The Wichita City Council last month adopted a plan for downtown that will guide development of the area for the next decade. The council first stripped the plan of any references to creating a new performing arts center.
The arts center move came after supporters of Century II — the city’s current performing arts and convention center — objected during the Aug. 18 council meeting. They pointed out that in March, voters rejected a proposed 1-cent sales tax increase that would have paid for a new performing arts center by an 82-18 percent margin, and that in 2020, more than 17,000 voters signed a petition in support of Century II.
“How many times does the community have to beat this into oblivion?” Greg Kite, president of the Historic Preservation Alliance of Wichita-Sedgwick County, asked council members.
The council vote was 5-2, with members Maggie Ballard and Joseph Shepard opposed to changing the plan.
The rest of the plan was approved without modification. It does not allocate any city money for specific projects but sets out goals and strategies for meeting them. It was commissioned by the Downtown Wichita organization and produced by Sasaki Associates, a Boston-based urban planning firm, and is the city’s first downtown plan since 2010.
At the meeting, Heather Schroeder, executive director of Downtown Wichita, said the 2010 plan helped foster 119 projects totaling about $2 billion in the city’s core, including almost 2,000 new housing units and 1,300 hotel rooms. At the same time, she said, “We have only built 15 percent of the potential development in the planning area, which means we’re leaving a lot of tax base on the table.”
The new plan lists four goals: a “connected downtown” that people can navigate on foot if desired; a “riverfront downtown” that makes the Arkansas River the city’s central gathering place; a “well-designed downtown” that makes the area feel welcoming; and a “full-service downtown,” with amenities such as a grocery store.
Some of the plan’s proposals for achieving these goals include:
• Removing motor vehicle traffic lanes on Douglas Avenue from the river east to Washington Street and replacing them with more bicycle and pedestrian paths.
• Creating new priority bike lanes on McLean, Market, Texas, William and English streets in addition to Douglas.
• Converting First and Second Streets to two-way streets.
• Starting a high-frequency downtown shuttle.
• Creating a four-mile walking and biking loop connecting museums on the river to destinations downtown.
• Developing eight downtown districts with unique identities and two new green spaces, planting 300 new street trees and hiring three full-time downtown ambassadors.
• Activating the ground floor spaces of downtown buildings.
• Creating 5,000 new housing units, one new grocery store and two new event spaces, while repurposing some of the 48 percent of downtown land now used for surface parking lots.
