Voice For Liberty

Tag: Downtown Wichita revitalization

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

  • Low NBA attendance in Wichita danger sign for Intrust Bank Arena

    The Intrust Bank Arena management firm SMG must be wondering what it bit off in Wichita. Last night NBA professional basketball players put sneaker to floor in Wichita for the first time in 14 years, and only an estimated 8,000 fans showed up. (Estimate is by the Wichita Eagle.)

    The game was held at the Charles Koch arena on the campus of Wichita State University. That arena has a capacity, according to the goshockers website, of 10,400.

    Wichita downtown arena boosters told voters that if we passed the tax, we’d have lots of events like this, and lots of fans would attend. But in this trial run of big-time professional sports in Wichita, the fans that did attend would fill barely more than half of the new downtown Wichita arena.

    Arena apologists are likely to come up with a variety of excuses for this embarrassingly poor turnout: It was only an exhibition game. It wasn’t at the downtown arena. It wasn’t the right teams. It was drizzling rain. There will always be excuses.

    The citizens of Sedgwick County are going to have to hope that the Intrust Bank Arena can do a better job drawing fans. Even though the SMG contract puts that firm on the hook for losses, that contract has a lot of ways for SMG to wiggle out, even before its five year management term expires. Ultimately, it is the Sedgwick County taxpayer who is financially responsible for the arena, and it is they who must hope for success.

  • Wichita planning puts freedom, prosperity at risk

    Remarks to be delivered to the October 13, 2009 meeting of the Wichita City Council.

    Mr. Mayor, members of the council,

    I’m here today to ask this council to put aside consideration of this proposal. My reasons are not particular to this proposal or planning firm, but rather I am concerned that we believe we have the ability to successfully plan at all.

    Here’s just one reason why I’m concerned: Wichita’s favorite method of financing developments is the TIF district. Recognizing this, the Goody Clancy proposal under the heading “Opportunities” mentions “Continue to employ established TIF funding mechanisms.”

    But as documented by the Wichita Eagle last year, our city has a poor record of financial performance with TIF districts.

    Another reason I’m concerned is that our attempts at downtown redevelopment so far have produced mixed results. In particular, the WaterWalk project in downtown Wichita has so far consumed $41 million in public subsidy, and we have very little to show for it. Shouldn’t we see if we can nurture this project to success before we take on projects that are much larger?

    Then there’s the presumption expressed by city leaders that downtown must be revitalized for the sake of our entire city. Several months ago I asked Mr. Williams to supply me with references that provide evidence for the claimed benefit of downtown redevelopment. At first he referred me to the mayor’s vision statement. But with all due respect, Mr. Mayor, your visions and dreams aren’t evidence.

    We do have a document that describes what’s been built in several cities. But the mere fact that buildings were built or renovated is not evidence of success. In these descriptions there’s no discussion of the cost, or the public subsidy needed to redevelop these downtowns, and importantly, no discussion of the effect on the entire city.

    When we look at the effect of things like TIF districts on an entire city, we find evidence like economists Richard F. Dye and David F. Merriman found. They concluded that yes, development happens in the subsidized TIF district. But it’s often at detriment to the entire city.

    Besides TIF districts, I’m also concerned about the use of other public subsidy, including a sales tax that some are talking about. I’m also concerned about the potential for eminent domain abuse. This summer I traveled to Anaheim, California to learn about a redevelopment district where the city decided not to use these techniques. The article Anaheim’s mayor wrote about this planning effort is subtitled “Foundation of Freedom Inspires Urban Growth.”

    That’s what I’m really concerned about: freedom.

    Why aren’t we satisfied with letting people live where they want to live? Why aren’t we satisfied with letting developers’ capital flow to where they think it finds its most valued use? Why do we think that centralized government planning can do a better job of making decisions and allocating resources than the dispersed knowledge of all the people of Wichita?

    Randal O’Toole has written about the impossibility of the planning task. In his book The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future, he writes this about urban planners: “Because they can build a house, planners think they can design an entire urban area.”

    He expands on the difficulty of the planning task at length in his book.

    These difficulties can be summed up like this: If we think that we can plan the revitalization of downtown Wichita, we ought to heed this quote from Friedrich Hayek’s book The Fatal Conceit: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

    Mr. Mayor and members of the council, our efforts at downtown redevelopment have produced mixed results at best. Yet we have a lot of development — commercial and residential — taking place in Wichita. It’s just not happening downtown. Instead, it’s happening where people want it to happen. It’s happening without TIF districts, public subsidy, or the use of eminent domain.

    Why can’t we be happy with that?

  • Downtown Wichita parking plan at odds with revitalization goals

    Currently, Wichita is struggling to find enough parking spots downtown to meet the demand expected to be created by the new Intrust Bank Arena. It’s been a contentious issue, with many Wichitans skeptical of the city’s ability to supply enough parking at prices that people are willing to pay for.

