A downtown development group has dropped one project and is gearing up for a public fight over another with a local free-market group that opposes public subsidies for private development.
The disputes between Tulsa developer Paul Coury’s group and Americans for Prosperity center on the use of transient guest tax revenues – a tax paid by hotel guests to stay in Wichita hotels, not a tax levied on all taxpayers – to redevelop old buildings into hotels.
One Coury project could be headed for a public vote, if AFP generates 2,528 verifiable signatures to place on the ballot the use of guest tax revenues for the Ambassador Hotel Wichita, a 117-room boutique hotel proposed for the old Union National Bank building at Douglas and Broadway. AFP, which opposes government involvement in private development projects, wants voters to decide whether the Ambassador developers get to keep 75 percent of the transient guest taxes collected there over its first 15 years, an estimated $2.25 million or 10 percent of the project’s $22.5 million price tag.
Other notable projects included their cottage in Wilson, NY, and Casa Isabel, a boutique hotel and restaurant in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. 
Especially when the magazine in question is the British bastion of style Tatler Magazine, and the hotel is a boutique, family-owned and operated small hotel 
Why base a swanky boutique hotel around a theme of philanthropy? “We simply believe in it,” says Plutzik, a former vice chairman for Credit Suisse who quit 
Priya Paul, chairwoman of Park Hotels, the country's first boutique hotel chain, and a respected design patron, has also noticed that “from the late 1990s