Pay-parking plan helps Lily Wu keep promise to unify Wichita. Everybody hates it. | Opinion
When Lily Wu was running for mayor, she promised to unify our city.
And now, eight months into her mayoralty, it’s Mission Accomplished.
But maybe not quite like she envisioned it.
Wu and the City Council she leads voted in a plan to blanket downtown Wichita with paid parking that is so incredibly unpopular that practically the entire city is leaning in to try to put a stop to it.
A Change.org petition to halt the plan has garnered 5,500 signatures.
A City Hall Facebook post announcing a series of community “informational meetings” on the plan drew 1,100 comments, overwhelmingly negative. As of this writing, emoji reactions to the post split as follows: 878 negative, 46 positive and 45 laughing, which I suppose could be interpreted either way.
Here’s a representative sampling of the comments:
▪ RIP downtown Wichita!
▪ And we’re paying an out of state company $12 MILLION over six years to charge Wichitans for the scant privilege of parking in the lots and garages that, in many instances, the taxpayers of Wichita already paid to build.
▪ Whose fault is this? Who do we need to fire/never re-elect?
The hits just kept on coming, through the first informational meeting, packed with people who were angry when they walked in and even angrier after sitting through a 50-minute slide show about the history of downtown parking and how awesome it would be to add an extra 75 cents to $2 to the price of eating breakfast at the Beacon — with private-sector corporate police to hover around and write tickets if you overstay your welcome downtown.
And it continued through Tuesday’s council meeting which ran for 10(!) hours.
I can say with pardonable civic pride that I haven’t seen Wichita this unified since 9-11.
At the end of the marathon meeting, the council decided to hit the pause button on buying the new parking equipment and rethink the plan.
There’s an escape clause in the contract with The Car Park, the Idaho-based company that will buy the equipment and write the tickets. The city can get out with six months’ notice, (although the city would have to pay the company’s management fee during that six months).
It would probably cost the city a few hundred thousand to back out now, but it’s still better than it costing us $12 million to execute a plan that is near-universally despised and sure to trigger de facto boycotts of downtown businesses from people who are fed up.
The parking incident has been a case study in what’s wrong with Wichita city government.
It was developed over more than 10 years of meetings and consultant studies, practically guaranteeing that only those who are the most dedicated to the plan would know what was going on and get a say in it.
But despite what the city says was a “robust” public engagement process (they always say that, although it’s almost always the same handful of people), key details of the plan were hidden, and continue to be.
I’ve attended meetings on the parking plan through the years and it was always presented as limited paid parking to address a few trouble spots, not everywhere, all the time.
An especially egregious problem is that the pricing will be “dynamic,” meaning prices will vary based on what’s going on downtown and how much the corporate parking police think they can squeeze us for.
When the you-know-what hit the fan, Wu tried the time-honored Wichita political tradition of blaming her predecessor, in this case, former Mayor Brandon Whipple.
When it was pointed out that she had also voted in favor of the plan a week after Whipple did, she said she didn’t realize it because it was slipped into the “consent” agenda the night before the meeting, with the misleading title: “A CHARTER ORDINANCE AMENDING CHARTER ORDINANCE 237 PERTAINING TO MUNICIPAL COURT PROCEDURES BY CREATION OF A SUBSTITUTE PROVISION.”
Welcome to my world, Lily.
I’ve spent the past two decades of my life trying to decode this kind of City Hall gibberish for the people of Wichita.
That you didn’t get it in time to read and understand it isn’t a glitch in Wichita government. It’s a feature.
This story was originally published August 15, 2024 at 5:07 AM.