    But did you know that there is likely to be fewer parking spots in downtown Wichita if the firm likely to lead downtown revitalization planning has its way?

    Here are a few excerpts from the proposal submitted by Goody Clancy, the firm the city is likely to choose to lead the planning process:

    Because transit, walking and biking will be viable options, less parking will be needed. … Parking policy will also unlock opportunity to redevelop parking lots … The effects of visionary choices such as increasing downtown residential development, expanding transit service, and constraining parking supplies will be investigated. … A sound and coordinated approach, encompassing economics, engineering and urban design, is needed to free up existing parking lots for redevelopment. (emphasis added)

    I wonder: do city leaders know that their herculean effort to develop more parking downtown is an obstacle to downtown Wichita revitalization?

  • Wichita’s Waterwalk failure breeds skepticism

    A recent Wichita Eagle editorial starts with this: “Seven years into a project that was supposed to give Wichita a grand gathering place full of shops, restaurants and night spots as well as offices and condos, some City Council members and citizens remain skeptical at best about WaterWalk’s ability to deliver on its big promises. … True, the skepticism to date is richly deserved.”

    The editorial goes on to report that public investment in this project has risen to $41 million. I don’t know if this figure includes long-term land leases for $1 per year.

    In any case, there’s little to show for this investment. Even the proposal for the redevelopment of downtown Wichita from the planning firm Goody Clancy realizes that WaterWalk is a failure:

    Indeed, Water Walk might be struggling to fill its space because it has, simply put, hit a ceiling: it is focusing on food and fun, and perhaps there is room for only one such district (Old Town) in Downtown Wichita. The Arena could help in this regard, but until the publicly subsidized Water Walk is a rousing success, it might not make sense to split the pie still further.

    With this glaring example of failure of a public-private partnership staring right at us in downtown Wichita, why do we want to plan for more of this? Shouldn’t we at least wait until WaterWalk is finished (if that ever happens) before we go down the path of throwing more public investment into the hands of subsidy-seeking developers?

    At minimum, we ought to insist that the developers of the WaterWalk project be excluded from any consideration for further taxpayer subsidy. The WaterWalk development team: Dave Burk, Marketplace Properties, LLC; Jack P. DeBoer, Consolidated Holdings, Inc.; Gregory H. Kossover, Consolidated Holdings, Inc.; David E. Wells, Key Construction, Inc.; and Tom Johnson, CRE, WaterWalk LLC need to recognize their failure and the tremendous amount they have cost the Wichita taxpayer.

    Some of these people — Burk and Wells to be specific — are partners in the failed Old Town Warren Theater TIF district. In that case, the city felt it had to make a no-interest (later becoming a low-interest) loan to protect its interests.

    It’s a near certainty that the plans for downtown Wichita — at least plans as grand as revitalization supporters must be thinking of — will require massive subsidy. Already new taxes are being talked up. We don’t have a good record of protecting the taxpayers’ investment in Wichita. What makes us think we can change now?

  • Planning downtown Wichita revitalization: an impossible task?

    At tomorrow’s meeting of the Wichita City Council, consideration of a plan for the revitalization of downtown Wichita is on the agenda. Before the city goes down this path, we ought to become aware of some of the difficulties with this type of planning.

    Randal O’Toole, in his book The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future, writes this about urban planners: “Because they can build a house, planners think they can design an entire urban area.”

    He elaborates on the difficulty of the task:

    Any who say they can write a comprehensive, long-range plan for a city or region necessarily presumes that

    • they can collect all the data they need about the values and costs of the land, improvements, and proposed and alternative projects in the planning area;
    • they can accurately predict how those values and costs will change in the future;
    • they can properly understand all the relationships between various parts of their region and activities in those areas;
    • they can do all this quickly enough that the plan is still meaningful when they are done; and
    • they will be immune to political pressures and can objectively overcome their own personal preferences.

    What are the technical barriers to the success of planning? O’Toole lists these:

    • The Data Problem: Planning requires more data than can be collected in time for it to be useful to planners;
    • The Forecasting Problem: Planners cannot predict the future;
    • The Modeling Problem: Models complicated enough to be useful for planning are too complicated for anyone to understand; and
    • The Pace of Change Problem: Reality changes faster than planners can plan.

    Are we in Wichita about to take on an impossible task?

  • Welshimer files for re-election to Sedgwick County Commission

    Gwen Welshimer campaign announcement 2009-10-09Sedgwick county commissioner Gwen Welshimer files for re-election.

    Today, Sedgwick County Commissioner Gwen Welshimer filed for re-election to her position as a member of the commission. Her statement is below.

