re getting a different story from Wichita’s bureaucratic class. According to them, a proposed Fairfield Inn in the downtown WaterWalk development is not feasible unless the city supplies some $3 million in subsidy to the developer.

    This is according to Wichita Urban Development chief Allen Bell, who says there is a “gap” in the business plan for the proposed hotel. Unless the city steps in and fills the gap, the hotel won’t be built, according to Bell.

    The figures that show the gap, however, are provided by someone who has a multi-million dollar motive to create a gap. Bell says his office checks the arithmetic on these figures, but that doesn’t count for due diligence, especially with the city’s recent history of overlooking important facts about proposed projects.

    Here’s the real question: with the city’s planning firm saying the downtown Wichita hotel market is strong with the market clamoring for new rooms, why does the city say a new hotel can’t be built without subsidy?

  • More questions surround WaterWalk hotel proposal

    Yesterday the Wichita Eagle printed a letter from citizen activist John Todd concerning the proposal for City of Wichita subsidy for a hotel in the downtown WaterWalk development. This is the unabridged version of the letter.

    In 2002 elected city officials leased a prime 20-acre parcel of city owned downtown land known as the East Bank to the WaterWalk developers for $1 per year for 99 years. The lease contained a subordination clause that allowed the developers to place new first mortgage financing on improvements (buildings) they made to the property, thus leaving the publicly owned land in second position to new first mortgage financing. This land was therefore subject to foreclosure action and loss in the event the developers defaulted.

    The Wichita Eagle reported that WaterWalk developers have received an estimated $41 million of taxpayer-subsidized stimulus money since the inception of this public/private venture. In addition to essentially free land, government officials have placed the project in a tax increment financing district and have utilized the STAR bond programs, both of which transfer tax revenues away from the public treasury and into the hands of the private developers. The Eagle also reported that WaterWalk developer Jack DeBoer was buying out his other WaterWalk venture partners and said there would be no need for additional government subsidy

    Just days prior to the January 12th City Council meeting the public learns that a new proposed WaterWalk hotel developer will ask the Council for a letter of intent approval seeking millions of dollars more of public subsidized funds.

    I feel certain that the letter of intent would have been unanimously approved had not several concerned citizens been there asking for a public hearing process that would allow citizens the opportunity to examine this project. (A video of that meeting can be seen at the city’s website by clicking on Wichita City Council meeting, January 12, 2010.)

    Is the WaterWalk hotel developer the only hotel bidder for this public/private partnership? Will our City Council issue a RFP (Request for Proposals) from other developers? Perhaps there is another private developer who will build the hotel with less public stimulus money or none. With massive public subsidy already given, why hasn’t hotelier DeBoer built a hotel on the property? He has stated he has no need for additional public money.

    How much money will, if any, is Mr. DeBoer receiving from the hotel developer for transferring the $1 per year for 99 year least on the .8-acre parcel of WaterWalk land? Who owns the parking garage next to the proposed hotel site, and how much money will the hotel developer be paying to use 100 parking spaces?

    As stewards of the public trust in the WaterWalk public/private partnership, our Mayor and City Council have an obligation to the taxpayers to hold a meaningful public forum to discuss the public’s interests in this public/private project. It needs to be held in a public forum similar to those held by Sedgwick County Commissioners.

    Local officials have locked us into an expensive public/private partnership with massive taxpayer provided benefits accruing to the private developer. Isn’t it time for the interests of the “public” portion of this partnership to be protected? Don’t Wichitans deserve the opportunity to discuss this project before additional public money is promised once again to developers?