It’s hard to stomach Wink Hartman’s arena sob story, but wait ’til you see what’s next | Opinion
I’m trying really hard to feel sorry for Wink Hartman — and failing.
Hartman, owner and namesake of the Hartman Arena in Park City, is claiming that Sedgwick County’s tax appraisals forced him to sell the 5,000- to 6,500-seat arena that he opened in 2009.
After selling his arena for $3.5 million in a deal that closed this week, Hartman laid into Sedgwick County government, saying high property tax appraisals forced him to sell the facility to its new owner, Wichita developer Jeff Lange.
“I just got run out of business, plain and simple,” he told Eagle business writer Carrie Rengers. “I couldn’t afford to keep it open with the heavy property tax burden that the county assigned me.”
That’s pretty hard to stomach, given that Hartman didn’t pay property taxes at all for the first 10 years he owned the arena. To help him build it, the Park City City Council granted him a 100% property tax abatement.
Park City further subsidizes the arena with an annual partnership fee of $25,000, and diverts money from the hotel guest tax to subsidize events there — about $167,000 this year.
Hartman originally built the arena to provide a home field for his Wichita Wild indoor football team, which folded in 2014.
The arena’s a smaller, bare-bones alternative to the larger and more luxurious county-owned Intrust Bank Arena, and cost about a tenth as much at $20 million.
Right about now, Hartman could use a gentle reminder that most of us have never owned an arena, or a football team, or an Indy car racing team, or oil wells, or a string of restaurants, or banks, or any of the other luxuries he’s been blessed with throughout his life.
And while he took his 10-year property tax vacation, the rest of us picked up the slack to pay for his public services.
By the way, it wasn’t just Park City forgoing tax income. The city’s decision carried over to county government and schools taxes too.
So every citizen of Sedgwick County has contributed to the Hartman Arena, including those who could never afford to go to a show there because they’re too busy trying to put food on the table.
The year the arena went on the tax rolls in 2019, Hartman paid $290,000 of general property tax (after appealing his valuation and getting the taxes reduced). Since then, it’s stabilized for the past three years around $280,000, records show.
Since building the arena, Hartman has spent $5 million on three political forays, running for Congress, governor, and lieutenant governor on the Republican ticket with Kris Kobach.
He lost all three races. If he’d just stayed out of politics, he’d have enough money banked to pay his taxes on the Hartman Arena for the next 18 years. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, he got a tidy $1.9 million “shuttered venue” government grant.
So you can see why I’m struggling to muster up too much sympathy for Hartman.
But frankly, I’m way more irritated with the Park City City Council, and you should be too.
Now, they’re gifting Lange with another 10 years of property tax exemption, for agreeing to take the arena off Hartman’s hands.
Assuming property taxes and the city subsidies stay about the same, over the next 10 years Lange could be getting the arena more or less for free.
That’s not how any of this is supposed to work. But it’s how it does, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.
Nobody but the state Legislature could prevent Park City, or any other municipality, from giving away everybody’s tax dollars to the wealthy and well-connected — and they’re the ones who wrote the law allowing it in the first place.
And while the rich rake in millions on these scammy deals, our intrepid lawmakers are busy being “fiscally responsible” by making sure some 59-year-old shelf-stocker at the Wally Mart doesn’t get 50 bucks worth of food stamps without working 30 hours a week.
Wink Hartman had his decade at the government trough. Now, he should step aside gracefully and let Jeff Lange take his turn.
And the rest of us?
Well, we carried the tax burden of the Hartman Arena for 10 years already. What’s another 10, right?
This story was originally published June 2, 2023 at 8:18 AM.
