If you're Mayor Karl Dean, and the host of Metro Council members and chamber types who supported his push to build the $623 million dollar Music City Center, this is not the lede you were looking for:
In its first year of operation, the Music City Center convention hall failed to meet projections for hotel bookings, saw its surplus revenue fund drop by nearly $8 million and had its bond rating downgraded.
That's from last Sunday's Tenessean,
where Nate Rau reports that the convention centerhas underperformed in its first year. When it comes to those all-important room nights, the center fell short of the first-year projections that were cited in support of tax incentives for the Omni Hotel, Rau reports, and looking ahead, while the MCC is supposed to bring in 1.48 million room nights over the next three years, conventions on the books now fall well short of that.
Naturally, folks like Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp. President and CEO Butch Spyridon and executive director of the Convention Center Authority, Charles Starks, argue that things are just swell.
