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Wichita City Council Allocates Hyatt Money Toward Transit, Streets

Sean Sandefur
/
KMUW/File photo
Wichita Transit will use proceeds from the sale of the Hyatt Hotel to fund a Transit Sustainability Plan.

The Wichita City Council approved a plan Tuesday that will allow a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the downtown Hyatt Hotel to go toward improving the city's public transit system.

Council members allocated $4 million dollars from the $20 million sale to fund a Transit Sustainability Plan. The city’s transit system is only sustainable through 2018.

The proceeds will go toward redeveloping the system by improving service, offering alternative transportation programs and increasing ridership through education and marketing.

Moji Rosson, chair of the Transit Advisory Board, said the system is severely lacking in funds.

“We understand that this money is not going to save our transit system," she said. "But it will allow us to embark on the initiatives ... until we can find that long-term and necessary funding source."

Council member Jeff Blubaugh voted against the plan.

“I guess I'm just a little bit uncomfortable not knowing what the end project is going to be," he said. Feels like a pretty large investment for an experiment, I guess."

The council also allocated $10 million of the Hyatt sale to go toward repairing city streets.

At the same meeting, council members approved the expansion of a bond district along the Arkansas River.

The city wants to issue Sales Tax Revenue Bonds, or STAR bonds, to fund major improvements on the west bank of the river, including to the Lawrence Dumont Stadium. An existing STAR Bond district helped to pay for improvements to the Keeper of the Plains and the waterfront near the Drury Plaza Hotel. Sales tax revenue captured within the district pays off bonds without increasing taxes.

STAR bonds are used for commercial entertainment and tourism areas.

"This project is really going to affect positively every single district in our city through jobs and people spending money here in Wichita from outside the area," council member James Clendenin said.

The expanded district still needs to be approved by the Kansas Secretary of Commerce.

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Nadya Faulx is KMUW's Digital News Editor and Reporter, which means she splits her time between working on-air and working online, managing news on KMUW.org, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. She joined KMUW in 2015 after working for a newspaper in western North Dakota. Before that she was a diversity intern at NPR in Washington, D.C.