Parkland sale to Ruffin’s Hyatt hotel is the right way to do city business | Opinion

As regular readers of this column know, public parks mean a lot to me.

The longest opinion article I’ve ever written, and the only one ever to run on Page 1, was a lengthy criticism of Wichita’s handling of its park and recreation assets over the past several years. It’s a trail that has taken, in my opinion anyway, way too much out of the public realm and put it into private for-profit hands.

But I’m not an absolutist. Sometimes, you can spend park assets to improve the community otherwise — and I believe in giving credit where it’s due.

Last week, the Wichita City Council inked a deal to sell a third of an acre of parkland to the Wichita Hyatt Regency Hotel, owned by casino magnate Phil Ruffin, for expansion of the hotel meeting and ball rooms. It’s a good move.

I was somewhat skeptical of the deal when I read the staff report and it said that because of lack of street access, nobody else could access the property but the Hyatt, allowing the deal to be struck without competitive bidding. That’s sort of true, but a minor adjustment in the property lines would have made it accessible from South Waco, between Century II and the Arkansas River.

I had a long talk with City Manager Robert Layton and came away thinking this deal will probably benefit the city as well as the Hyatt.

First, Layton said he insisted that the property sell for fair market value, as determined by an independent appraisal, $217,450.

Second, the money from the land sale will be earmarked for improvements in the rest of the park it’s being shaved off of, A. Price Woodard Park.

Third and probably most important, the land sale for the Hyatt expansion signals that the city is finally getting serious about making improvements to the Century II Convention and Performing Arts Center, after years of back-and-forth over whether to tear it down and start over.

The change of course represents a lost $700,000 spent developing the Riverfront Legacy Master Plan — including $200,000 of city and county money.

The proposal to raze Century II and the downtown library for new convention and performing arts facilities was ambitious, but it ran into strong opposition from the citizenry and the COVID-19 pandemic pretty much relegated it to history.

In a way, we’re lucky it cost us as little as it did.

The pandemic has changed the convention business, probably forever. Most conventions are now offered in hybrid form, live and online.

Big in-person gatherings are much rarer than they once were and competition is fierce. If Wichita had embarked on the $1.2 billion master plan before 2020, we could be stuck with a lot of built convention space and not much use for it.

The plan is expected now to revert to more or less what Layton proposed in 2017 — keep the roundhouse, but either replace or expand the attached Bob Brown Arena.

That could correct some of Century II’s flaws, including low ceilings and inadequate loading docks for modern shows. The new space at the Hyatt will offer additional convention space, when needed.

The Brown arena is basically just a concrete box of no architectural significance whatsoever and the city can do pretty much whatever it wants there. Not even the Save Century II group cares.

The City Council will evaluate the options for it this winter. I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with.