No matter how much opposition there may be to plans to sell off the city’s parkland, I seriously doubt it will matter.
When City Hall gets an idea like this in their heads, they have ways of making it happen, regardless of what the community at large may think.
When a plan is as controversial as selling off parks, the city staff are past masters at finessing it through the system with nobody noticing.
What they’ll do is deflect, and say that really, no decisions have been made. They’ll give it a few months, time enough to let everybody assume that the City Council and staff have given up on the idea.
But they won’t really give up.
They’ll quietly insert it in some obscure “master plan” while next to nobody’s paying attention, because next to nobody ever pays attention to those things.
And there it will sit, possibly for years, reinforcing the public’s belief that there is nothing to worry about.
And one fine day, some business owner will come through the City Hall door with a proposal for something big and profit-making that they want to build on public parkland.
And the city staff will quietly cut a deal behind the scenes.
And late some Thursday afternoon, probably in 2027 or so, a contract to sell a park or two will mysteriously appear on the City Council agenda for the following Tuesday’s meeting.
And city staffers will solemnly swear that they’re just implementing the master plan that was passed back in 2025.
And before any opposition can organize, the council will rubber stamp it, sign the contract and it will be a done deal. No deposit, no return.
It’ll be the same play that the city ran when it decided to start charging 75 cents to $2 an hour to park downtown.
Of course, the vast majority of Wichitans would rather that the parking remain free. And probably even more would object to paying $12 million to private-sector parking mercenaries to install meters and write everybody tickets.
That doesn’t matter. It was in the “Parking and Multi-Modal Plan,” begun in 2007 and last revised in 2019.
It’s like Yul Brynner said when he played the Pharoah of Egypt in the movie “The Ten Commandments” — “So it shall be written. So it shall be done.”
I wrote this at the beginning of Thursday night’s City Council meeting, as I waited for the council to get to its budget hearing.
About a half-hour later, Mayor Lily Wu confirmed it, as she doubled down on her contention that 146 parks may be too many for a city of 400,000 people.
“We are responsible in having a master plan that will come out next year, a request for proposals for that master plan, to look at what our master plan for parks should be,” she said.
Usually when I make a prediction, it doesn’t come true before I even have a chance to publish it. And saying “master plan” three times in the same sentence also has to be some kind of record.
And also as I expected, Wu said not to worry because no decisions have been made — yet.
“I don’t believe that quantity equates quality,” she said. “I believe in having better-quality parks . . . And my question to staff during the last meeting was, that (master plan) proposal only looked at enhancements and expansion of the park (system), and I said we need to also consider all options, including elimination, if we have better quality parks.”
Wu’s comments were in response to state Sen. Mary Ware. Ware serves on the Senate Commerce Committee, the goal of which is to make laws encouraging people and businesses to move to Kansas.
“The last thing I could think of that would be helpful as far as parks are concerned in that regard would be to lower the number,” Ware said. “If anything, we need more parks, we need more lush parks.”
City Manager Robert Layton said the city will soon be spending a quarter of a million dollars on a consultant who can educate us on “best practices” and “what the new park system will look like.”
So that’s how we’ll find out someday which neighborhoods get to keep their parks, and which will get the next destination bar, or convenience store, or apartment complex.
So it shall be written. So it shall be done.
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