Convention Center Follies. Heywood T. Sanders
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Tagge’s connection of the racing taxes that supported downstate county fairs with the potential to support a permanent fair in Chicago was in large part serendipity. But it also reflected a clear political calculation. Chicago and Cook County received none of the benefits of a tax that aided county fairs, and could make a plausible case for a share. At the same time, Tagge’s idea of relying on an existing state tax had a far larger appeal for a Republican-oriented newspaper in Chicago.
Tagge went on in his 1984 interview,
Well, my next step was to get on the phone to Maxwell and of course he was gung ho for it. “Wonderful, Wonderful…. And he said, “Well, who’s going to run the thing?” I said, “My notion is that it cannot be the damn Chicago City Council and it can’t be the damn Cook County Board because there are just too many burglars with their hands out all the time, if not for cash then for other things. And the nearest thing we can come to a power that has a pretty good sense of decency is the Chicago Park Board.” And he agreed with that.
Tagge, and likely Don Maxwell as well, had little regard for the politicians of Chicago or Cook County. The Railroad Fairs had been run by Major Lenox Lohr, a retired Army officer with an impeccable reputation, and the Tribune sought to keep a more permanent fair efficiently run outside local politics. When additional legislation was introduced in the 1953 legislative session to broaden the revenues to provide for a convention hall rather than a fair, the formal ownership of the convention facility was put in the hands of a new Fair and Exposition Authority.
The new authority was to have its members appointed in equal numbers by the mayor and governor. But Don Maxwell and the Tribune were unwilling to see the new entity come under the direction of some who lacked “civic virtue.” As Tagge recalled,
Maxwell decided to begin by choosing every member of the exposition authority and he didn’t talk to the mayor, the governor. He had me do it. He wouldn’t like to be turned down or argued with so I went to these people and told them what we wanted and quite properly they went along with it because we were completely and entirely responsible for getting the money.
The intent of Maxwell and Tagge, both in securing the state revenues for what would become McCormick Place, and putting it under the control of a public authority run by an appointed board, was to insulate the project from the petty politics of the city and county, while assuring a grand civic benefit run in an appropriately businesslike way. The subsequent history of McCormick Place and the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority suggests that they did not fully achieve their aim. Building and then regularly expanding a major convention center was (and is) an inherently political activity in a variety of ways, with deals to be made and contracts and benefits to dole out.
The $252 million expansion, authorized by the state legislature in 1984 and financed with statewide sales and hotel tax revenues, provided an opportunity for what the Chicago Tribune termed “cronyism in contracts,” with the foundation subcontractor owned by the Democratic state representative who sponsored the expansion legislation. The security firm awarded a no-bid contract was owned by the brother of the chair of the Cook County Democratic Party.70
The 1991 expansion, with its price estimated at $987 million and with backing from new taxes on car rentals, downtown Chicago restaurant meals, and airport buses, provided the opportunity for a last-minute budget deal in the state legislature, tying votes for the McCormick Place expansion to support for the continuing use of high-sulfur southern Illinois coal by Chicago utility companies. The final deal provided “‘McPlace,’ the $1 billion expansion of Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center, for Chicago Democrats … property tax caps for suburban Republicans … a balanced budget and caps for [Governor] Edgar … [and] coal for downstate.”71
Politics and deal-making has thus pervaded the business of McCormick Place. But it is a kind of politics that is fully removed from the direct influence and oversight of the mass of Chicago area citizens and voters. And when the questions of financing and implementing successive expansions with price tags on the order of one billion dollars arose, they were questions that were entirely the purview of the state legislature and the governor.
Philadelphia
Philadelphia, too, had an existing convention center in the 1970s and 1980s. The city-owned Philadelphia Civic Center boasted some 382,000 square feet of exhibit space, and had hosted a number of national political party conventions in the decades past. Its last major addition had come in 1978. But the center was old, and in the wrong place, in West Philadelphia some distance from downtown and its concentration of hotel rooms. For newly elected Mayor Bill Green and his aides, taking office in January 1980, the focus was on downtown and the need to boost both the city’s tourism industry and the larger downtown area. The city’s formal business organizations, the Greater Philadelphia First Corporation and the Chamber of Commerce, were both enthusiastic promoters of a new convention center in Center City.72
The prospects of a new convention center were given a serious boost by the creation of a convention center steering committee in May 1982 that in turn commissioned a feasibility analysis from Houston-based Pannell Kerr Forster (PKF). The PKF findings, made public in January 1983, said the city needed a new facility with 300,000 square feet of exhibit space “to remain competitive in the conventions and meetings business.” PKF considered an upgrade for the existing Civic Center, but deemed a new center on the eastern side of the center city area as the most viable, at an estimated construction cost of $114 million.73
City officials pressed for a center with some 400,000 square feet of space in order to beat the scale of the existing Civic Center. And construction and land acquisition costs began to soar, first to $275 million in the summer of 1983, then to some $400 million at the end of the year. With the cost regularly escalating, Mayor Green and local business and development officials chose to turn to the state government for financial assistance.
The city’s quest for convention center funds from the state began in August 1983 with an effort to change state rules to enable the financing, and an initial request for $43.9 million, even as the mayor was still negotiating with the Philadelphia city council for its approval of the convention center project. The agreement with the council was finally reached in March 1984. In April, the city hired S. R. Wojdak and Associates, and Joseph McLauglin, a former deputy mayor, as lobbyists for the city in Harrisburg, and they set about seeking to expand the state’s commitment well beyond $44 million.74
The city’s convention center effort won the support of Republican Governor Richard Thornburgh. But Republican legislators had a set of specific demands, intended to limit what Philadelphia’s largely Democratic politicians could do with a state-funded convention center project. First, they insisted that the new center be owned and managed by a public authority, with a board equally divided between gubernatorial appointees and appointees from Philadelphia (in turn divided between mayoral appointees and city council appointees). Second, they capped the state’s fiscal commitment at $185 million. And finally, they insisted on a strict ethical code for the board and authority employees, as well as limits on contracts and employment.
State legislators and business interests outside Philadelphia also perceived the proposed state financing as an opportunity for serving their own local concerns and engaging in classic horsetrading. In the words of Democratic Senator Barry Stout of southwestern Pennsylvania,
I kind of liken this … to making whole hog sausage. I do not want to see all the loin go to Philadelphia and all the hams go to Allegheny County [Pittsburgh] and those surrounding counties like Washington, Beaver, Fayette, Greene, Westmoreland and a lot of the counties that are contiguous to metropolitan areas end up with the sow belly. I want to know … if in the next three weeks … we will fatten up the hog a little bit and have a little sausage for the rest … of Pennsylvania?75
Governor Thornburgh responded to Pittsburgh legislators and business interests by promising state funding for the new midfield terminal at Pittsburgh’s airport for a total of $100 to $150 million. By the time he signed the act creating the Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority and committing $185 million in state funding, the legislative deal had broadened beyond the aid for Pittsburgh’s airport to include funds