A Facebook Note from Chris Schultz

I am a lifelong Topekan and I have been a downtown business owner for nearly a decade.  While I am incredibly grateful to those who have been loyal customers throughout the years, I feel that I can no longer sit quietly and accept that there are certain residents in our city who will never have a positive thing to say about the quality of life here without realizing that their negative attitude is what is holding the rest of us back.  Potholes, Phelps, dead hippos, blah blah blah… There… I said it… We have all heard about it, now please allow us to move on.  Attitudes like this are screaming for something that will give them a little pride in their community.  And we all need this pride and a great quality of life to draw businesses and visitors to our city.

Our city is a business and leaders should run it accordingly.  I am personally in the restaurant business.  In my line of work, I could provide the most minimal food quality and service to my customers and they would still have to eat in order to live.  If this were my business model, the customers would get no excitement from their visit and would certainly never have a craving for anything I provided them.  The only satisfaction they could take is that it was cheap for them.  Eventually they would tire of my business and move on to the next place up the road.  This seems to be the kind of business model that many in our city expect with their government.  Wouldn’t you rather pay a few extra cents for something that fills your tummy AND makes you feel good at the same time?  Eventually, I have to ask the question, “What will keep them coming back?”

My family and I have put ourselves on the line and personally invested everything we could in downtown to make it great.  And we are happy to be here.  But some people seem to miss the point that downtown’s infrastructure needs a lot of maintenance.  Inadequate storm drains run directly in to the sewer lines which cause many downtown basements to be flooded with sewage water through their floor drains when it rains heavily.  Sometimes the street lamps work and sometimes they don’t.  It depends if the gods of electrical shorts are in our favor or not that night.

The Capitol District Project and its volunteers should be commended for identifying that these problems exist and putting a cohesive business plan together to maximize the inevitable tax dollars that we will be spending on these issues.  Their main goal will maximize our investment in a crumbling infrastructure AND provide investment that will grow the tax base.  Isn’t that the way our city should operate?

Downtown is the heart of our city.  We can all agree that, as a city, we need to hit the treadmill and do a little cardio because our heart has certainly seen better days.  If the north, west, south, and east side of town are the legs and arms of Topeka, they are all useless without a strong heart.  Topeka, like all of us, would die without a heart.

Sincerely,
Chris Schultz