It was one of those days when it seemed that nothing made sense to us.
On one hand, there were reports that the Wharton Administration was softening on the completion of Beale Street Landing, and on the other, there was a City Councilman suggesting that residents of the smaller towns in Shelby County shouldn’t have the right to vote on city-county consolidation.
According to The Commercial Appeal, the Wharton Administration thinks we need a new $500 million convention center.
According to the Memphis Daily News, the Wharton Administration suggests that we don’t need to spend the $9 million to complete Beale Street Landing right.
Déjà vu All Over Again
We guess our math skills just aren’t good enough to understand the calculus. In the great scheme of things, Beale Street Landing will have more impact on tourism than a new convention center. And we can actually afford it.
As Smart City Memphis contributor John Lawrence wrote so convincingly a few days ago, it’s time to finish Beale Street Landing according to the winning designs by an outstanding Argentine architectural firm.
We have trouble believing that the Wharton Administration won’t support the $9 million to complete the project. After all, it’s like déjà vu for Mayor A C Wharton. When he was elected county mayor in 2002, he inherited a FedExForum cloaked in controversy and with emotional calls for it to be scaled back. But rather than yield to ideas that would have diminished the quality of the arena, he continued on, and as a result, FedExForum was convincing proof of the wisdom of doing public projects first-class and high-quality.
In raising the issue of a new convention center, it was said that Memphis needs it to attract more tourists. There’s no argument that the bread and butter for our “hospital industry” is tourism, and that’s why the idea of a new convention center needs more examination. It’s not about attracting tourists. It’s about attracting conventions. There’s a big difference.
Arms Race
Of course, we’re not alone in this talk about a new convention center. Even as think tanks dispute claims that convention centers are wise public investments, cities continue to escalate the competition to see who can spend the most and build the biggest. A new convention center proposed in Nashville is now projected to cost more than half a billion dollars, and city boosters are pushing the new building as if the future of Middle Tennessee hangs in the balance.
In recent years, about 40 cities have built new convention centers or expanded existing ones, totaling about $2.4 billion in public funding a year. It’s no surprise that in just over a 10-year period, convention space increased 51 percent (even as attendance declined).
Dreams of being a convention destination run deep in cities everywhere, and in pursuit of these dreams, promises and projections are more and more extravagant, like the ones for new hotel room nights in Richmond that ended up being off by two-thirds. Such overstatements are more the rules than the exception when it comes to convention centers.
Most remarkable of all, all these new facilities have come on line despite declines in conventions. Most of all, not even the most vocal supporter would argue that these buildings really do anything to address poverty, loss of middle class families, workforce challenges and population loss.
Unvarnished Facts
Rather than beginning with the assumption that Memphis does indeed need a new or expanded convention center, what would really be valuable for Memphis is an independent, objective market study (and not by the cadre of convention center cheerleading consultants who regularly churn out Pollyannish projections). We need to know what Memphis’ niche can really be. Perhaps, we’ll never be a convention center like Nashville, so we need to find out how to find our distinctive niche and leverage it as capably as we can.
After all, if the past is the best predictor of the future, a new convention center could be underperforming and disappointing. Perhaps, with a clear-eyed, skeptical analysis of our realistic opportunities, we can in fact finally find a position in the convention industry that makes sense.
There is one thing on which we can surely all agree: It is hard to find a major convention center that provides an experience that is as dismal and unappealing as ours. Built apparently from German bunker blueprints and with the attendant lack of charm, the convention center cannot create the same kind of ambiance as the striking glass and steel centers that open to the surrounding urban fabric of its city.
It’s the difference in a building that looks outward and one that turns inward. Unfortunately, for us, Memphis Cook Convention Center looks inward with a vengence, and as a result, there is no connectivity with the city that it serves.
Payday Someday
However, the hard part is figuring out how to pay for it. The hotel-motel tax is already stretched to the breaking point, and it’s almost certain that new tax sources would be needed to pay the massive price tag that this project would have. In fact, if a new convention center is built, its cost will easily surpass the public building project that was previously the most expensive – FedEx Forum.
Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, City Council member Janis Fullilove was full of anything but love toward the county towns. She’s ready to ask for a Tennessee Attorney General’s opinion on whether the towns should even have the right to vote on the proposed merger of city-county governments. But she said she’s not being “mean spirited,” just “fair.”
It gives fairness a whole new meaning. Just imagine if the shoe were on the other foot. The county towns had decided that they wanted to merge with Shelby County but they didn’t think Memphis should vote on it. We suspect that the Councilwoman would be up in arms.
Taxation Without Representation
Here’s the small fact that she seems to overlook: Residents of the towns pay county taxes, so they should of course have a vote on the future of that government. To suggest otherwise is obtuse.
From an earlier position of saying a dual referenda to reform local government structure is a violation of “one man, one vote” for Memphians, she now thinks “one man, no vote” is fair for the towns. It’s bad enough that there are some of our favorite loose cannons – like Council member Fullilove, County Commissioner Steve Mulroy and former judge D’Army Bailey — think the rules should be changed in the middle of the game to take away the dual referenda requirement in the Tennessee Constitution, but all of this distracts us from the current discussion about merging city-county governments.
