Wichita still doesn’t have its lakeside park; shady dealings of the past are to blame

There’s a certain satisfaction to being able to say “I told you so.”

But with the city of Wichita, that satisfaction is often tempered by the fact that it doesn’t come until years after City Hall cut ethical corners, and there’s no one left around to be held to account for shady insider dealings and phony pie-in-the-sky plans.

The latest example is the so-called Crystal Prairie Lake Park at K-96 and Hoover in northwest Wichita.

By now, it was supposed to be a “world class” lakeside park and regional tourist attraction, with a 215-acre lake featuring scuba diving, sail boating, a rowing race course, a swimming beach, fishing areas, a concert amphitheater, a mammoth glass-fronted “beachhouse”/event center and a cable wakeboard park where you could water ski or wakeboard being pulled along by an overhead rope instead of a boat.

I drove by it on Thursday and it’s still the same fenced-off flooded sand mine, next to an abandoned garbage dump, that’s it’s been for the better part of the past two decades.

It was born in a sand deal that was high-end corruption even by Wichita standards.

I first raised red flags about it back in 2004 when the deal was cut between City Hall and Quik Sand (there’s an appropriate name), a subsidiary of the Cornejo and Sons gravel and construction empire.

The land was originally purchased by the city to expand the Brooks Landfill, the city dump that was rapidly running out of space. Ultimately, the city decided to go another way and ship the trash to distant landfills, so the site was reclassified as park and open space.

Two companies, Quik Sand and Ritchie Corp., competed for the right to excavate the sand at the site, let the resulting pit fill up with water, and eventually turn it back over to the city for its lakefront park.

The problem was, city staff altered Quik Sand’s bid so that the Cornejos won the competition. The staff got there by taking the best parts of both proposals and stitching them together to make the Quik Sand bid look better than it actually was.

City staff’s excuse for altering the proposal was that it made it easier for the council members to decide.

Quik Sand’s actual proposal projected a 15-year cash flow to the city of $2.25 million and a time horizon that put development of the park at 25 years, minimum.

But the council at the time was told the city would get $3.75 million and a lakeside park in 15 years.

So here we sit, 18 years later.

No park.

No park on the horizon.

No accountability.

Every council member who voted for the contract is long since term-limited out of office. The interim city manager who babysat the deal is retired.

Quik Sand was merged out of existence and Cornejo and Sons was sold in 2010 to an international conglomerate. A few years later, that same company, Summit Materials, bought the company formerly known as Ritchie Corp.

City Manager Robert Layton, who inherited this mess, is planning to scale back the grandiose plan for Crystal Prairie Lake Park into something the city might actually be able to afford someday, like a simple lake with a swimming beach and a boat ramp.

Good call.

He’s also planning to recommend not funding the park in the upcoming Capital Improvement Program budget and spending those dollars on more pressing needs like streets, and police and fire stations.

Also a good call, since Cornejo and Sons will be digging gravel there for another year before park construction could even begin.

But hey, this wasn’t a total loss.

The architects who drew up the plans for the park won awards for it from the American Society of Landscape Architects in 2010 and 2011.

Hooray. Never mind that the plan never went anywhere and likely never will.

We can’t fix this. It’s too late for that.

But let this be a cautionary tale: The next time City Hall tries to sell a plan that looks too good to be true, it probably is.