Convention Center Follies. Heywood T. Sanders
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the Legislature, which authorized the issuance of revenue bonds … and not with the LVCVA.” With the lawsuit moot, the authority moved ahead with a $150 million bond issue in November. The new South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center opened at the beginning of January 2002, just in time to accommodate the annual Consumer Electronics Show and its 110,000 attendees, and bringing the Las Vegas Convention Center to a total of 1.94 million square feet of exhibit space.90
From its beginnings as the Fair and Recreation Board, through a series of bond defeats and political machinations in the 1960s and 1970s, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority has emerged as a massive fiscal engine, effectively free of direct control by Clark County voters or even the county commission. Convention center boosters had succeeded in reconstructing the political and fiscal constraints on the LVCVA, first managing to avoid direct public votes on expansion bonds, then legislating revenue bond authority that enabled the authority to avoid the potential hurdle of the Clark County commission. The state legislature did shift some hotel taxes to the local schools, and it would also take a portion of the hotel tax revenues to pay for transportation projects. But by 2007, the 132,947 hotel and motel rooms in Clark County were pumping out almost $220 million a year for the LVCVA, dedicated almost entirely to marketing, promoting, and financing the convention center. The authority’s room tax revenues were hit hard by the recession—the total for 2010 came to just $163.8 million. A planned expansion that would add more meeting room space and renovate older areas was put off. Yet the LVCVA still sits atop a stock of hotel rooms that can, as occupancies and room rates gradually improve, produce a stream of tax revenues that can and likely will support even more expansions.
In November 2011, LVCVA head Rossi Ralenkotter told the Review-Journal editorial board that it was time to revive the $890 million expansion project that had been put on hold during the recession. The authority’s room tax revenues for 2011 had grown to $194.3 million, and the authority’s vice president of sales argued, “If you look at what our competitors around the country have leading up to their convention centers, ours doesn’t match up.”91
Beyond City Limits
Beginning in the 1980s, it became increasingly common for academic analysts of urban politics and city policy to describe the constraints and limits on city governments. Paul Peterson’s 1981 City Limits focused on the notion that “local politics is most limited,” and posited the central necessity for cities to pursue “policies which contribute to the economic prosperity of the local community.” Economists Helen Ladd and John Yinger documented the fiscal straits of big city governments in their 1991 volume, America’s Ailing Cities. The fiscal problems of older cities like Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, and St. Louis that have seen continuing population loss since 1990 have not gotten better since they wrote.92
For other urban observers and commentators, the fiscal and economic plight of the nation’s large older cities called for a restructuring of local government, focusing on the creation of metropolitan and regional solutions to governance and local finance. Former Albuquerque Mayor David Rusk, in Cities Without Suburbs and Baltimore Unbound, called for urban solutions such as the creation of a “Metropolitan Municipality of Greater Baltimore” with the capacity to raise and spend region-wide revenues that could resolve metropolitan scale housing, economic, and social issues.93
Journalist Neal Peirce has similarly embraced metropolitan and regional government initiatives—“citistates”—as a means of moving beyond narrow local government boundaries to deal with broad regional needs. Peirce and his colleagues have stressed the importance of marshaling regional economic and fiscal resources to deal with the full range of contemporary metropolitan needs.94
For all the seemingly broad agreement among urban analysts about the constraints on big city governments and the myriad limitations faced by cities and their leaders, those limits have represented no impediment to the proponents of convention center development. The massive public investment that a city like Baltimore, Philadelphia, or Hartford can no longer manage either fiscally or politically can instead be—and has been—readily managed by an independent public authority or a state government. What a fiscally strapped and racially divided community like St. Louis, Richmond, or Cleveland cannot achieve on its own (or with the approval of the city’s electorate) can in turn be politicked, financed, and realized by a county government or through a new regional entity. Thus, the convention center in downtown St. Louis is owned by the regional Convention and Visitors Commission, the Richmond facility by the Greater Richmond Convention Center Authority, Hartford’s Connecticut Convention Center by the Capital City Economic Development Authority (now Capital Region Development Authority), and the new Cleveland “Med Mart” by Cuyahoga County.
The structure of American local government, with an array of different agencies and multiple levels, provides ample opportunity to secure support for a convention center project from a variety of officials with varying outlooks and orientations. There was no necessity or compelling functional logic for involving New York’s Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority in building the Coliseum and later the Javits Center. Nor was the Chicago Tribune’s successful use of horseracing tax revenues to construct McCormick particularly logical. But these cases, and a host of others, worked.
Even where the responsibility for convention center development has remained with a general purpose local government such as a city or a county, as in the cases of Kansas City, San Antonio, and Cincinnati, it has proven possible to restructure the politics and finances to effectively insulate proposed centers from public review and debate. These cities, and others, have long since devised means of financing convention facilities without a direct public vote. They have made use of dedicated revenues from taxes on local hotel rooms and car rentals. These funds, often combined with the commitment of private dollars for naming rights or project aid, make a convention center seem a “bargain” or affordable even where government revenues are tight. And it is possible to structure such revenue sources to contend, as center backers often do, that these dollars are the rightful purview of local hotel owners, and somehow cannot be used for any other public purpose.
The product of a local governmental system of multiple responsibilities, revenues, and political openings is an unusual kind of “political privilege” that attaches to convention center development efforts. No longer packaged as one part of a broad effort to address investment and infrastructure needs with voter-approved bonds, convention centers are promoted as unique vehicles that will assuredly generate ever more “economic impact,” jobs, and new public revenues. And in those cases where a mayor, manager, or county official is less than fully enthusiastic about center building or expansion, proponents have been able to “wait out” resistant officials until the next election.
In Nashville, the city commission vote in January 2010 that officially began work on a $650 million new “Music City Convention Center” was the product of politics, deals, and consultant studies—from CSL, KPMG, Tradeshow Week, C. H. Johnson, and HVS—that extended back to April 1999, through the eight years of Bill Purcell’s mayoralty, to newly elected Mayor Karl Dean. Where Purcell’s finance director, David Manning, had issued a memo warning of “a serious over-supply of convention center space in recent years … [such that] the [Music City Center] could become a serious drain on Metro’s financial resources,” his successor found a way to make a more costly if no less uncertain project a reality. Nashville’s financing scheme for the Music City Center ultimately combined a hotel tax, a hotel tax surcharge, an airport departure tax, a vehicle rental tax, a redirection of state and city sales taxes at the center and adjacent hotel, and the creation of a Tourism Development Zone and tax. The combination of strong local business backing and mayoral support succeeded in gaining new state legislation that allowed the Metro Nashville government to tap a whole range of new revenue streams, dedicated to a convention center and nothing else.95
Freed from the need to build the kind of electoral consensus required to “sell” bond issues to local voters, able to literally pick and choose the unit of government that is most fiscally flush and politically amenable, capable of outwaiting an unhelpful or unsupportive elected official, and ultimately positioned to garner the tax revenues generated by visitors and tourists rather than local taxpayers, convention center