Commissioners in Sedgwick County, Kansas recently voted 3-2 to auction off the southern portion of the land at Wichita Greyhound Park. The county owns the land and the greyhound facility but casino magnate Phil Ruffin’s company built and owns the buildings at the site and pays the county $87,000 annually in rent for the land under an agreement that runs through 2039.
The venue closed in 2007 after voters rejected a ballot measure allowing slot machines there. At the time, the Greyhound Park hosted live dog racing and satellite wagering on horse races around the country, but Ruffin said he couldn’t make a profit on race wagering alone.
Commissioner Richard Ranzau, one of the two votes against auctioning the property, said Ruffin recently offered $1.2 million for the property. The county nearly sold it to him for about $1.3 million, but commissioners determined the transaction would require competitive bidding. The property has been appraised for more than $2 million.
Commissioners David Unruh, Michael O’Donnell and David Dennis cast the three votes in favor of selling the property. Unruh said selling now would be more practical “than rolling the dice thinking that you might get gambling” at the site sometime in the future. He said the county is considering a public auction for purposes of conducting an open and transparent process, and to gain the maximum revenue. “We need to do this in such a way that it doesn’t look like we’re making a special deal or anything like that,” he said. Dennis noted, “We have things we can do with that funding,” like purchasing firefighting equipment or moving county offices to a larger facility.
Ranzau said he doesn’t know why the issue of selling the property has come up now. He and Commissioner Jim Howell, who also voted against the sale, contend if the county sells the land, and Ruffin ultimately can get the state legislature to authorize a revote on slots at the track, the county would lose millions of dollars in gambling income. Ruffin has argued the wording of the original ballot was too confusing to voters, making it difficult to measure their true feelings about adding slots at the racetrack. Howell said as long as the county owns the property and it remains unincorporated, the county government would receive tens of millions of dollars from its 2 percent share of gambling revenues. Howell added if the track would reopen with slots, it could take business from the Kansas Star Casino at Mulvane, which has an exclusive 25-year deal with the state to operate gambling in the region.
Dennis said at the moment it makes no sense to discuss who would get how much from gambling revenue. “Right now it’s zero percent and it’s going to stay zero percent unless the state changes the rules,” he said.
The greyhound park once employed 256 people. It was part of an extensive entertainment complex along with the adjacent Kansas Coliseum which closed earlier this year. The 122-acre Wichita Greyhound Park on I-135 near Park City includes an 80,000 square foot auditorium/grandstand building and 26,000 square feet of dog kennels.
