Delano businesses cry foul over parking during ballpark construction

Forget the debate over whether there will be enough parking spaces when the Wichita Wind Surge baseball team debuts at its new stadium this spring.

Business owners in Delano are having a much more immediate problem with the stadium’s close to 300 construction workers who are taking their customers’ parking spaces now.

“The problem started the minute they started construction,” said Jennifer Ray, whose Monarch bar and restaurant is on the roundabout by the Delano clock tower.

“My lunch business has suffered tremendously,” she said. “We have kind of trucked along and dealt with it for quite a while.”

The parking lot between the Monarch and the stadium is only part of the problem. Since about July, there’s been a ripple effect onto Douglas and side streets where workers park at 7 a.m. and don’t leave until late in the afternoon.

“I’ve seen an impact on foot traffic,” said Bungalow 26 owner Kelsey Metzinger.

She said she started talking to other business owners about what might be going on.

“We were all . . . scratching our heads,” she said.

Then she talked with Ray.

“I was like, that could be a piece of the puzzle,” Metzinger said. “The side streets are completely filled all the way around.”

Some business owners are reluctant to discuss the problem for fear customers will quit coming to Delano.

“There are spaces available to shop Delano,” said “Hatman” Jack Kellogg, whose Hatman Jack’s Wichita Hat Works is just across Sycamore from the Monarch. “Just have a few more minutes in your arsenal to locate one that’s handy.”

City Council member Jeff Blubaugh and City Manager Robert Layton acknowledge that construction is affecting businesses.

“This is their money-making time of year, and they’re getting hit hard on the parking,” Blubaugh said.

He and Layton said they’ve repeatedly stepped in to try to help by working with contractors to get the message out about other available parking for the workers. They said the problem is that new subcontractors regularly come on the job, and the messaging has to start over again.

“We’re successful for a week or so, maybe two weeks,” Layton said.

Blubaugh said he thinks the new stadium eventually will be a great boon to the Delano area, “But they’ve got to make a living in the interim.”

Priority list

Wind Surge owner Lou Schwechheimer said he’s also taking the parking situation “very seriously.”

“We’ve continued to do our utmost to be a good neighbor,” he said. “We’re taking those concerns to heart.”

However, Schwechheimer said the stadium “is a major project” with some very stringent timelines.

Ray, who was invited to be a team investor and said she still plans to be one if she’s still wanted, said there have been a lot of apologies but not much help.

“I just don’t think it’s very high on anyone’s priority.”

Adding to frustrations among business owners is that the team ropes off parking every day for its own use at its team store near the stadium.

“It’s just astounding,” Ray said.

“It’s not legal, first off. It’s the street. And second off, you’re the ones causing this problem.”

Schwechheimer said he believes that space is rented, but Layton said that’s not the case.

“We have reminded them that they’re not to do that because of the parking scarcity, and we’ll remind them again of that.”

Ray said the team also removed handicap signs from the lot behind her business and uses the spaces for employee parking.

Schwechheimer said he doesn’t believe the land where the team’s trailers are is handicap accessible and that his staff continues to adjust to construction schedules and work with contractors to park where they request.

Layton said if the signs have been taken down, “We’ll go ahead and put the handicap parking back.”

He said he’s been working with business owners and groups in Delano about long-term parking solutions for when baseball games start.

“I don’t want to come up with a solution that will be opposed by business owners.”

Layton said the city has identified about 9,000 parking spaces between downtown and the 10,000-capacity stadium and is adding 800 more spaces by buying and leasing other spots. The city also is creating a park-and-ride option to ease parking issues for games and other events.

Ray is skeptical and concerned.

“People are not going to walk from the other side of the river to eat or to pop into Kelsey’s or to get a massage.”

Ray points to downtown as a comparison. She said she knows that “worst-case scenario” she can park in the Old Town Square parking lot, but she said Delano doesn’t have anything like that.

“I’m all for walkability, but there has to be a place to walk from.”

Sacrifice fly

Long before there was even talk of a new stadium, Picasso’s Pizzeria owner Kurt Schmidt said parking was an issue in Delano.

“That’s the way I’ve felt since day one.”

However, he said his customers don’t seem to complain.

“If people want to come and eat your food, they’re going to find a way to eat your food.”

He’s hoping there will be many more baseball fans eating his pizza starting this spring.

“They will all be new customers — hopefully new customers to us.”

For now, though, Schmidt said parking “does suck.”

Ray and several others who are tired of battling the situation and taking a new tack this week.

“We’re going to take a little page out of their playbook,” she said.

The owners have ordered a number of sandwich boards that say parking is reserved for retail customers. They also have ropes to block off parking and are going to take turns putting them up and taking them down each day.

Kellogg said he knows that with progress comes sacrifice, but he is looking for some help.

“All it would require is for the construction workers to move their trucks into a different spot so that . . . the merchants and the stakeholders can get their customers to move in.”

He said lots of letters have been “flying back and forth” and that “Schwechheimer has gone to bat for us.”

Since nothing has changed, though, Kellogg said, “We’re sort of taking the law into our own hands.”

The business owners feel they’ve done enough sacrificing, which is why Ray is organizing a parking counteroffensive.

“If nothing is going to change I will stop wasting my time sending emails to the city and the baseball team,” she said in a Dec. 5 letter to fellow business owners, “but I figured that this would be a good last resort.”

This story was originally published December 22, 2019 at 4:37 AM.