Monday, April 20, 2009
Barry / Politics Gail Kerr Hearts the Convention Center; Logic Takes a Holiday
Posted by Bruce Barry on Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 12:22 PM
Let's unpack some of Kerr's specious arguments.
GK: Money to pay for that land will not come from the sales or property taxes you pay. The Metro Development and Housing Agency will take out loans to buy the land. The debt service on those loans will be paid by the tourism taxes.
Although this is literally true as to the dollars involved, it overlooks the reality that opportunity costs are always involved. Tourism taxes used to fund one thing are inevitably unavailable for another. Loans for one purpose at some level exclude borrowing for another. A convention center is not a self-financing project; it relies in significant measure on revenue from people who won't use it, and it crowds out other public purposes. This doesn't necessarily make it a bad thing -- it may be worth the opportunity costs of foregoing alternative public projects or initiatives, but that's a conversation we need to be having. An honest civic dialogue would compel supporters to suspend the fantasy that the absence of a new convention center has no relationship to the presence of anything else.
GK: Land and construction costs will only go up with delays. At the same time, the mayor and his financial advisers have said they will not push forward with the financing for the center until the bond markets warm back up.
Sure, delays could increase costs, but one person's "delay" is another person's "democratic process." By Kerr's reasoning one would should race ahead with a public project rather than take the time for analysis and deliberation with complete information and full transparency because time is money.
GK: Approving land acquisition now gives officials plenty of time to negotiate without resorting to condemnation.
This makes little sense. A property owner inclined to seek an extortionate price isn't going to cave because there's "plenty of time." Whether the land buying occurs now or later, it will be obvious to the seller with a working brain stem that there's one motivated buyer with a single purpose, a visible deadline, and deep pockets.
GK: If for some reason the council decides not to push ahead and build a convention center, the city will still own 15.5 acres of prime land south of Broadway downtown. They could use it for something else or sell it at a profit.
Yes, and those 15.5 acres will (until resold) no longer be on the tax rolls. And let's also keep in mind that an assumption that the city could turn around and sell it quickly at a profit, which Kerr asserts as a kind of easily exercised option, is at best highly speculative.
GK: That's exactly how the area developed that now is home to the symphony hall, Hilton Hotel and Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.
Here Kerr serves up a classic analogical fallacy, assuming without justification that a different set of development projects undertaken at a very different stage in the city's downtown evolution and under very different economic conditions represents a suitable comparison, and then drawing a dubious inference from this questionable comparison.
GK: Like it or not, the existing downtown convention center is too tiny to attract the nation's biggest meetings.
GK: Dean told the council we have missed the opportunity to woo 297 conventions because of the small hall. It's like asking the Titans to play their home games on a peewee football field. You just can't compete.
There will always be a significant number of conventions for which we can't compete; unobtainable business is not by itself a logical reason to expand a business. By that logic Gaylord should expand the Ryman because with its <2,000 seat capacity they miss the opportunity to lure acts that can sell 5,000 tickets. The Titans analogy is a defective irrelevancy because the point is not to have bigger conventions just for the sake of it; the point is to reap economic development gains that follow from drawing a larger convention trade. A convincing case will shed light on the magnitude and probability of those gains. An argument that you can't attract bigger conventions without a bigger convention center is factually axiomatic, but persuasively vapid.
This should not be about pushing ahead over skeptic objections. It should be about letting the details and the debate ripen to the point where concerns and objections can be fully formed and heard. A critical question at hand right now is whether going ahead with land purchase seeds inevitability, and in so doing forestalls legitimate analysis and deliberation. As for the Parthenon: It's a wonderful edifice, but "our iconic image"? Is Gail high? I find that first-time visitors to Nashville are almost always surprised (and often bemused) to discover we have this Parthenon replica thingee. I suspect that a national survey would reveal that the percentage of Americans who associate Nashville with images of the Parthenon or classical Greek architecture would be infinitesimal.
GK: People made fun of Mayor Richard Fulton when he saved historic Second Avenue's row of warehouses. Second is a tourism mecca now. People tried to level the Ryman Auditorium, and scoffed when it was saved.
Again fallacies of faulty analogy: Because people wrongly scoffed at other attempts at downtown development, Kerr seems to be suggesting, it is wrong to scoff at this one. But the Ryman and Second Avenue were historical rescue and preservation projects, and are elements of the city center that add to Nashville's cultural fabric by serving residents as much as tourists. Their place in urban development differs vastly from the public financing and construction of a massive new convention box of a building that will be occupied almost exclusively by visitors for the sole purpose of generating tourist tax dollars.
GK: People laughed when Titans owner Bud Adams said that he wanted to go to a Super Bowl.
What can I say, he's a funny guy.
GK: These are our signature success stories. The Music City Center deserves the same chance.
A project of this magnitude and expense doesn't "deserve a chance" on the basis of flimsy reasoning linking it with past projects and circumstances that bear little resemblance to or relevance for the present. A proposed convention center deserves the chance to rise or fall in the context of a full and open debate on its specific and identifiable merits as an engine for the kind of economic development we really need, and as an element of an urban design aesthetic we really want. (I'll leave it to others to determine whether a Hooters on Second Avenue and a concrete stadium ringed with parking lots are Nashville's "signature success stories.")
Comments (13)
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Great post. It's difficult to have a real debate on these kind of issues -- that requires real information and informed debaters....Kerr's approach is more like civic jingoism, and while unhelpful, it is certainly easier.
