7 questions the Wichita City Council should ask before approving downtown paid parking | Opinion

If you've been distracted lately by the recent election (as I have), it's time to start paying attention again to some of our local issues.

And one of the biggest ones is parking — specifically, where, how and how much it will cost the citizenry of Wichita to use public parking downtown. It's set to come before the City Council on Tuesday.

When we checked in with the council members in August, they were pausing the final vote to blanket downtown with pay-to-park to allow for more "public input" because the entire city pretty much gave them the finger over the initial plan.

There's been a little bit of public input since then, but the intermission was mostly to allow time for city staff to cut special deals with some of the noisiest critics — owners of businesses in Delano and Old Town — so they'd mute their opposition and let City Hall have its way with the rest of us.

There is now a dizzying array of options, which I won't spend a lot of time on here.

I'm just going to mention the two big deals that have been cut with the business types:

Delano will get a deferment on paid parking until after the new "multimodal transit hub" — a giant parking garage for Riverfront Stadium masquerading as a transit center — is opened.

Old Town parking will remain free to users, but the city will increase the sales tax in the business district and collect your money that way instead.

With that in mind, there are several questions that should be asked before any of this goes through. I could ask them myself, but they really need to be asked by the City Council, which is kind of what we pay them to do.

So here goes:

Where's the TIF income? Practically all downtown development has been subsidized with Tax Increment Financing. That's where the city borrows money to build public improvements (mostly parking garages) to jump-start business development, and then pays it back by diverting increased property tax income from new development for a period of years.

The promise of TIF is always that once the initial debt is paid and the properties are fully on the tax rolls, the city gets a bump in property tax revenue because the new buildings are charged more than what they replaced.

Now that some of these districts have run their course, what's the city doing with the extra property tax income? Wouldn't it make sense to set some of that aside to maintain the public assets that were built with TIFs?

Is the Downtown Parking Fund really as bad off as you say it is? City staff selling the plan like to quote a statistic that the downtown parking fund has lost money in four of the last six years.

That's true.

But let's bear in mind that two of those six years were heavily affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, when businesses were either closed or restricted for public health reasons (it was in all the newspapers) and it took a while for downtown to ramp back up.

Take those two years out of the equation and the fund made a slight profit, $25,550 over the remaining years, including $53,178 in 2023.

And why weren't the two years of COVID-related losses covered by the city's share of federal COVID-relief aid?

$400 per parking space per year? Say what? Assistant City Manager Troy Anderson said in at least one public meeting: "If we're not recovering $400 per space per year, we're not recovering our operations and maintenance."

That seems excessive. It would be enough to resurface that parking space every year until the asphalt is piled so high you'd need a ramp to get into it.

Also, we could sure use a breakdown of what's operation and what's maintenance in this equation — how much are we paying to actually preserve the usability of public assets, versus how much are we paying toll collectors to run the machines that collect tolls?

Who's causing problems? In a column I ran this week from the Downtown Wichita development corporation, they made this statement: "No matter where a business is located, customers don't want to walk through broken glass or pass people sleeping in stairwells to get from their car to the business."

Fair point.

I can speak with some authority on Old Town, since I worked there for five years until we moved our offices to the Epic Center earlier this year.

There are two classes of drunks there: The professionals, (including some of the aforementioned stairwell sleepers), and the part-timers on weekends. Most of the broken glass shows up on Monday mornings after the weekend's amateur nights. And it's almost all upscale beer bottles, not the cheap vodka and malt liquor favored by the pros.

Who's responsible for basic maintenance? Another point from Downtown Wichita's guest column: "Parking lots have litter and overgrown weeds. Parking garages have piles of human waste and foul odors."

That's true. And it raises the question of what we're getting for our money from the private company the city contracts with to run the existing paid parking. Are they responsible for any day-to-day maintenance like hosing down the garages once in a while or spraying the cracks in the surface lots with Roundup, or do we just pay them to collect money?

$9 million for deferred maintenance? Really? Anderson has said in a council meeting that the city has $9 million in deferred maintenance needs on downtown parking. As far as I know, no one's asked for details on what and where. If it's really that bad, how can these garages still be in operation? We could use a detailed spreadsheet showing what's included before accepting that estimate at face value.

Where's the excess profit from parking going to go? I think we all can guess the answer to this one — another slush fund for the downtown developers to build more things for themselves with public subsidies.

I can think of other questions that should be asked, but these would be a very good place to start.

The City Council ought not to act until they're answered.

Let's see if they do.