For anyone in Wichita or beyond who has been disappointed in the public-private partnership known as the WaterWalk development downtown and the almost $44 million the community has poured into it, Tuesday’s City Council meeting was for you.
There were two shockers during a lengthy discussion on the development as a whole and the proposed affordable apartments that an Indiana company wanted to build there, which were denied in what several council members described as a tough vote.
The first stunner was when Jim Korroch, one of three trustees of the late WaterWalk developer Jack DeBoer’s estate, apologized for failures related to the development.
“The vision for WaterWalk was big,” Korroch said.
“Looking back, mayor, it’s clear that WaterWalk has fallen painfully short of Jack’s original vision.”
Anyone remember that series of canals that were supposed to be throughout the development?
Citing the pandemic and the recession of 2008, Korroch said that “it would be easy to cast blame on external economic forces.”
“However, internal missteps and shifting priorities all played a role in the slow growth of WaterWalk.”
He said the focus perhaps was too much on “nice-to-haves” instead of on building a critical mass of people who lived there.
“Regardless, on behalf of the estate, I sincerely apologize to the council, to the citizens of Wichita for falling short of that original vision,” Korroch said. “We could and should have collaborated better, asked for help and been more transparent.”
He discussed the affordable apartments and how they could address a problem for Wichita as a whole and serve as a catalyst for WaterWalk in particular. He said the workforce individuals who would live in the affordable apartments should “not be a victim of the past.”
“There’s nothing we can do about the past. It’s time to move forward,” Korroch said. “Today should not be so much about airing grievances of the past, although we’re ready to hear those, but more about dreaming about WaterWalk’s future and the opportunity we have to dream and start fresh.”
However, in an emphatic rebuttal, Mayor Lily Wu was not having it.
Airing grievances
“We have never aired these grievances,” Wu said. “And these grievances (are) the reason why this community has said they don’t want to see sweetheart deals. This is the ultimate sweetheart deal.”
Wu was referring to WaterWalk in general — not the apartment deal.
“I do want the community to know exactly what happened so that we can then move forward, but we cannot move forward without addressing what has been promised and not fulfilled.”
In a previous meeting with Korroch and Assistant City Manager Troy Anderson, Wu had asked Anderson to put together a timeline of what has happened at WaterWalk over its almost 25-year history.
But neither Korroch nor most of the people watching and attending Tuesday’s meeting were prepared for the lengthy presentation that followed with dozens and dozens of screens of numbers and agreements and all kinds of other information about WaterWalk that Anderson presented. He even took audible breaths while making the presentation in a sign that it was a laborious one even by city standards.
The bottom line was he reported that the public investment in WaterWalk is almost $44 million, and the private investment has been almost $37 million.
“I don’t know what they’re including or not including in those numbers,” Korroch said after the meeting.
He said the private investment has been more about $57 million.
At almost $50 million, Korroch said, the apartments would represent almost as much investment as everything else at the development so far, which includes the WaterWalk Place condominiums, the Fairfield Inn & Suites Wichita Downtown, the former Gander Mountain building and the Realtors of South Central Kansas building.
Korroch said the apartment deal is now dead.
“They’ll move on,” he said of the Indiana developers.
WaterWalk’s future
So what’s ahead for WaterWalk?
During the meeting, the council had brief discussion of what’s called a fee simple arrangement in which the city, which still owns the land at WaterWalk and has given the developers of it a 99-year lease, would deed the land to DeBoer’s estate in exchange for a significantly reduced schedule to develop it.
Korroch said it’s hard to get businesses interested in a property that they can’t own, but the fee simple arrangement would change that.
Interspersed with the talk about WaterWalk’s future, council members aired a lot of thoughts about what’s gone on in the past.
“I think everybody should be mad about it,” Dalton Glasscock said before asking how the city can get out of its lease arrangement.
Council member J.V. Johnston in particular talked about how upset he was to be rebuffed for a plan he had to move his former Johnston’s clothing store to the city’s core.
“It kind of brings up an old wound,” he said.
Johnston said that John Clevenger, the late president of Commerce Bank, also had tried to move its Wichita headquarters to that property and was similarly rebuffed.
“He said, ‘The city would not talk to me,’ ” Johnston said.
Wu said the deal with DeBoer — and originally Dave Burk and Dave Wells before they got out of the deal — was the kind of sweetheart deal that she campaigned against.
Though council members acknowledged the need for affordable housing, council member Brandon Johnson was the only one to support this particular deal. Others said it was a tough vote for them because of the need for the housing, but they said it either wasn’t the right deal for WaterWalk or it was too rushed with too many unanswered questions.
Korroch said his apology was not simply a bid to win over the council to try to get the apartments approved.
He said whatever happens, particularly now that they’ve not been approved, there are many discussions with the council yet to come, and he said he felt the air needed to be cleared.
“It was just the right thing to do.”
This article was produced by The Wichita Eagle as part of the Wichita Journalism Collaborative. The WJC is an alliance of seven media organizations and three community groups, formed to support and enhance quality local journalism. KMUW is a founding partner of the WJC.