Matthew Kelly
Wichita’s broadly unpopular plan to install paid public parking across downtown by the beginning of next year has stalled out for the time being, Mayor Lily Wu and City Manager Robert Layton told The Eagle.
In the three weeks since the city’s Facebook announcement garnered more than 1,000 angry comments, many attendees at subsequent listening sessions have been similarly incensed, and a downtown small business owner’s petition to scrap the plan has collected 6,030 signatures.
“As of right now, it’s not [starting Jan. 1] because again, everything’s on hold,” said Wu, who was part of the unanimous Aug. 13 vote to delay the purchase of new parking meters and other enforcement technology until after another round of public meetings. The paid parking plan itself was approved 5-2 in January.
The City Council will take up parking again on Sept. 10 when staff summarizes that feedback. But Wu said it’s “definitely not going to be an action item” until an alternate plan can be considered.
“We’re trying to come up with ideas,” she said.
The longer the council takes to make a decision, the less likely that any new system will be in place early next year, Layton said.
“September 10 is the baseline, and then after that, depending on how the council reacts, we’ll try to do something — if not by later in September, we’ll do October,” Layton said. “Sort of an outline for a path forward. Maybe it’s a revised plan. Maybe it’s a series of options in order to achieve what we want.”
roved a contract in June that calls for increasing the fee for Idaho-based private management company The Car Park from roughly $350,000 a year to more than $2 million each of the next five years, including $460,896 a year in reimbursements for new meters.
If the council decides to move in a significantly different direction on downtown parking, the city will have to renegotiate its contract with the company, Layton said. But there are no immediate plans to lower The Car Park’s management fee.
“We’re going to be talking to Car Park about doing some enforcement and doing some things and cleaning up our garages and our lots that are part of the contract now,” Layton said. “So they’re not going to just tread water and collect a fee. We’re going to elevate the service that we’re expecting from them in our garages.”
About 35 people turned out for a listening session at the Kansas Leadership Center hosted by the Chamber of Commerce on Thursday evening. Several business owners worried that the switch to paid parking could drive business to their competitors by making customers weary of downtown.
Russell Arben Fox, a political science professor at Friends University, said he has agreed with the general framework of the parking plan since it was presented to the bicycle and pedestrian advisory board he sits on before its adoption by the council.
“We’re all a bunch of urbanists there and we’re people that are very familiar with the ways in which an overabundance of free or essentially unenforced paid parking acts as a depressive agent on urban development, on the rise of consciousness about the importance of public transportation,” Fox said.
“You have a lot of businesses that have assumed over the last twenty, thirty years — however far back you want to go — they have assumed that this parking adjacent to them is free and is going to remain free, and they have built that into their business plans,” Fox said. “Because of that status quo, you don’t get more infill development . . . You don’t have really an avenue to say, ‘Hey, we could make the downtown more livable. We could make it more walkable. We could make it more environmentally sustainable.’ Instead, you just stick with what you have.”
At Thursday’s meeting, attendees were asked to generate some of their own ideas for how the city could improve its downtown parking plan. Some of the most popular propositions included offering day parking passes, allowing storefront businesses to lease or sponsor nearby street parking for customers, and offering a set number of spaces in a garage at a discounted rate for downtown employees.
What a difference four years make. In 2020 the Democratic Party took an aggressively anti-death penalty position.
Not so this year.
In 2020 Joe Biden pledged that if he was elected president he would stop federal executions, propose legislation to abolish the death penalty at the federal level, and provide incentives for states to follow suit. “Because we can’t ensure that we get these cases right every time,” candidate Biden tweeted, “we must eliminate the death penalty.”
That trauma was still evident sixteen years later when the 2004 Democratic platform didn’t mention the death penalty. Instead, it sounded law and order themes and promised, “To keep our streets safe for our families” and to “support tough punishment of violent crime.”
Four years later, the platform changed its tone and criticized the way the death penalty was administered. As part of being “smart on crime,” it pledged to fight “inequalities in our criminal justice system,” including in the use of capital punishment.
“We believe,” it said, “that the death penalty must not be arbitrary.” It went on to argue that DNA testing “should be used in all appropriate circumstances, defendants should have effective assistance of counsel. In all death row cases, thorough post-conviction reviews should be available.”
In 2012, the platform continued that theme. It noted that “in the last four years, rates of serious crimes, like murder, rape, and robbery, have reached 50-year lows” and again focused on problems in the death penalty system. Still, it said nothing about whether the punishment itself should be ended.
That changed in 2016, when as the Huffington Post points out, “the Democratic Party became the country’s first major political party to formally call for abolishing the death penalty.”The 2016 platform put the death penalty position out front as part of a commitment to reforming the “criminal justice system and ending mass incarceration.” It committed the party to abolishing the death penalty which it said “has proven to be a cruel and unusual form of punishment. It has no place in the United States of America.” The Democratic platform explained that “The application of the death penalty is arbitrary and unjust. The cost to taxpayers far exceeds those of life imprisonment. It does not deter crime, and exonerations show a dangerous lack of reliability for what is an irreversible punishment.”
2020 again committed the party to a broad criminal justice reform agenda including “root(ing) out structural and systemic racism in our criminal justice system and our society.”That is one of the reasons why the Democrats reiterated that year that the party “continue(ed) to support abolishing the death penalty.” In addition, every Democratic presidential candidate in 2020 openly opposed capital punishment —including Kamala Harris.
“I’ve long been opposed to the death penalty. It is deeply immoral, irreversible, and ineffective. And if we are going to transform our country’s broken criminal justice system, we must be fearless — unafraid to speak hard truths” Harris said at the time. She called the death penalty “deeply immoral, irreversible, and ineffective. And if we are going to transform our country’s broken criminal justice system, we must be fearless — unafraid to speak hard truths.” Then the freshman senator from California, Harriscalled on her party “to speak some hard truths about this immoral practice.” Those truths included the fact that “as many 1 in 10 people prosecuted with a death penalty conviction has been exonerated.”
Harris also pointed out that “the death penalty is far more likely to be carried out against people of color, people with mental illness, and people who could not afford to pay for legal counsel at trial.” She claimed that “abolishing (capital punishment) just makes financial sense.”