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So the next time the Scene uses these same kinds of straw men and misleading facts and inapplicable metaphors for one of your causes, we can expect a prompt rebuttal showing all the areas where you mislead people? I look forward to that!
I still hate the idea that they're willing to bulldoze one of the lone remaining all ages music venues in Nashville (nay, Middle Tennessee) for a dubious convention center in the middle of an economic recession where business conferences are being scaled down significantly.
Rocketown may not be my scene and I may disagree with specific parts of how they operate, but you can't argue that they don't fill a necessary void in Nashville.
Wasn't there a legal opinion last week that if the council approves funding the purchase of the land they have pretty much approved the whole enchilada?
I don't think Rocketown is disappearing -- they're currently looking at other downtown spaces to re-open the venue. So they may get shuffled, but I don't think they're being exterminated.
Bruce, thank you for being among the handful in town with a byline and the stones to write this. I hope it gets top billing in this week's Scene, it deserves it.
I think it's time that we, as a city, come clean about the notion that big business is on the mend and the multimillion dollar convention market will return on its heels. Every indicator points to a longer and more protracted recession, a permanent loss of wealth - corporate and otherwise, and a new era of thrift - corporate and otherwise. The reality is that spending in the convention market is only going to decrease and we're likely to get stuck with, well I can't even call it a very pretty empty building, because, frankly, it's ugly. It also disrupts the street grid significantly, making the neighborhood less walkable, bikeable and policeable.
And if we decide as a city that this the right time to build a new convention center, must we accept the CVBs suggested spot? A lot of people worked very hard on a Plan of Nashville and talked to a lot of citizens to work out a suggested siting in the Gulch along the Church Street viaduct. Can we at least talk about why the chosen site might or might not be a better locale? Can we talk about whether a big box convention center fits into the cultural district being built South of Broadway or whether there might be better uses of that site (including some already extant on the site like Rocketown).
A friend of mine who Chairs many professional nationwide conventions said that at the capacity the new convention center would be built Nashville would need approx 10,000 hotel rooms to accomodate. And their committees do not book conventions in cities with less than that - perhaps this person's knowledge is faulty, but they said Nashville does not have 10,000 rooms downtown. And until they do, the new convention center will not be a success since many will still opt for cities with more lodging capacity.
Regarding the number of hotel rooms:
According to the Nashville Convention and Visitors Bureau's "Meeting Planning Guide," page 57 (http://tr.im/jgtX), there are 3,000 "committable sleeping rooms" in the "center of downtown."
One comparison might be with Salt Lake City, which has a convention center roughly the size of the proposed Music City Center (neighborhood of 600,000 square feet of total usable space). Salt Lake City has over 7,300 rooms in what it calls the "Salt Lake Convention District" and 6,400 rooms within walking distance of the convention center (source: http://tr.im/jgtM).
Kansas City, on the other hand, also has a convention center in the 600,000 square foot vicinity, but has only about 3,500 hotel rooms within 12 blocks of the center (source: http://tr.im/jgvk).
A new convention headequarters hotel anticipated to accompany the Music City Center would add perhaps a thousand rooms, but is that enough to compete with cities having more lodging in the CBD? Hard to say...
Oh, it won't be shuttered for good, but who knows how long it will take before they can reopen? The City Hall owners said they'd be reopening the venue after getting bought out by Urban Outfitters and we haven't heard a peep from them in nearly a year.
I also can't imagine a much better place for them than where they are now. Sure, the parking isn't great (and is downright awful when something's going on at Sommet) but it's in a fairly central location that's easy to get to on foot/by bus. Maybe if they take over where the current convention center is, but I don't see that happening.
Maybe if they weren't trying to ram this thing through during one of worst economic downturns of the century, I wouldn't be as adverse to it, but at this point it just seems wrong.
"The City of Marietta [Georgia] spent $27 million to build the center in 1996, but it floundered badly under original operator Sentry Hospitality and didn't do much better under successor Remington. The city council ultimately voted in December 2007 to float $7 million in bonds for a major upgrade as part of a deal that saw Remington sign a franchise agreement with the Hilton chain to gain access to its world-wide booking service and hopefully increase occupancy rates...." -- as reported by the Marietta Daily Journal in January.
The taxpayers have been on the hook for years with the Marietta disaster. Sentry took us all for a ride when I was living down there, and a long investigative series could be written about Sentry, and should be.
You have to scrutinize the feasibility studies done on convention centers. These folks always say, "Yeah!! Win-win!!" Same positive answer in every case. You may find one company is doing these studies for various cities. As always, follow the money. Who stands to profit/benefit? It won't be you, average taxpayer/resident.
This is the last thing Downtown needs. We should start with transportation or some green space besides the Homeless park by the library or Riverfront Park. We may need a convention center, but why not Gaylord build it near Opry Mills and Nashville can provide some type public transit from Opry Mills to Downtown.
Remember The Floridian? It was an Amtrak route that went from Chicago to Miami and went through Nashville. This route made it possible to ride a train from Nashville to just about any part of the country via connections. We are going to spend $500 million on a convention center and our tourist city doesn't even have train service? Our public transportation system sucks and yet, $500 million for a convention center? Birmingham has Amtrak service and Nashville doesn't. Who needs a train when you can go to the National Association of National Associations Convention?