    Welshimer, a Democrat, is so far the only candidate in that party. There are three Republicans who have either filed or are considering filing.

    Welshimer campaigned and has voted as a fiscal conservative. I asked her given your fiscal conservatism, how will these Republicans differentiate themselves from you? Welshimer said that she’s not heard their campaign platforms. They are all city people, she said, likely to support funding of downtown Wichita.

    Responding to my question about the downtown Wichita revitalization planning and the likelihood of a tax to fund it, she said that we’ve given the city a $210 million economic development tool called the downtown Wichita arena. The county has also given many years of property tax incentives, both in the past and in the future. The other 19 cities in the county have not enjoyed this treatment, she said.

    In 2006, Welshimer signed a pledge to not raise taxes if elected, and she has fulfilled that pledge so far. Her opponent in that election, incumbent Ben Sciortino, received the endorsement of the Wichita Eagle. Welshimer narrowly won that election, 10,081 votes to 9,941.

    Analysis

    Given Welshimer’s fiscal conservatism, Republican candidates will find it difficult to run to her right. Her stand against tax increment financing (TIF) districts and subsidies to downtown developers means she’s not likely to get the support of those downtown developers who thrive on taxpayer subsidy. Those people contribute heavily to political campaigns. Additionally, her support for the dismissal of Sedgwick County Manager Bill Buchanan — a position I support — puts her at odds with the Chamber of Commerce crowd. They make political contributions, too.

    In this district (district 5), my analysis of a recent voter file shows voter registration runs 29% Democratic, 40% Republican, and 31% unaffiliated. (The remainder are Libertarian and Reform party registrants.)

    Considering recent voters (those who voted in an election in 2008), the numbers change a bit. In this case, 30% are Democratic, 44% Republican, and 26% unaffiliated.

    Welshimer’s statement

    I have filed as a candidate for re-election to the 5th District Seat on the Sedgwick County Commission. I want to continue holding the line for Sedgwick County taxpayers.

    At this time, center Downtown redevelopment is the number one issue for this race. I want the tax dollars paid by Southeast Wichita, Derby, and Mulvane to be used for paving roads, drainage, infrastructure, traffic controls, township assistance, and business district enhancements in District #5. The $210 million sales tax arena and decades of property tax incentives for center Downtown have been a weight around the neck of my district. I will support redevelopment of Downtown through private investment only in the future.

    I want more property tax reduction. I want to pay for it with new revenues and more efficient policies.

    If re-elected, I will continue to work for safe, sensible, and reasonable alternatives to a costly new jail.

    The Coliseum site has the potential for 1,000 new jobs and $10 million in new revenue over the next five years. I want to work to make this happen.

    I want to continue to work for the success of the National Center for Aviation Training at Jabara Airport. This is evolving into a job training destination center for employers around the world and it offers an incredible new future for Sedgwick County.

    I believe in the power of progressive new ideas. I have not been a commissioner who gives in to the out-of-touch “good old boy” network.

    I am ready for a rigorous campaign.

  • Wichita sales tax likely to be proposed

    Two recent events have led me to suspect that as part of the plan for the revitalization of downtown Wichita, we’re going to see a sales tax proposed.

    The first is Phillip Brownlee’s editorial in last Friday’s Wichita Eagle, which carried the title Taxes are lower than many think. While this editorial focused on property taxes, it’s easy to see this as an argument that Wichitans can bear the burden of more taxation. Softening up the electorate, so to speak.

    Then, there’s this email sent to the Wichita city council and Sedgwick county commission members:

    I recently received the attached information on Oklahoma City’s next plan for their downtown area. This is their MAPS program that spurred their downtown developed. I thought you might find this of interest.

    http://www.okc.gov/maps3/

    Sincerely,

    John Rolfe
    President and CEO
    Go Wichita Convention & Visitors Bureau

    MAPS — that’s the program that funded Oklahoma City’s downtown improvements through a sales tax, with a second version funding school projects — will be voted on in December. If approved, a 1% sales tax will raise funds for more downtown projects. This email, without saying so directly, endorses the idea of a sales tax for downtown development.

    What’s the sales tax in Oklahoma City, you may be wondering? It’s 8.375%. It won’t change if the new MAPS plan is approved by the voters, as a current 1% tax will expire.

    That sales tax was billed as “temporary,” and it does appear that it will expire as planned. But, city leaders are recommending approval of the new sales tax. This is similar to the sales tax for the downtown Wichita arena, when as that tax was nearing its end, Sedgwick County Commissioner Tim Norton “wondered … whether a 1 percent sales tax could help the county raise revenue.” (“Norton floats idea of 1 percent county sales tax,” Wichita Eagle, April 4, 2007)

    The sales tax for Wichita is 6.3%.

