Wichita City Council members will vote later this month on a plan to sell land around the new riverfront baseball stadium to the team’s owners for a dollar an acre.
The city currently owns the 24 acres in Delano where the stadium is being constructed, including roughly 4.5 acres that the city wants to transfer to Wichita Riverfront LP to develop as a retail, commercial and hospitality site.
The group includes the owners of the new baseball team. The development rights over the area around the stadium was one of the team's requirements to relocate to Wichita.
At the recommendation of staff, the council delayed a vote on the deal until March 19 to give members and the public more time to review the agreement, which only came to light when the council’s agenda was published Friday.
Several residents spoke at the council’s meeting Tuesday, criticizing a lack of transparency over the deal.
“I would just like to understand, and I think the community deserves to understand, what was the process that went into this, from start to finish?” said District 2 Advisory Board member Paul Lavender.
“Who led it, who was leading the discussion? And specifically, how did we make the decision to tear down Lawrence-Dumont Stadium and start rebuilding another one without a signed deal in place?”
Mayor Jeff Longwell said Major League and Minor League Baseball rules prevented the city from revealing the details of the deal before Tuesday’s council meeting.
“It’s a complicated process, as I’ve said before, for how you can interact with a team and the appropriate protocol,” he said. “And that’s eventually what led us to this path that we’re on today.”
Council member James Clendenin said he’s concerned whether the team owners can guarantee the land will be developed.
“This is prime, the biggest, most prime property in the city of Wichita," he said. "So if that development doesn’t happen, does MiLB Pacific Coast League pull out? Do we have any sort of personal guarantees that if that happens that we can be made whole, or that we can guarantee that the development moves forward?"
Wichita Riverfront LP will have to begin construction on new development within a certain amount of time after Opening Day next year, or the city can buy back the property at the same price.
Explaining why the city doesn’t instead lease the land, Longwell said the sale — even for just $1 per acre — adds the property back to the tax base. The city estimates the development will generate about $38 million in revenue over the next 20 years.
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