Opinion: Mall CID increase merits consideration with caveats

By Gina Long

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Houston-based RockStep Capital recently submitted a proposal to the Hutchinson City Council to increase the existing 1% sales tax surcharge to 2% for purchases at businesses located at the Uptown Mall. The company says the funds will be used to attract more tenants, make all stores outward-facing, and remodel the interior space for mixed use.

The surcharge applies within a specific geographic area referred to as a Community Improvement District (CID). The mall itself and an adjoining property carry a 1% CID fee. The new Hilton Garden Hotel and Old Chicago restaurant will charge an additional 1% CID.

CIDs are used as incentives to encourage property and business development. The Hilton Garden Hotel’s surcharge will end when either the roughly $18 million cost of developing and building the facility is recouped or 22 years pass, whichever comes first.

The City of Hutchinson withholds a small percentage of the generated revenue ot cover administrative costs incurred from collecting the sales tax and distributing the CID funds to property owners.

The best part of CID financing is that it is not a citywide tax; it is only generated when someone makes a purchase at a business on the property.

RockStep Capital was given the 1% CID when it purchased the mall property out of bankruptcy in 2014. The building was neglected, with broken plumbing, heating, and AC, and the prior owners pocketed insurance money instead of fixing the roof after baseball-sized hail destroyed much of Hutchinson’s east side in 2012.

A retail apocalypse soon followed, with nationwide chains shuttering hundreds of thousands of retail locations. Shortly after, the mall lost its anchors, Sears, Dillard’s, and JCPenney. The food court, which had been dwindling since the early 2000s, said goodbye to its last vendor several years ago.

The mall’s interior is dark and worn, and about half of the retail space is unoccupied, per its website (the green spaces have tenants).

RockStep Capital rebranded to Uptown Mall in 2020 and hinted at securing national retailers for the empty anchor spaces, while also building a small business incubator space inside. That growth has been slow but is showing some success.

Uptown Mall’s outside entrance spaces have shown encouraging growth, attracting national chains such as Harbor Freight, Ulta Beauty, Dollar Tree, TJ Maxx and Ollie’s Bargain Outlet. The west end hosts Hutch Vintage Market, a unique retail model and a fun place to shop for everything from antiques to homemade crafts and jewelry. ESSDACK, Dunham’s Sports, and B&B Theatres fill out the south side’s outside entrances.

The old Goody’s store was supposed to have a national retailer move in, but so far has only hosted Spirit Halloween each fall.

The public hearing is scheduled at the Hutchinson City Council meeting on Monday, May 6, at City Hall, beginning at 5:30 p.m.

I want some solid and enforceable guarantees from RockStep Capital before committing to increasing the CID charge:

1. A complete parking lot replacement. The mall parking lot’s potholes are legendary for their width and depth. The problem has lingered too long and has now become a safety issue, posing dangers to drivers and bicyclists. I won’t drive through the parking lot when there’s snow because I can’t see and dodge the craters. Removing some of the unused parking and adding some simple landscaping would increase curb appeal and lower the high temperatures radiating from a massive swath of unused asphalt.
2. Truth in signage. The K-61 sign and the one along 11th Avenue still list businesses that have been gone for several years. Worse yet, the building’s most visible entrance still says “Food Court.” I think of tired and hungry families who drive by and think they can get a bite to eat.
3. A full accounting of how CID monies are spent trying to attract more tenants. I don’t want to find out that those funds were shipped off to prop up a mall somewhere else. Local special tax funds should stay in the community.
4. Parking lot security cameras. Hit-and-run incidents and vehicle break-ins are still a big problem, and, frankly, those concerns limit my shopping trips to quick dashes into and out of the stores. That doesn’t help the revenue flow.

A full 80s-style mall with spacious hallways and walking space will not return. Businesses focus on extracting profit from every square inch of their stores, and the costs of heating and cooling non-revenue-producing space do not make sense in today’s spreadsheet-oriented corporate management style. Spaces with outside entrances are more accessible and in greater demand. Some say that the mall should be torn down and replaced with clusters of strip malls.

On May 6, we citizens will have our opportunity to speak. Hopefully, RockStep Capital will present more specifics about their vision.

By Gina Long Houston-based RockStep Capital recently submitted a proposal to the Hutchinson City Council to increase the existing 1% sales tax surcharge to 2% for purchases at businesses located at the Uptown Mall. The company says the funds will be used to attract more tenants,

Kansas’ case for cannabis: legalization necessary 

CAPTION: Kansas legislators resist marijuana legalization ahead of the 2025 session as thousands cross the Missouri border as medical marijuana patients and countless others for recreation. CREDIT TIM CARPENTER/KANSAS REFLECTOR

By Michael Glenn

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Our Kansas Legislature recently wrapped up its 2025 session, and many of our legislators from Hutchinson and Reno County cited property taxes as an issue they wanted to help reduce. 

