In this episode of WichitaLiberty.TV: A look at a special district proposed for Old Town, the process of granting economic development incentives and a cataloging of the available tools and amounts, and an example of waste in Wichita. Episode 43, broadcast May 18, 2014. View below, or click here to view on YouTube.
Tag: Sedgwick county government
In Wichita, citizens want more transparency in city government
In a videographed meeting that is part of a comprehensive planning process, Wichitans openly question the process, repeatedly asking for an end to cronyism and secrecy at city hall. As part of the Wichita-Sedgwick County Comprehensive Plan, the City of Wichita held a number of focus groups meetings. Their purpose, according to city documents, was to provide “information on the components of the Plan and provide input on a draft survey.”
(Some indication of the reverence given to the plan to city planners may be inferred by the city’s use of capitalization when referring to it.)
The community meetings were structured in a way reminiscent of the Delphi method, described in Wikipedia as “a structured communication technique, originally developed as a systematic, interactive forecasting method which relies on a panel of experts.” Others have a more skeptical view, believing that the Delphi technique leads citizens to believe they have participated in community democratic decision-making when in reality, that is not the goal of the process.
In October Americans for Prosperity-Kansas invited the city to hold a focus group meeting. Video from the meeting is below, or click here to view at YouTube.
Dave Barber, who is Advanced Plans Manager at Wichita-Sedgwick County Metropolitan Area Planning Department, facilitated the meeting. Susan Estes of AFP was the meeting organizer and host. Mike Shatz is the videographer. His description of the meeting is “The City of Wichita is holding a series of meetings to gain input from the public on future spending plans. The meetings are based off a survey the city conducted, which, by all accounts, was full of loaded questions geared towards promoting the programs that city officials want to see. In this meeting, one of the first in the series, citizens openly question the process and repeatedly ask for an end to cronyism and secrecy at city hall.”
Sedgwick County illustrates inefficiency of tax credit mechanism
Tax credits can be an inefficient way for government to distribute benefits, as illustrated by action the Sedgwick County Commission will consider today.A tax credit is, conceptually, a certificate with a dollar amount written on it. That certificate can be used instead of cash for payment of taxes. So when the State of Kansas issues a tax credit for $100, the state gives up that same amount in tax revenue, as someone will submit that certificate instead of a hundred dollar bill in payment of taxes. The certificate, of course, has no value to the state.
Sedgwick County received Kansas income tax credits under the state’s historic preservation program. Since the county doesn’t pay income tax, it can’t use them as payment for taxes. But since the credits are transferable, the county can sell them to someone who does need to pay taxes. And if that person can buy the tax credits for less than face value, such as paying $90 for a tax credit that’s worth $100, there’s motivation for buyers and sellers to make a deal.
This is what the county is doing. In an auction it sold three tax credits for a total of $507,066.74. This is described by county documents as representing $0.9025 per dollar of value. Working backwards, this means that the tax credits have a face value of $507,066.74/.9025 = $561,847 in face value. Someone will submit these credits to the state instead of a check for that amount when they pay their taxes.
This means that the State of Kansas gives up $561,847 in order to grant a benefit worth $507,067 to Sedgwick County. This is the inefficiency of using tax credits as a mechanism for distributing benefits.
You may be wondering: Why does this state use this inefficient method? One reason is that tax credits operate more or less on autopilot. Once the program is authorized and put in place, people or organizations that qualify for the credits receive them without action by the legislature. This has happened in downtown Wichita on a number of projects such as the renovation of the Broadview and Ambassador Hotels. Both received millions under historic preservation tax credit programs. (See In Wichita, historic preservation tax credits an inefficient form of developer welfare.)
Can you imagine the legislature having to vote to give millions of dollars to specific hotel developers? That probably wouldn’t be popular. But the tax credit program accomplishes the same result, and mostly under the radar without scrutiny.
Tax credits are a direct transfer of money from taxpayers to private parties. But being accomplished through the tax system shrouds the process in mystery. And, no direct action is required by any legislative body. The legislature creates the tax credit program. The developer applies, and if accepted, the credits are granted. No one — at least no one elected by and accountable to voters — votes to grant the specific credits.
The Kansas historic preservation tax credit program, in a short time, has grown from a program designed to help spruce up a few old buildings here and there to a developer welfare program on steroids.
Commissioner’s questions halt county’s plan to remove trees on private land
Good job, Sedgwick County Commissioner Richard Ranzau. It’s always good to put the kibosh on unneeded government spending.
At stake was about $47,000, just less than the annual median household income in Sedgwick County.
County Manager William Buchanan had signed off on spending $46,685 to clear out trees on private property along Central Avenue from the entrance of housing development St. Andrew’s Place east to 143rd Street. Work was to start next week.
But questioning by County Commissioner Richard Ranzau put the kibosh on the project, and the Minneha Township now will have to pay the tab if it wants the trees gone.
“We got out in front of ourselves without doing much critical thinking, and I take full responsibility for that,” Buchanan said.
Continue reading at the Wichita Eagle.
Readers may remember my op-ed in that same newspaper from 2009:
Last year a political science professor who is a keen observer of Kansas politics told me that city or county managers shouldn’t be in their jobs more than four or five years. After that, he said, they gain too much power.
If managers are to serve their councils or commissions — instead of the other way around — sometimes a change needs to be made, just for the sake of change.
This alone is enough reason for change in the Sedgwick County manager’s office after 18 years of County Manager William Buchanan.
Continue reading this at Commission has cause to want a new manager.
