Convention Center Follies. Heywood T. Sanders
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new convention center necessarily meant gaining voter approval for general obligation bonds. With great fanfare, the $15 million convention center bond proposal appeared on the city ballot in November 1957. The bonds managed a 52 percent “yes” vote, but fell short of the required 55 percent majority. Mayor Celebrezze and developer Zeckendorf tried again with the same scheme the following year. The “yes” vote slipped slightly, and once again the plan failed.12
With two successive defeats, Zeckendorf gave up on Cleveland and moved on to other cities. But Celebrezze, and more importantly the business leaders of the Greater Cleveland Chamber of Commerce and Cleveland Development Foundation, were unwilling to give up on the promise of a big new convention center and the prospect of anchoring downtown revival with it and the new hotel it would surely draw. The result was a political compromise with the leadership of the city council that involved a less costly convention facility at a different site. With that compromise, a new $10 million convention center plan was put on the ballot in November 1960, and finally succeeded in winning voter approval.13
The route to electoral success was no less rough for 1960s Atlanta. Newly elected mayor Ivan Allen, Jr., and the Chamber of Commerce he had just led as president proposed a new auditorium/convention hall in early 1962. A $10 million civic center bond issue was packaged with other spending proposals for street and sewer improvements and a major new cultural and arts center in Piedmont Park. Despite the unanimity of the city’s white civic leadership and the promise of a broad set of community improvements, the entire bond package of $80 million failed to win voter approval.14
Mayor Allen and the chamber leadership were not willing to give up on the planned auditorium/convention hall, despite the fact that a post-election survey showed only 58 percent of voters willing to support it, compared to 84 percent backing for schools and 79 percent for street or sewer improvements. Allen chose to try again with a convention hall reduced in scale and cost, dropping the bond issue amount from $10 million to $9 million. Submitted to the voters again in May 1963, the convention hall issue passed. But Atlanta was left with an undersized convention facility, with business leaders complaining of its inadequacy shortly after it opened.
The cases of Cleveland and Atlanta suggested that voter support for convention center bonds was not necessarily certain, even with broad backing from business and political leaders including a seemingly popular mayor, the promise of new jobs and development, and the packaging as part of a larger bond program. That fact was certainly evident in 1960s St. Louis. A modest bond proposal for renovating city buildings, including the Kiel Auditorium, on the ballot in January 1962, was defeated. A second attempt later that year met defeat as well. And a 1966 bond issue for expanding the Kiel and adding more exhibit space was also defeated, managing the lowest “yes” vote (54 percent) of the 18 issues on the ballot.
St. Louis faced the unusual problem of having to secure a two-thirds majority under Missouri state law. But it also faced a new set of political and electoral realities during the 1960s, as the coalition of upper-income whites and African American votes that had historically provided the votes to pass major bond issues began to collapse. That change, in turn, reflected a new level of political involvement by the African American community, linked to the civil rights movement, and the increasing white outmigration from the central city. The new electoral politics of bond issues were fully evident when St. Louis business and political leaders succeeded in putting a proposal for building an entirely new convention center on the ballot in March 1971. The result was an abject defeat, termed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch “the worst defeat of a local capital improvement plan here in many years,” with the bonds managing just 36 percent of the vote. Even the predominantly African American wards, long the source of 75 and 80 percent margins for previous bond proposals, delivered just a 45 percent “yes” vote—far below the needed two-thirds.15
Plans for a new convention center in downtown Kansas City followed a very similar trajectory to those in St. Louis, with much the same outcome. By the 1960s, the Municipal Auditorium that was the great political triumph of the 1930s was showing its age, and as in Cleveland and Atlanta, local boosters were looking to compete with newer, bigger centers in other major cities. At a meeting of the board of directors in March 1964, the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce took up the question of the need for more exhibit space at the auditorium, noting “The increased competition for convention business.”16 That May, the chamber leaders moved that “a complete study be made of the possibility of new and expanded auditorium facilities in Kansas City … [with] suggestions for methods of financing the project.”17
The new convention center had to wait for passage of a county government priority, a new stadium, in mid-1967. But with passage of the stadium bond proposal, the chamber leaders again took up the question of more convention space. At the chamber board’s July 1967 meeting, president Robert Ingram said “that it would be necessary for revitalization of effort for the establishment of an Exhibition Hall,” noting that “Mayor [Ilus] Davis advised him that the cost today would be approximately twelve million dollars” and that “hotel interests are quite concerned with building new hotel facilities until they are assured that we can have more conventions.”18 Two months later, Ingram reported to the board that he had been in touch with the city council and “that they were attempting to work it into a capital program.”19 After the city manager and staff crafted a broad capital improvement effort, Mayor Davis reported to the chamber in January 1969 that a planned bond program would join the new convention center with bonds for street lighting, swimming pools, airport improvements, and remodeling of City Hall. The Mayor concluded by saying, “We will call on you when the time arises that we need your support on these various projects.”20
What the mayor and city council finally crafted was a package of 17 individual bond issues, for a total of more than $143 million, in keeping with the city’s historical pattern of comprehensive packages of bond proposals. The largest single item on the list was proposition number 3—$23.5 million for a new exhibition hall. The campaign for the December 16, 1969, bond election was bankrolled by the chamber, promoted as a “Program for Progress,” and sold vigorously by local media. The Kansas City Star ran a front page editorial on December 15, arguing that “The prime consideration at the polls tomorrow is whether Kansas City is to grow or retrench in the 1970s.”21 The campaign mirrored a host of past efforts. This time it did not work.
Each of the 17 bond issues was defeated, failing to win a two-thirds majority. Two, for police and fire, actually managed to top the 50 percent mark. But most did far worse, including the $23.5 million exhibition hall proposal. It managed just a 32.6 percent “yes” vote, placing it next to last in public appeal. The defeat was a stunning failure for both the city administration and the business leadership. Meeting with the chamber two weeks after the vote, Mayor Davis “explained that the Program was caught in the upgraft [sic] of feelings against taxes nation wide.”22 It was also clear that the mayor had little interest in returning to the voters quickly, as the city had in the past. The mayor said he had “no magic words or direction,” and that “all issues have to be passed and it is only a matter of when,” posing the question, “How do we do it?”23
By about 1970, the business and political leaders of both Kansas City and St. Louis faced the larger demographic and political realities that had confronted their counterparts in Cleveland, Atlanta, and a number of other cities. The bond programs that had so consistently garnered public support in the past were now far more problematic. And no single project demonstrated the public’s indifference or disdain more than the investment in a new convention center or exhibition hall. However appealing these major investments might be to hotel owners, downtown firms, and local business leaders, their appeal to an electorate concerned about things like property taxes, (often dwindling) basic city services, and neighborhood change was remarkably limited.
The answer to the question posed by Kansas City mayor Ilus Davis of “How do we do it” clearly had to be differently—with some fiscal or political change that held the promise of reversing (or avoiding) the public’s disinterest.
A Fiscal and Political Reformation
Kansas City
The plaint