Wichita City Hall dumps park director, but really needs a change of attitude | Opinion
Let’s get one thing straight off the top: I didn’t fire Troy Houtman as Wichita’s Park and Recreation director.
And even if I could, I probably wouldn’t have, as miffed as I am about the handling of Clapp Park since the city shut it down as a golf course for no good reason.
But hey, if I’m going to get blamed for Houtman’s unceremonious departure as Wichita parks czar, I’m going to say something.
I woke up this morning to a post with this in it, by Park Board member Tom Ewert:
“Way to go Dion Lefler, you cost a good man his job and cost the city a lot more money. At least you could have done a bit more research into what actually goes on at Clapp Park, with the WSU cross country team, and the disc golf course which can now host national tournaments.”
What triggered that post was a couple of columns I wrote about City Hall’s proposal to extend, for the next 10 years, the no-bid, low-rent lease of the former Clapp clubhouse to Duck’s Flying Discs. It was a plan the city tried to slide through as a consent agenda item on the day after a three-day weekend, when they thought nobody would be paying attention.
Duck’s essentially took over the park three years ago under the auspices that its disc golf business would be sort of a bridge usage, until the city could plan and start turning the former golf course into a phenomenal regional destination park. The rent was a nominal $300 a month, which was supposed to go up 30% a year, but the rent increases were never implemented.
Meanwhile, the city wasted more than $200,000 on a consultant study drawing up an eye-popping park with a bistro restaurant, all-weather farmer’s market, performance bandshell, BMX bike track, numerous sports courts and a mound for watching planes from McConnell Air Force Base.
But the “L.W. Clapp Park Master Plan” was a $28 million IOU that the city can’t cash, and a broken promise to a community that’s been stripped of its golf course while being told they’d get something better.
It probably would surprise Park Board member Ewert that I agree with him that the department’s oversight of the clubhouse lease, incompetent as it was, is only a $3,500 error and probably not a firing offense, or worth the cost of a national search to replace Houtman.
It probably wouldn’t surprise Ewert that I don’t give a flying flip about his cross-country course. First, there’s no shortage of places where you can run cross-country in and around Wichita. And if that was such a crying need, WSU could have set aside some of the land when it tore out its own golf course to build the Innovation Campus.
It probably also wouldn’t surprise Ewert that I’m not especially impressed at our ability to host national tournaments in a C-list sport like disc golf.
Troy Houtman wasn’t the problem with Wichita parks.
The real problem here is that the city has adopted a philosophy that parks and cultural facilities primarily exist to serve developers and businesses that can make money off them.
▪ We saw it at Naftzger Park, where just about anything natural was bulldozed to make way for a sheet of plastic grass to support adjacent commercial, office and apartment development.
▪ We saw it at Chester I. Lewis Reflection Square Park, rebuilt primarily as the entryway to a developer’s new osteopathic medical school.
▪ We saw it at Century II, where ticket prices and parking rates have soared after operations were turned over to a for-profit business.
▪ We saw it at the Stryker complex, where the city built $23 million worth of soccer fields and privatized them, killing the nonprofit soccer league that used to serve thousands of children in south Wichita.
▪ And we saw it most of all at the Wichita Ice Center, where the city privatized it and then forgot about it, and is now suing the former operator after a decade of unpaid debts and damage to the ice-making equipment.
Wichita — its City Council and its Park Board especially — need to go back to basics and remember that the purpose of public parks, recreation and cultural services is to provide affordable activities, entertainment and education to the general public — not catering to private developers and business interests.
If they don’t understand that, nothing’s going to change and nothing’s going to get any better — with or without Troy Houtman.