    City leaders are likely to use the the Intrust Bank Arena in downtown Wichita as an example of a successful project funded through a sales tax. But any assessment of the success of this project is about two years away. The fact that the arena exists is evidence of a minimum level of competence. It will be some time before we know whether the arena can support itself without being a drain on taxpayers, despite the provisions of the SMG management contract.

    In Wichita, we’re going to have to be watchful. The drumbeats of new taxation have started.

  • Wichita downtown arena parking promises not fulfilled

    In 2004, as residents of Sedgwick County were considering whether to vote for a sales tax to fund the downtown Wichita arena (now known as the Intrust Bank Arena and nearly ready to open), people wondered about parking.

    So on a campaign literature piece, the arena supporters made this claim: “With the proposed garage structures, more than 10,000 parking spaces will be available within a three-block radius of the Arena (compared with the Coliseum’s 4,500 spaces.)”

    Today, on the eve of the arena’s opening, these parking garages don’t exist.

    What about surface parking spaces? According to the draft version of the parking plan submitted to the city council last week, there is “available weekday parking supply at peak of approximately 3,040 spaces within the Arena District.” That district is, approximately, a three-block radius around the arena.

    The parking structures promised by arena boosters might be built. The city has approved a TIF district that surrounds the arena, and there is the potential, by my reckoning, to spend around $9 million on parking structures. But at a cost of $20,000 to $25,000 per space, this money buys 450 parking spots at most.

    By the way, I learned that the number of parking spaces around the arena is likely to decrease. At least that’s the goal of one of the firms who pitched their planning services to Wichita last week. That’s because if there is development of the area immediately surrounding the arena, there won’t be room for so much parking. Travel by automobile is something to be reduced, according to most of the planners, and we should rely on transit and bicycles instead.

    I realize that the arena boosters who put out this information weren’t government officials (although some may have been involved). They put out a few other whoppers, too. It’s too bad that so many citizens believed them.

  • Goody Clancy proposal for Downtown Wichita revitalization master plan

    Last Friday a selection committee selected one company from four finalists to lead the planning effort for the revitalization of downtown Wichita. If some city leaders and a few citizen elites had their way, citizens of Wichita wouldn’t be able to see the company’s proposal document until after the city council makes a decision to follow — or not — the recommendation of the selection committee. But thanks to city manager Robert Layton’s decision, this document is now available for all to read. (Thanks also go to council member Jim Skelton, for his unsuccessful effort to release the documents.)

    This proposal is available because I requested it (and paid for it) under the provisions of the Kansas Open Records Act. The Wichita Eagle requested it too, and as of the time I received my copy, only that newspaper and I had requested it (along with the other three proposals from the finalists).

    I didn’t scan all the pages, leaving out a section about the personnel involved and an appendix of related articles. Still, there’s 109 pages to read — but there are a lot of pictures. Click on
    Goody Clancy Proposal for Downtown Wichita Revitalization Master Plan     to view or print the document.

    (Update: The Wichita Eagle has obtained and posted a much better version of the proposal. It’s complete and in color. Click here and here.)

    There are danger signs all over this document. Under the heading “Fiscal Responsibility,” for example, we see “Know the full range of effective public-private finance tools at hand.” Which means, of course, that developers will have their hands in the pockets of taxpayers through devices such as TIF districts, grants, tax credits, abatements, and other forms of subsidy.

    Another sign: as a challenge to downtown, the document cites “The impact of relatively low development costs (inexpensive land, tenant-borne special assessment districts for infrastructure) at Wichita’s perimeter have a direct impact on Downtown land value and infrastructure economics.” (emphasis added)

    What’s wrong with this statement? First, inexpensive land is a good thing. It means more people can afford what they want.

    Second, note that people developing on the perimeter pay their own infrastructure costs. This statement hints that downtown developments won’t be expected to pay theirs.

    There are just a few hopeful signs: “Indeed, WaterWalk might be struggling to fill its space because it has, simply put, hit a ceiling: it is focusing on food and fun, and perhaps there is room for only one such district (Old Town) in Downtown Wichita. The Arena could help in this regard, but until the publicly subsidized WaterWalk is a rousing success, it might not make sense to split the pie still further.”

    Indeed. While we’re at it, let’s etch the names of the developers of WaterWalk on a large monument somewhere downtown, so that they are properly excluded from any further consideration as beneficiaries of the taxpayer. (Here’s the list, in case this monument isn’t built.)

    But if there’s not demand for another food and fun district in Wichita, what about the promise of all the food and fun surrounding the Intrust Bank Arena? (A campaign piece from that election reads “It [the arena] will enrich our quality of life as new restaurants, shops and clubs spring up in the area …”)

    It’s unknown how seriously the city council will take the steering committee’s recommendation. The council plans to vote on October 13.