In Wichita, the chair of the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce crafts a sweetheart deal for his company to the detriment of Wichita taxpayers.
In November 2013 the Wichita City Council granted an exemption from paying property and sales tax for High Touch Technologies, a company located in downtown Wichita. This item was of more than usual interest as the company’s CEO, Wayne Chambers, is now chair of the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce.
A question is this: Who was the biggest beneficiary of this transaction: High Touch and its owners, or city taxpayers?
To evaluate real estate investments, a common metric is capitalization rate. The formula is
capitalization rate = annual net operating income / cost (or value)
($35 per stall per month * 12 months per year) / $17,609 cost = 2.4 percent
How do we place this number in context? Is this a good or bad deal for taxpayers? To answer this question, we need to find an appropriate capitalization rate. In major cities the capitalization rate for parking garages is lower than for other types of real estate, perhaps five percent. Local sources say the rate in Wichita for parking garages could be seven or eight percent, but there are no recent parking lot transactions to help gauge what the market wants for a capitalization rate. Taxpayers may remember when the city evaluated the Union Station project in October, part of which is a parking garage, the city used a capitalization rate of nine percent. That’s the capitalization rate the city felt the investor deserved to earn, and the city used that rate to justify taxpayer subsidy.
But on the 215 S. Market garage the city, on behalf of taxpayers, accepted a cap rate of just 2.4 percent.
What if the city wanted to earn a capitalization rate of nine percent for taxpayers? The annual rent for each parking stall would have to be $1,585, or $132 per month. At seven percent capitalization rate, the monthly rent would be $103.
But the city is renting the spaces for just $35, not $132 or $103.
All of these costs are contained in the $35 monthly rent the city will collect from High Touch. It’s a great deal for High Touch, and a bad deal for city taxpayers. It also establishes a template whereby private sector developers are unlikely to develop parking in downtown Wichita when there is a competitor that can undercut their rates, using taxpayer dollars to do so.
Taxpayers might remember that the biggest subsidy for High Touch — the property and sales tax breaks — started when the company CEO dropped hints that the company might add jobs elsewhere than Wichita. Chambers told the Wichita Business Journal that he considered moving the office to another city. All this happened while he was working his way up the leadership ladder to become chair of the Wichita Chamber.
An open records request reveals that the interest rate the City of Wichita pays to finance these types of projects is 5%. So the city collects a 2.4% return on the parking garage and pays out 5% for money borrowed to finance the project. Go figure…
This is chump change in Wichita when compared with other city contracts for land along the river or large construction contracts. Just look at the deal the Michigan Company and their Wichita partners got on the airport construction project. The airport project seems to have dropped off the local media radar screen as it seems to fall behind its projected completion date.