WichitaLiberty.TV September 15, 2013
In this episode of WichitaLiberty.TV, host Bob Weeks reviews chapter 4 of “Economics in One Lesson,” about how public works mean taxes, and efforts to create jobs through spending on public works do more ham than good, if the public asset is not truly needed. The tax used to build the Instrust Bank Arena in Wichita is analyzed in this light. Then on to chapter 5, “Taxes Discourage Production.” Amanda BillyRock illustrates, and Bob explains that notwithstanding inventions like the powdered orange drink Tang, innovation and progress comes primarily from the private sector, not from government programs. Episode 13, broadcast September 15, 2013. View below, or click here to view at YouTube.
WichitaLiberty.TV September 1, 2013
In this episode of WichitaLiberty.TV, host Bob Weeks presents an analysis of the delinquent real estate tax list and wonders why our institutions don’t provide this simple enhancement. Then, a review of the first two chapters of “Economics in One Lesson” with application to situations in Wichita. Finally, Amanda BillyRock illustrates Chapter 3: Blessings Of Destruction, and examples in Wichita are noted. Episode 11, broadcast September 1, 2013. View below, or click here to view on YouTube.
Sedgwick County delinquent taxes, the useful version
The Wichita Eagle has devoted newsprint to deliver the data, and you can obtain it as pdf on your computer, too. Neither of these options for delivering the Sedgwick County delinquent tax list for 2012 is very useful.
I’ve created a Google Docs sheet that holds this data. You can access it below, but it’s probably best to open it in a new window by clicking here. There are three tabs: an introduction, the data, and a pivot table that summarizes the data. Have fun.
Do economic development incentives work?
Judging the effectiveness of economic development incentives requires looking for the unseen effects as well as what is easily seen. It’s easy to see the groundbreaking and ribbon cutting ceremonies that commemorate government intervention — politicians and bureaucrats are drawn to them, and will spend taxpayer funds to make sure you’re aware. It’s more difficult to see that the harm that government intervention causes.
That’s assuming that the incentives even work as advertised in the first place. Alan Peters and Peter Fisher, in their paper titled The Failures of Economic Development Incentives published in Journal of the American Planning Association, wrote on the effects of incentives. A few quotes from the study, with emphasis added:
Given the weak effects of incentives on the location choices of businesses at the interstate level, state governments and their local governments in the aggregate probably lose far more revenue, by cutting taxes to firms that would have located in that state anyway than they gain from the few firms induced to change location.
On the three major questions — Do economic development incentives create new jobs? Are those jobs taken by targeted populations in targeted places? Are incentives, at worst, only moderately revenue negative? — traditional economic development incentives do not fare well. It is possible that incentives do induce significant new growth, that the beneficiaries of that growth are mainly those who have greatest difficulty in the labor market, and that both states and local governments benefit fiscally from that growth. But after decades of policy experimentation and literally hundreds of scholarly studies, none of these claims is clearly substantiated. Indeed, as we have argued in this article, there is a good chance that all of these claims are false.
The most fundamental problem is that many public officials appear to believe that they can influence the course of their state or local economies through incentives and subsidies to a degree far beyond anything supported by even the most optimistic evidence. We need to begin by lowering their expectations about their ability to micromanage economic growth and making the case for a more sensible view of the role of government — providing the foundations for growth through sound fiscal practices, quality public infrastructure, and good education systems — and then letting the economy take care of itself.
Following is the full paper, or click here.
Change in needed in Wichita
A version of this op-ed by John Todd appeared in the Wichita Eagle.
Change is desperately needed in Wichita — change to allow exceptionalism and end failed economic subsidies.Once again, several of the favored downtown development group partners have lined up outside City Hall with outstretched palms to receive prime city owned Arkansas River corridor land for bargain basement prices layered with generous incentives.
I heartily support private real estate development downtown and across Wichita. It creates jobs, enhances quality of life, expands the tax base and provides economic uplift. However, projects involving generous taxpayer funded “economic development” incentive handouts transfer the risk and tax burden from developers back to taxpayers who rarely realize any direct benefits from the projects.
The downtown WaterWalk project essentially gave away 20 acres of prime city owned land with a reported $41 million incentive package that included diverting tax revenue to the developer with unknown benefits to taxpayers. Compare this with the Waterfront development at 13th and Webb Road that received no subsidy and generates an estimated $2.5 million in annual tax revenues for the public treasury.
To paraphrase a thought attributed to several authors: “A Democracy cannot survive as a permanent form of government, because, when people discover they can vote money for themselves out of the public treasury, they will bankrupt it.”
I believe it is time for the citizens of Wichita to move forward by putting a new marketing program in place titled, “Capitalizing on Exceptionalism: A New Chapter in Wichita.”
To make it work, we must enlist the support of key, wealth producing, connected people of influence in our community as well as the everyday hard working citizen entrepreneurs and craftsmen, and provide the marketing forum for them to recognize and realize that Wichita can be exceptional, and that we don’t have to embrace a “follow the herd” mentality that will lead us to economic destruction and mediocrity.
We must change the “entitlement” mentality that permeates the social and the business segments of our whole country, starting in particular with our own community. Wichita can become the exceptional example of economic prosperity others will strive to emulate.
If we can move away from the entitlement attitude and get government out of the way, our private sector entrepreneurs and craftsmen can match anyone in the country; and all of this can be achieved by rejecting the corporate welfare trap we have fallen into.
John Todd
Wichita
Tax credits can be an inefficient way for government to distribute benefits, as illustrated by action the 
