From KAKE in Wichita, Kansas –

Owners of a popular east Wichita shopping center want to make improvements. In turn, they want shoppers to pay more in sales tax.

Eastgate Shopping Center at Kellogg and Rock Road will ask the Wichita City Council to establish a Community Improvement District for the area. Plans call for facade renovations, and parking and store improvements.

The cost for the project will run more than $53 million. Eastgate developers say a one cent sales tax would be in place over a 22 year period to pay for the renovations.

A privately owned shopping center can petition the city to impose a tax and give it to them?

Is the private becoming the public? or the public, the private?

Tax money will directly pay for improvements to this shopping center in the form of a sales tax. Is this wise? At what point does a government cease being government of the people and morphs into a subsidiary of private interests offering its citizens up for their business value?

The one thing that I find most ironic is that Kansas is considering cutting its corporate tax rate, but it is okay for a business to apply for and receive a tax increase on the citizens of that same state.

James Pilant