In recent years, even destination cities have had to offer significant incentives, discounts and free rent in order to lure convention and trade show business. … Wichita isn’t competing with Atlanta and Las Vegas for convention and trade show business, but the same story of exhibit hall expansion and waning attendance has played out closer to home, too. The Overland Park Convention Center opened in 2002 with consultants estimating the new facility and city-owned hotel would generate 60,000 overnight stays a year. Overnight stays peaked at roughly 58,000 in 2006. By 2015, that figure had dipped to 30,346 stays. In 2018, the last pre-pandemic year with available data, just 23,338 convention-goers stayed overnight in Overland Park. Despite the drop-off in attendance in the past decade, cities keep building new convention centers. The $288 million publicly funded Oklahoma City Convention Center opened in January 2021.
Source: Wichita Eagle

The city’s latest campaign for a sales tax, championed by many of the same downtown boosters behind the Legacy plan, failed in 2014. The $450 million plan would have funded drought-protection and water infrastructure, transit, and street maintenance, but was rejected largely because of an $80 million “job creation” fund aimed at giving cash incentives to companies, which was seen by many as a giveaway to businesses. How other area businesses and nonprofits might see an uplift from east bank development isn’t clear, but one example floated by stakeholders has been a benevolence fund. … City voters who were interviewed for this article cited several examples of past public subsidization of private businesses that have raised eyebrows, mostly notably in a $22 million local soccer stadium, a $10.2 million subsidy for Topgolf, and 1,000 no-bid contracts worth a half-billion dollars at the state level from 2011 to 2018. That wariness has led to the Riverfront Legacy Master Plan being viewed through the lens of other city projects plagued by accusations of cronyism and a lack of competition.
Source: Wichita Eagle

Computer systems are being restored in Pottawatomie County are after hackers launched a ransomware attack on Sept. 17, county officials said Friday. The county resolved the attack by paying less than 10% of the hackers’ original demands, County Administrator Chad Kinsley said in a statement. The eastern Kansas county did not disclose the amount it paid, WIBW-TV reported. “We are a small county with small resources,” Kinsley said. “With the extraordinary demands that the COVID-19 pandemic has placed on local governments like ours, we wanted to make sure that the hackers understood that there was no way we could even come close to meeting their demand.” Technical workers have installed more sensors on all servers to prevent further attacks. The investigation into how the hackers gained access to the system is continuing.
Source: Wichita Eagle

As Congress considered a massive COVID-19 relief package earlier this year, hundreds of mayors from across the U.S. pleaded for “immediate action” on billions of dollars targeted to shore up their finances and revive their communities. Now that they’ve received it, local officials are taking their time before actually spending the windfall. As of this summer, a majority of large cities and states hadn’t spent a penny from the American Rescue Plan championed by Democrats and President Joe Biden, according to an Associated Press review of the first financial reports due under the law. States had spent just 2.5% of their initial allotment while large cities spent 8.5%, according to the AP analysis.
Source: Wichita Eagle