In Sedgwick County, is there slack time?

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As reported in the Wichita Eagle, the Sedgwick County Commission decided to reimburse the county for time its employees spent working on arena-related matters. The money will come from the sales tax that was collected to build the Intrust Bank Arena in downtown Wichita. The amount of money the commission decided to transfer is $1.6 million, although according to the Eagle, the total cost could reach $2.6 million.

Here’s something of concern to me in the story: “But he [Sedgwick County chief financial officer Chris Chronis] pushed for the money to remain in the arena and pavilions’ operating and maintenance reserve fund, which last month had just less than $14 million, because taking money out of the fund would drain it four years earlier than expected — in 2024.”

Evidently the county has financial projections for the arena all the way out to 2018, and possibly beyond. That is a very long time into the future, and any projections about the performance of the arena over this period would be based on assumptions that can’t be estimated with anything approaching certainty.

Projections with this precision made about events so far in the future surrounded by so much uncertainty remind me of the saying that economists use a decimal point to show they have a sense of humor.

Back to the present: Commissioner Dave Unruh told the Eagle that the county did not hire any new staff to perform work that has an estimated value of $2.6 million. My question is this: Is this evidence that there was $2.6 million of slack time in county employee’s schedules? How were they able to get this vast amount of work accomplished? Perhaps after the arena work that has occupied $2.6 million of staff time is complete, we could hire out this staff to earn revenue for the county, as it seems they will have time on their hands.

Regarding the contention that voters in 2004 were promised that no property tax money would be used on the arena, Unruh was quoted by the Eagle as saying: “I do think that we made a very strong commitment that all the sales tax money would be used for the arena and pavilions.”

It seems that now Sedgwick County voters have a new concern: When politicians make a promise, do we have to ask them if this is a regular commitment or a very strong commitment? Or are there other types of commitments that we don’t know about?

Comments

3 responses to “In Sedgwick County, is there slack time?”

  1. CarlosMayans

    The Arena sales tax was implemented while we still had a period of higher interest rates. “How much was the earned interest on the $170 million arena funds collected and how was that interest used???”

  2. Trotty

    about 10 million was made on interest and kept in the general fund. Should be enough to reimburse salaries.
    Weeks- you have no clue how cost accounting works

  3. Wichitator

    I think that more than $12 million was earned in interest on arena/pavilion sales tax revenues. State law requires that this be deposited into the county’s general fund I’ve been told by county officials.

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