By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — The city of Hutchinson's budget is in better shape than was initially expected going in to 2021, so the governing body will likely have some options later in the year they weren't expecting to have.
"We're provisioning for that question to come up or that consideration, for a lot of those seasonal positions that we noticed weren't on the ground this last year," said City Manager Jeff Cantrell. "I think for anyone that lives near a waterway, they can probably appreciate immediately what I'm talking about. Those typically get mowed once or twice a year. Last year, many of those didn't get touched at all."
The challenges the pandemic has brought to the tourism sector in particular will leave the governing body with a lot less to go on if they decide to go forward in acquiring the Atrium Hotel property in an effort to rehabilitate it.
"It causes us to do a little more research and probably use a crystal ball a little more than we would like to as far as projecting what that acquisition and its successful ratios would have to look like," Cantrell said. "Lenders right now, across the nation, a lot of them are running from that kind of business. Others are still taking it on, but they're increasing their pledging requirements to protect their position on the loans."
Changing meetings of all kinds from face to face to technology based, which has come out of necessity, will also complicate matters.
"In our line of work, we have lots of conferences, as you know, that we send staff to for ongoing education and things like that," Cantrell said. "What I'm seeing is, the first half of the year, a lot of places are still deferring those opportunities and those events. In the second half of the year, a lot of them are showing projections that they actually do intend to meet in person. I think, if we have correlation across the country, what our expectation is, is that it will come back, but its going to be slow."
It's also important to note that such events have gotten out of the habit of coming to Hutch due to the deterioration of that property in recent years, so fixing it up and breaking that pattern could take a while.