By: DEAN KLENDA
I’m Dean Klenda and I’m running for City Commission and I may not look like your typical city commissioner because I’m not. I’m young, I work as an operations manager for a security company based out of Wichita and I own my own business doing production for events and such.
My issues I’m running on are listed below.
a) Evaluate the management of Tonys Pizza Event Center, we need to bring more concerts and events to town. I grew up on Front Street near the TPEC and that parking lot was constantly full of people and traffic on weekends, dog shows, car shows, big events. Interacting with them as a vendor providing sound solutions to events the last 5-10 years has been a slope towards being harder and harder to make events successful and rudeness from management. I believe this event space is being wasted and needs to be more used, or find a new management company to increase the usage.
b) Fully help fund Salina Winter Grace and expand it if possible. I believe we have some excellent community resources for homelessness but believe we need an emergency short term shelter with a lower bar to entry to help people get brough to the resources we have for them (Ashby house, Rescue Mission, Salina Grace Community Resource center, and so on)
c) Stop spending public funds for “economic development for sports teams without proof of return on the economic development. I think 65,000 in two years to an external for-profit entity claiming economic development is nonsense. I think if a for profit entity needs that much money from a city, they need to evaluate the business there are running especially when it’s a for profit agency that only brings 5-10 events to a city for entertainment. 30k a year would be one great summer concert series with very good local and regional artists in a public space like city lights stage or even Eric Stein Stage.
d) Either repeal bsl and replacement with better policies based off behavior.
e) Bring back some actual form of public free weekly entertainment either during the summer season or longer, something like the old Friday night lives that happened weekly. Covid slowed this and now it’s very limited and not what we used to do and I feel like this is a sorely missed program.
f) Bring back the public forum to at least 5 minutes, if not 10. Citizens need time to speak up at meetings and we should allow them some reasonably amount of time. I don’t know the magic number that gives everyone a fair shot but also allows others the time to speak? Maybe 5/10? 3 is definitely not enough for people that might not be confident in public speaking.