Print edition: 
A downtown development group has dropped one project and is gearing up for a public fight over another with a local free-market group that opposes public subsidies for private development.
The disputes between Tulsa developer Paul Coury’s group and Americans for Prosperity center on the use of transient guest tax revenues – a tax paid by hotel guests to stay in Wichita hotels, not a tax levied on all taxpayers – to redevelop old buildings into hotels.
One Coury project could be headed for a public vote, if AFP generates 2,528 verifiable signatures to place on the ballot the use of guest tax revenues for the Ambassador Hotel Wichita, a 117-room boutique hotel proposed for the old Union National Bank building at Douglas and Broadway. AFP, which opposes government involvement in private development projects, wants voters to decide whether the Ambassador developers get to keep 75 percent of the transient guest taxes collected there over its first 15 years, an estimated $2.25 million or 10 percent of the project’s $22.5 million price tag.
The other project, the 62-room renovation of the Commodore Apartments near Broadway and Central downtown, is dead, Coury said, because of the specter of another guest tax fight with AFP, and problems obtaining state and federal approval to rework the historic building.
“We were going after the bed tax there again, and we were certainly concerned about another fight with them,” Coury said. “When you combine that with our inability to get design approval, it just wasn’t a project we could make work.”
The battle over the Ambassador guest tax revenue will heat up next week, when AFP plans to turn in protest petitions that could put the issue before the public for an election.
AFP will host a “petition party” from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. Sunday at the Corporate Hills Marriott, 9100 Corporate Hills Drive, to receive final petitions and launch one last plea for signers in a drive that has lasted 60 days.
Petitions are due in the Sedgwick County Election Commissioner’s Office by the close of business Tuesday. The group needs 2,528 verified signatures to force the funding to a public vote. Almost 900 were turned in Friday.
If the petitions are verified, Ambassador developers are ready to run a public campaign to state their case, a campaign that they call “expensive and unfair.”
“It’s putting us in a very awkward position,” said Coury, who heads the team that includes Old Town developer Dave Burk and Wichita construction executive Dave Wells. “We have to run a campaign, whether they spend a nickel or not.”
Susan Estes, a spokeswoman for the Wichita office of Americans for Prosperity-Kansas, said the group is confident it will get the verified signatures, but she stopped short of proclaiming victory in the petition drive.
She said the group is short of the 3,000 signatures it’s trying to obtain, the buffer AFP and its supporters want to ensure that the petition is approved by the election commissioner.
While Estes refused to commit to a public campaign to defeat the guest tax if the petition drive succeeds, Coury said AFP is holding the developers’ pocketbooks hostage and discouraging potential downtown development.
“They’re not out a nickel,” Coury said. “And if they choose not to fund a campaign, it’s incumbent upon us to spend some money.”
If the AFP petitions succeed, hotel developers are required by law to pick up the $50,000 tab for the election.
The decision about the Commodore was a surprise to Estes, who said she was speechless about Coury’s comments.
“We welcome Mr. Coury to Kansas and Wichita,” she said. “We just believe that the best approach to economic development is … tax reform rather than governments picking winners and losers.”