While some work was done in the area by eliminating 1.5 mills for state educational purposes, substantial relief promised by candidates did not follow through.

If Kansas legalizes recreational cannabis, which 61% of us already support doing, places a 10% excise tax on all cannabis products and directs those funds to education, we could lower the mill rate for all Kansas property owners and still fully fund education, a main concern when discussing property tax relief.

While specific data isn’t available for Kansas, we can use our neighbors as an example to see how much we could make. Missouri generated $1.5 billion in 2024 from all cannabis sales. In one year. Since Missouri has a little over double the population of Kansas, we’ll take that into consideration for calculating this number.

2,970,606, the population of Kansas, divided by 6,245,466, the population of Missouri, gives us roughly 47.5%, which means Kansas could reasonably expect to produce 47.5% of the sales that Missouri did. 

That’s $712,500,000 in Kansas cannabis sales per year. Add a 10% excise tax to that, and you get $71,250,000 in new tax funds the Sunflower State can use. 

These funds could play a role in reducing property taxes. Given the estimated collection of property taxes that fund public education in our state, $71.25 million could knock a mill off the bill. 

While property taxes are a viable option to use cannabis taxes, there are many other ways to use the funds that would benefit our state.

These funds could help support veterans’ benefits across our state. Many veterans use cannabis products to aid complications of PTSD, and for our state to continue criminalizing and punishing those using cannabis for this purpose is shameful. 

These funds could help the public defender crisis our state faces, with fewer and fewer attorneys available in rural Kansas. Every person charged with a crime deserves a fair defense, and cannabis taxes can help the state and district courts find attorneys willing to work. 

These funds could help underserved students in Kansas looking to earn a college education through an extended Promise Act Scholarship. The Promise scholarship currently assists students in earning two-year degrees and technical certificates in high-demand jobs, benefiting them personally and our state’s economy and workforce overall. We can improve upon that by providing more funding to this scholarship, investing in our future and the betterment of our youth.

These funds could be used to make our state a better place to raise a family and succeed. Whether you’re a young person looking to go to college or a young family looking for a place to settle, legalizing cannabis would provide benefits to everyone. 

With these benefits in mind, I find it troubling that our legislature hasn’t acted upon this already. Cannabis use has been proven to be safer to consume than alcohol and tobacco, drugs which are legal in the United States. From simply just overdose statistics, the CDC estimates that 2,200 Americans die from alcohol poisoning directly every day, not including other alcohol-induced deaths, such as driving under the influence or cirrhosis of the liver.

Consuming enough THC in a given period of time to overdose is impossible to do, according to the same study. 

The only overdosing anyone could possibly do with cannabis is when it is mixed with other substances that can be fatal, such as fentanyl. Thankfully, our state has decriminalized fentanyl testing strips in harm reduction efforts, but cannabis could be much safer to consume in Kansas if it were legalized, regulated and labeled for consumers. 

Imagine this argument for alcohol: which one is safer to consume, a suspicous looking unlabed bottle with “XXX” written on it, or a labled bottle of liquor that tells you how much alcohol is in the liquor? Which one are you more likely to be able to drink responsibly?

Our state is in a clear position: we can legalize cannabis, make tens of millions in tax revenue, help veterans, stop incriminating people over cannabis and make our state a more attractive place to live. 

Or we can continue kicking the can down the road until the federal government *inevitably* legalizes it anyway, making Kansas catch up with the rest of the states who are raking in billions in tax revenue.

If Kansas doesn’t act, we’ll continue giving money away to our neighboring states, which have already undergone cannabis legalization or decriminalization in some form. Thousands of Kansans purchase cannabis for medical purposes in Missouri, as reported in the Kansas Reflector. That’s money that we could have, but we choose not to. 

A multi-billion-dollar industry stops in Kanorado and picks back up in Kansas City, Missouri. My only question to our legislators is, are you tired of sending money to other states?

CAPTION: Kansas legislators resist marijuana legalization ahead of the 2025 session as thousands cross the Missouri border as medical marijuana patients and countless others for recreation. CREDIT TIM CARPENTER/KANSAS REFLECTOR By Michael Glenn Our Kansas Legislature recently wrapped up its 2025 session, and many of our legislators