Just because.
Caleb Hannan at the Nashville Scene’s Pith in the Wind blog offers additional question ideas, courtesy of the mayor of Dallas, for those of us going to the convention center panel discussion this Sunday:
Every city reads from the same playbook when it comes to building convention centers. So when you consider a city like Dallas, it’s helpful to picture them about four pages ahead of Nashville.
Whereas we’ve spent the past decade waltzing our way towards a new center, Dallas has spent roughly half that time trying to build an adjoining hotel. Earlier this month, the city finally reached an end point, shooting down a referendum that would have blocked the $500-million, publicly-owned* hotel. The only problem: It’s almost impossible to finance.
In this week’s Liberadio(!) interview with Dr. Heywood Sanders, professor of public administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio and Nashville convention center panel participant, he discusses these not-so-quick-fix “headquarters hotels:”
Listen to the three-minute interview excerpt (full interview here):
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Dr. Heywood Sanders: …In Fact, the latest fillip to this, and it’s one we might want to talk about in the Nashville case, is what happens after you build a new convention center or do a major expansion and you don’t get the business you expect. And the answers the consultants now pedal is, “what you need next door is a headquarters hotel of a least 1,000 rooms.” And if, by the way, you can’t somehow subsidize or induce a private developer to take on that proposition, increasingly we find cities issuing tax-exempt municipal bonds and building their own hotels and going into the hotel business…
Freddie: So this is proposed by the Chamber of Commerce, the Convention and Visitors Bureau, and the Mayor’s Office as an economic development must. If you see it as a bust, then why are all these parties so hot on it?
Dr. Sanders: In Nashville I’m sure individual folks have their own reasons. Mayors and local elected officials often like to support big, large-scale development projects. It gives them something that they can point to and claim as a record of a major public advance. It’s easier to take the money and build things like that than deal with rather more intractable urban problems like the quality of the schools or drug problems or the overall level of violence and criminality. Those are tough things to tackle. They take time and a lot of money. Doing big projects, particularly big projects where you can argue that visitors are paying the tab, that’s a nice quick simple fix.
The panel discussion is this Sunday, May 31, at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music (the Steve and Judy Turner Recital Hall) from 2-4 PM.
Pigeon Forge is in the mist of the Convention Center and Host Hotel craze. The State Building Commission approved public financing of this boondoggle. Even after a citizen appeared and offered testimony before the Commission demanding they stop the bond funding approval.
Two studies authored by Dr. Heywood Sanders were entered into testimony and the record. Those studies made clear building publicly funded convention centers are not economic development activities, and that host hotels only add to the problems of under performing convention centers.
The State Building Commission approved the Pigeon Forge application even though it was incomplete, submitted past deadline, and had various deficiencies, such as millions of dollars in authorized bond funds which did not appear on the master budget–as required by the enabling legislation.
Add to this the arbitrary and capricious action by the Department of Finance by way of failing to promulgate rules and regulations governing the application process and procedures. They just make it up as they go along.
Dr. Sanders is a very well studied man. His articles and lectures are second to none. Enjoy his presentation.