Wichita rewards businesses that dodged $13 million in parking payments via secret deal | Opinion
On parking, the Wichita City Council showed who they work for Tuesday.
Hint: It’s not you.
Once again, the council — with the notable exceptions of Mayor Lily Wu and council member Mike Hoheisel — put the interests of the well-connected downtown business class ahead of the general public and its interests.
In short, the council bent over backwards (as usual) to ensure that the cost of doing business will be borne by ordinary citizens who patronize downtown establishments, rather than landlords and business owners.
It’s all the more galling because it’s been less than a week since we learned that the city government — acting on a secret handshake deal that was never voted on nor written down — has been undercharging Old Town businesses for their parking by $532,000 a year for the last 25 years.
The city now claims it has a backlog of more than $18 million in deferred maintenance that needs to be done on its garages. In Old Town, charging the businesses what they originally agreed to pay would have generated $13 million, which, in the years before the current inflationary period, would very likely have been plenty to pay for any maintenance the garages needed.
The backroom deal City Hall cut with the businesses in the late 1990s was that they’d pay $7.50 per space per month for parking in perpetuity, despite contract language that should have raised the cost per space to as much as $25 a month by now.
The answer seems simple: make the businesses pay what they’re supposed to pay and the parking problem goes away.
Props to Mayor Wu for taking the fight to city staff. She interrupted Assistant City Manager Troy Anderson’s canned presentation to express her displeasure over the uncollected revenue.
“I asked myself why were these contracts not enforced and how did we get to this position?” she said. “Old Town is still paying the same rate as 1996, and I don’t know what other entities still get charged the same amount when there are increases in costs like personnel, like equipment.”
Instead of trying to recoup any lost revenue, the council majority — again, minus Wu and Hoheisel — threw the underpaying businesses a bouquet.
Under the plan approved by the council Tuesday, Old Town bars, restaurants and shops that underpaid for a quarter century are getting rewarded with a boost to their bottom line at taxpayer expense. They won’t even have to pay the $7.50 per space anymore, assuming they agree to a special sales tax to be levied on their customers, which for most will go unnoticed at the bottom of sales slips.
Adding a localized sales tax, called a CID, usually takes a 100% vote of the affected businesses. But in what appears to be a way to ensure passage, the City Council is planning to reduce the minimum vote to 55%, as low as it can go under state law.
Old Town generates $40 million in sales annually. The 2% parking tax is estimated to generate about $800,000 a year.
On top of that, offices, apartments and other businesses that don’t generate sales tax will pay $15 per space, bringing the total rake for the city to roughly $1 million a year in Old Town alone.
For the record, that $15 per space per month works out to $180 a year, less than half the $400 per space per year that Anderson has been swearing City Hall needs to break even on parking.
If you’re downtown, but not in Old Town, you’ll be paying a dollar an hour or $5 a day for surface parking. Garage parking will cost you $1 an hour, or $10 a day.
The first 15 minutes will be free. Merry Christmas Wichita.!
Why the big hurry to push this through? Because the city can’t wait to deploy a for-profit force of privatized parking enforcers from an Idaho-based company called The Car Park, to write Wichita drivers as many tickets as possible, using equipment the city’s taxpayers are paying for.
The new plan excludes, for now, the Delano business district, which was vocally opposed to paid parking. Pay-to-park in that area will wait until after the completion of the new “multi-modal transit center” — a giant parking garage for Riverfront Stadium pretending to be a useful hub for our perpetually inadequate bus system.
Council member Dalton Glasscock called it a “win, win, win” proposition.
And he’s right.
City Hall wins, because it will get a windfall of new parking money for more garages to facilitate its pet projects.
The Car Park wins. They get $12 million over the next five years to install parking meters and gates and write tickets.
Old Town businesses that have underpaid for parking for 25 years win, because now they won’t have to pay at all.
The only losers are us.
This story was originally published December 18, 2024 at 5:16 AM.
