Willis "Wink" Hartman emphasizes his job-creation efforts
Today, Willis "Wink" Hartman is considered one of Wichita's most successful businesspeople.
But it wasn't always that way.
Hartman has been a lot of things: a refinery worker, a vegetable salesman, a failed homebuilder.
Now, he owns his own oil company and a growing string of restaurants. He has an indoor football team and financed and built the $19 million sports and concert arena where it plays.
Hartman acknowledges mistakes along the way, with two DUI offenses and a 1987 bankruptcy when his home-building business went sour.
In September 2009, early in the Republican primary campaign for the 4th District congressional seat, Hartman sent The Eagle a letter to publish. It foreshadowed some of the issues that his opponents would likely raise — almost all of which have since been raised.
"I have been once divorced, I've twice made the bad decision to drive under the influence, and not every business decision I've made has turned to gold," Hartman said in his letter to the editor. "Making mistakes is an unavoidable part of life. What is important, though, is how you recover from your mistakes."
His politics
Hartman's politics are standard conservative Republican fare: low taxes, small government, light regulation on business, opposition to abortion.
He is hoping that voters see the breadth of his experience — and his ultimate success as a job-creating businessman — as a reason to elect him.
Hartman has spent about $1.2 million so far on the race — almost all of it his own money.
He says that self-funding means he can steer clear of lobbyists and other Washington special interests.
With the state unemployment rate at 6.3 percent — lower than other parts of the country but high by Kansas standards — Hartman said his top priority is getting Kansans back to work.
He said south-central Kansas has a skilled workforce now, but needs more jobs "before those skills and those people move elsewhere."
And Hartman says that while all of the candidates have a position on creating jobs, he's actually created a lot more of them over the years.
"I have a completely different skill set (than opponents), creating jobs and building businesses in different fields," he said. "I have the ability to put people at the table and get them to see my vision."
Rather than government stimulus, he thinks reducing government spending and regulation is the key to jump-starting the economy.
"Government does not truly create jobs except in the government structure," he said. "We need ongoing jobs that the private sector does a better job (of creating)."
Opinion on Gulf spill
A longtime oilman, Hartman has closely watched events unfold in the BP oil spill off Louisiana's Gulf Coast.
"I think the BP situation is probably one of the saddest things in my lifetime I've seen," he said.
He said he thinks moratoriums on drilling and increased regulation would be off the mark. The primary problem, he said, is that existing regulations weren't followed.
Hartman said every oil rig already has a big book of safety regulations and procedures to follow, but the federal government was lax in enforcing the rules on the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon rig.
He also said he thinks that the federal response to the spill has been slow and haphazard.
"Somebody (in the federal government) should have taken control immediately," he said. "(President) Obama should have been on site in 48 to 72 hours."
Working his way up
Hartman's grandfather started the successful Hartman Oil Co. and passed it down to Hartman's father.
Although Hartman was born to wealth, he said he was expected to work his way up. His early jobs were pumping gas and working in the Derby Refinery.
From there, he moved to sales, with Xerox Corp. and Del Monte Foods.
It was an ill-fated foray into building that brought Hartman to bankruptcy in 1987. He said he was working with a partner to build homes in Wichita's Tallgrass area when the bottom fell out of the market. Hartman Homes was one of several building companies to go under, he said.
That experience was part of what shaped Hartman's opposition to the last three years worth of bailouts in the banking and automobile industries.
"I wasn't 'too big to fail,' " he said. "I didn't have anyone standing behind me."
The turnaround came when Hartman bought out his father's interest in the family oil business in 1990, making him the sole owner.
He embarked on a series of acquisitions that tripled production and expanded into oil services and trucking.
Diverse businesses
Hartman has been diversifying his business interests in the Wichita area for about the last five years.
He established the upscale Chester's Chophouse restaurant at the Waterfront and Jimmy's Egg, a chain of coffee shops soon to establish its fifth location.
Hartman has incorporated his restaurants into the campaign with "Wake Up With Wink" sessions. Friday mornings he goes to one Jimmy's Egg or another to field questions from voters.
Three years after the Wichita Stealth folded, Hartman brought indoor arena football back to the community in 2007 when he started the Wichita Wild. A year later, he broke ground for the 5,000-seat Hartman Arena, which has emerged as a concert and entertainment venue as well as a home for the Wild since its 2009 opening.
Controversy came to the campaign when Hartman's chief rival for the GOP nomination, Republican National Committeeman Mike Pompeo, questioned his loyalty to Kansas and his truthfulness in asserting himself as a lifelong Kansan.
Hartman owns homes in Kansas and Florida. Over the years, he changed his driver's license and voting registration and took a homestead tax exemption on his house in Florida.
Hartman denied he ever abandoned his home state.
He characterizes the $4 million Florida seaside home as his vacation home, and showed The Eagle forms indicating he has filed and paid his income taxes as a Kansas resident.
This story was originally published July 21, 2010 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Willis "Wink" Hartman emphasizes his job-creation efforts."