Meltdown at Wichita Ice Center puts the public in public-private partnership | Opinion

If there’s one thing Wichita City Hall loves, it’s a “public-private partnership.”

They approve them just about every week.

“Public-private partnership is an ideal model for city development,” said former Mayor Jeff Longwell, hours after The Wichita Eagle reported how he’d steered a half-billion-dollar water treatment plant contract to his friends in the local business community.

Public-private partnerships usually take one of two forms:

▪ A wealthy local developer decides he — it’s almost always a he — wants to build a business, be it a restaurant, bar, apartment house, warehouse, whatever. He goes to the city and asks for assistance to make his project more profitable for him. City Hall says “That’s a great idea!” and doles out cash, free land and/or tax breaks, and sometimes even a localized sales tax that goes straight to the developer’s pocket. Think WaterWalk and Chicken N Pickle.

▪ The second common type of public-private partnership involves the city paying to build a big facility and then privatizing it. Think Riverfront Stadium and the Stryker soccer complex.

Both types of projects would be more accurately called “government-business partnerships” than “public-private” — because generally, your role as the public is limited to paying taxes to make the rich richer and maybe serving as customers of businesses that you helped finance.

The Wichita Ice Center has been an embarrassing albatross of public-private partnership for years. But it’s now emerging as the project that could finally be putting the public in public-private partnership.

After a malfunction in the chiller that freezes the ice, volunteers from Wichita’s skating community played a significant role in getting the Ice Center back up and running.

The chiller broke on July 7, causing a meltdown. The city brought in a portable chiller to refreeze one rink until more repairs can be made.

But skating ice is poured in layers. And somebody has to paint the red and blue lines, goal creases and face-off circles for hockey before the final top layers of ice can be applied and smoothed out for skating.

The rink operator, Rink Management Service Corp., reached out for help to local skating organizations.

Volunteers from Air Capital Speed Skating, Wichita Adult Hockey League, Wichita Youth Hockey and Wichita Inline Hockey Players got the painting done in time to salvage most of a youth hockey event last week.

Skating started again on Thursday, 21 days after the chiller went down. The last time it went out, in 2018, it took 47 days to get this far.

Back then, the Ice Center was run by Genesis Health Clubs.

City Hall had cut a deal with Genesis in 2011, paying them to run the Ice Center for 10 years, while allowing them to put a for-profit health club on the second floor.

For years, hockey players, figure skaters and recreational users complained that Genesis allowed the ice operation to get run down while spending lavishly on its private club upstairs.

In January, the city took the contract away from Genesis and gave it back to Rink Management. City Hall is now suing Genesis for $425,000 in unpaid debt issued by the city to build the health club.

So kudos to Wichita’s skating community.

Your activism ousted an operating company that wasn’t taking good care of the center, and gave it to one that does. And when the chiller broke, your pitching in helped get them get the ice back up more than twice as fast as when the same thing happened four years ago.

Thanks for showing us all what public-private partnership should look like.

It brings to mind the catch phrase of Canadian comic Steve Smith, in “The Red Green Show” on public television: “We’re all in this together . . . Keep your stick on the ice.”