Convention Center Follies. Heywood T. Sanders
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the opening of a new $786 million expansion in 2011, the series of consultant studies and their forecasts, regularly cited by the press and public officials, effectively defined the content and focus of the public discourse on convention center building. Those “expert” studies admitted no uncertainty about larger market realities or future performance. It was simply taken as a given that the new center would produce the anticipated benefits. And when the expansion proposal was developed, that discussion too was suffused with consultant predictions of an economic boom, with no real effort on the part of local officials, city and state bureaucrats, or news media to determine whether earlier forecasts had really been met.
The Philadelphia story neatly exemplifies the larger political and fiscal realities (or perhaps fantasies) behind the building boom. The new Pennsylvania Convention Center was financed with a combination of state dollars and local hotel tax revenues, neatly removing the question of center development from both the public and the city government. The expansion was financed with state revenues from slots gambling, in a deal—assembled and pressed by governor and former Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell—that also aided Pittsburgh and its convention center. In both cases, the public investment decision was focused on paying for convention center space, not on any larger goal or purpose, and with no consideration of alternative needs or public investments.
Without any direct public vote, the “deals” to finance the center were shaped by state-level politics. There, the deal-making was effectively distributive and geographic, with enough benefits for enough parts of the Commonwealth and their local legislators to succeed. The fundamental “deal” for Philadelphia’s center and its subsequent expansion were thus constructed in a remarkably narrow and constrained field, with serious public discourse and debate effectively limited and avoided, built on the unquestioned assumptions and presumptions of consultants who presented no record of their earlier forecasts’ accuracy and no evidence of expert knowledge beyond the contention that they had done many such studies before.56
The dynamic of “expert” consultant studies, promises of a boom in visitor spending, specific forecasts of “economic impact,” editorial endorsements, and seemingly “invisible” financing was much the same in New York City in the 1990s. Just a decade after the 1986 opening of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, center officials commissioned a feasibility analysis of an expansion from Coopers & Lybrand. The New York Times reported the findings of the Coopers & Lybrand study on the Javits Center in April 1997, that “To maintain its competitive edge” the Javits needed to double its exhibition space or risk being hurt by new centers or expansions under way in Chicago, Las Vegas, Orlando, Atlanta, and Philadelphia. From such an expansion, “the economic benefits could be huge…. creation of 13,000 new jobs and $87 million in annual tax revenues for the state and the city.”57 And the expansion call was renewed the following month in the New York Times, pegged to the opening of a new center in Atlantic City, complete with the same argument that “an expanded center would generate 13,000 new jobs and contribute $568 million in added spending at hotels, restaurants, theaters, stores and other New York City businesses.”58
The Times editorial page joined the chorus in June 1998, by noting that the city’s “attraction as a site for trade shows and conventions has been one of the key elements in its economic growth” and telling Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, “Building a world-class convention center would create jobs and assure the city’s ability to attract trade shows and exhibitions into the next century…. The Mayor must cooperate with the state in reaching that goal.”59
For all the seeming specificity and certainty of the Coopers & Lybrand study, the Times reportage succeeded in misreading its findings and substance. The report did estimate the jobs to be produced by an expansion at “12,700 full and part-time jobs.” And it did put “Estimated Annual Direct Spending in a Stabilized Year of Operations” at $568,254,000. But those figures would be the total product of the expanded center, not the added or incremental impact.60
The Coopers & Lybrand study did not include figures on the spending or job creation of the existing, pre-expansion Javits. Nor did it include numbers of anticipated new events or attendees, making it impossible to calculate the added impact of expansion. Indeed, the Coopers study contained only relatively limited information on the center’s actual performance, with event and attendance data for just three years, two of them shown as “estimated.” Had the Coopers consultants provided a longer historical view, the study might have yielded a more accurate, if more disturbing, portrait.
While the Javits was shown as hosting 60 conventions and tradeshows with total attendance of 1.1 million in fiscal year 1995, that total was substantially less than the (not reported) 1.42 million attendees of 1991 or the 1.92 million in 1990. And perhaps most problematically, where Coopers & Lybrand calculated average convention attendee spending on the basis of estimates by the International Association of Convention and Visitors Bureaus, that each spent three days or more in the convention city, Javits attendees didn’t come close to that estimate. The Coopers study of the Javits expansion noted that the 1.1 million convention and tradeshow attendees in fiscal 1995 generated just 201,600 hotel room nights. The reality was that the tradeshows at the Javits were primarily attended by New York metropolitan area residents, who visited the Javits for the day, rather than by out-of-town visitors. In order to realize the jobs or economic impact promised by the Coopers consultants, the Javits would have to successfully compete for an entirely new market of rotating conventions.
The Javits expansion proposal stalled despite the economic boom promised by Coopers & Lybrand, as the result of a fight between Mayor Giuliani and New York Governor George Pataki over Giuliani’s plan for a new stadium adjacent to the center. With no real progress, the Javits Center Operating Corporation commissioned another study to move the project forward, this time from Robert Canton of PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
The March 2000 PriceWaterhouseCoopers analysis concluded (in print both italicized and bold) the “JKJCC will lose existing business if it does not expand,” “JKJCC will attract new events if it is expanded,” and “An expanded JKJCC will generate economic and fiscal benefits to New York City and the State of New York.” The PWC report offered an even more precise picture of the results of an expansion, noting that the center’s exhibit halls “are currently at practical maximum occupancy,” and predicting that an expansion of some 500,000 square feet would bring the Javits 504,000 more convention and tradeshow attendees each year, for a total of 1.62 million.61
Canton’s 2000 report concluded that those half million more convention attendees would produce precisely 417,000 new hotel room nights a year and generate an added $355 million in spending and 7,000 additional jobs to the city. But at the end of the year an entirely new dimension was added, with the initially quiet floating of a proposal for a new football stadium for the New York Jets adjacent to the Javits. The Jets stadium was linked to the city’s efforts to win the 2012 Olympic Games. But a stadium with a retractable roof could also be sold as offering added exhibit hall space—“the stadium could be converted within 24 hours to exhibition space and connected to the Javits Center by a footbridge”—and a solution to the presumed deficiencies of the Javits. The convention center itself was termed by the Times article as “widely derided as an out-of-date, second-class building unworthy of the city.”62
Neither the Jets stadium nor the Javits Center expansion proved easily realized in the cauldron of New York City politics. So in late 2003 the Javits Center Corporation sought yet another consultant study of the market for an expanded center, turning once again to Robert Canton of PriceWaterhouseCoopers. In the years since the 2000 analysis, convention business and travel generally had been hard hit by a recession and the aftermath of 9-11. Convention and tradeshow attendance at the Javits had fallen from 1.3 million in 1998 to just 955,000 in 2003. Canton attributed the drop to “an industry wide trend of decreased event attendance.” Yet the forecast of new convention and tradeshow attendee spending in his 2004 report proved even greater than in 2000.63
The New York Times article reporting on the PriceWaterhouseCooper findings noted that “doubling the center’s size… would attract half a million more visitors, 18 to 20 new trade shows and conventions, and nearly $700 million in additional business