March 9, 2025
It’s very interesting to me. This whole “parking situation” in Old Town Wichita, Downtown Wichita and Delanoict.
The Old Town Association, with a bunch or all of the small businesses in the district, came up with a proposal to create a Community Improvement District (CID) where the owners of the businesses in Old Town pay money to the city for parking. To avoid the paid parking.
Some of you might not know that businesses in Old Town have been paying for parking for YEARS for you all to go to their businesses. So, this was nothing new.
And my sources — yeah, I have sources and it’s not because of my blog — tell me that they were proposing to DOUBLE what would be paid to the City of Wichita- Government under the prior arrangement. To get the City the revenue it claims to need for improvements and maintenance, etc.
In fact a petition was filed with the Wichita City Council to consider the option (option to not charge the patrons of Old Town, but charge the businesses in Old Town). It cost the Old Town Association $5,000 to file the petition and ordinarily the petitoner would get to have a hearing with, essentially, witnesses to testify about the option.
But the Wichita City Council said (in laymen’s terms, so don’t come at me for saying this is exactly what they said): “No. There’s no language in the petition that allows us to end the deal in the future, and instead of having a hearing as is the ordinary course of business or going back to the association to deal with adding or re-adding the language, let’s just vote “no” now and end the whole thing.” And they did.
Oh well.