Then again, it’s possible that even if some attorney filed a lawsuit, we’re told that a judge would be reluctant to postpone the scheduled November vote on a new government. We hope so, because some of us really want to talk about what a new, improved government could look like.
Let’s go ahead with the scheduled referenda and if there’s going to be a debate about the law governing metro government, let’s have it next year (if the vote this year fails).
“””IF???””
De Army and FullOfIt have already seen the writing graffitied on the wall regarding consolo-tax grabbing to save memphis from itself-dation. It’s apparently unacceptable to them that finally, after achieving majority status in the county, they just can’t force the suburbanites to give over their wallets for ‘equality’s’ sake.
maybe they will have better luck with reparations.
Good write up. As far as convention centers go, they are sold on the apparent logic of the idea: they pay for themselves through the increase business they generate for the hospitality industry. However, when everyone else has one and all things being equal, will it still generate the same amount of business? It is very similar to the recent Aquarium Wars we are just now emerging from. Over the past 10-15 years aquariums were the thing to build to draw tourists. They got bigger and more grand until every city had one. As they were built they went from international to national to regional attractions. If Nashville, Memphis, Dallas, and St.Louis all have equally sized convention centers, then we can’t expect a lot of bang for our buck. You have to be the first to build these types of things to make them pay off, and even then you better be ready to either update or move on because they lose their appeal in a decade.
The Bass Pro Shop is no different.
I think it is too early to rule in or out a new convention center. But, I always like to play the “What if I had $500,000,000” game.
One of the complaints I hear about why we don’t book more conventions is that we don’t have enough Downtown hotel rooms. If this is true, $500 million could put 3,000 more rooms on the market. If that money were used as a 40% subsidy for private development, 7,000 rooms could be added (and would be paying taxes). 40% is not uncommon public participation for Convention Center hotels.
One of the complaints I hear about why we don’t have more hotel rooms is that we don’t have many business travelers. If this is true, $500 million could add 2.5 million square feet or two 60-story skyscrapers to our skyline. If that money were used as a 30% subsidy for private development, six 60-story buildings could be added to our skyline. This would equate to 7,000 to 30,000 new downtown employees… provided we could find some mobile businesses that wanted the discounted luxury space with river views.
One of the complaints I hear about why we don’t have a better office market is that there are few nice neighborhoods in which to live. If this is true, $500 million could build 1,700 new luxury townhouses in and around the Pinch District. This would create a Brooklyn style neighborhood between the Convention Center, Pyramid and St. Jude. If the money was used as a 20% subsidy for private development, a 2,000 townhome neighborhood could be built at each end of the T-shaped trolley line and have enough left over for a fourth in the center of Downtown.
I might do some mixture of that with $500,000,000.
Ooh, another good one!
Why don’t we sell the old convention center, or, since the city owns it, turn it into an energy efficient HOTEL?
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If I had $500,000,000 I would give Janice $100,000 to leave Memphis and open a beauty parlor, where looks over substance is appreciated to build her self esteem and not worry about her ego.
I’d give $400,000 to get rid of Ophelia and she could go in partners with Janice. They should go to Kentucky, or Timbuktu.
Maybe another $400,000 should go to get Barbara and Joe to take a permanent vacation, dump the rest of the council, then, dump the school board and turn over to mayoral control, consolidate govs to get a better tax per capita figure,
People don’t move to Memphis or want to visit from the crime and miserable stats which we get every year,
They don’t like bums downtown,
They don’t like corrupt government,
They don’t like being surrounded endless abject poverty and desperation,
Families don’t like a school system that underperforms, due to a battle between a greedy, yet third rate, union that only has money as it’s interest and never protects rank and file,
Families don’t like a school system that provides a third rate education and institutionalizes knee-jerk racism (black racism in response to white racism),
Families don’t like a place with no creative vision and no evidence of maturity or growth over years of empty promises,
People don’t want to move to a place that is going to teach their kids to be “criminals, box packers, or leave” as their home.
Those problems all have a “possibility” of changing soon, When they do actually do something right that matters to many people, you’ll see some “magnetism”.
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The core is the educational system, you want families to move here, make THE ENTIRE PUBLIC EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM worth participating in. That will be demonstrated by graduation, college placement, employment placement and retention stats.
Without that, Memphis has no worthwhile future. We’re in a special situation, we’ve been lying to ourselves for so long that we “don’t need to improve, we’re doing better (than we actually are)” that we have fallen to the VERY BOTTOM of the pile of picks.
“If you’re smart” you already know that!
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The fact that Memphis has the highest tax rat per capita in TN shows that were just stupid enough to think we can tax our way out of anything when stats show we are taxing our way out of citizens!
Sell excess Memphis properties to pay for your next stupid project and get a tax break for the citizens to boot by reducing the upkeep on warehoused properties we are NEVER going to use again.
Better do something quick because the clock is ticking before the exposition of the REAL Memphis budget happens and I bet you won’t like the look of that if you own property here!
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Has anyone ever thought that in these times of properly scrutinized budgets that maybe there won’t BE as much convention center use anyway?
City worker by peer cities comparison.
Memphis/Shelby County, 14,792 workers
Metro Nashville, 6,597
Metro Indianapolis, 6,991
Metro Louisville, 7,453
Metro Jacksonville, 8,019.
* numbers do not include schools
THIS IS DAMNING EVIDENCE!!!!!!!
We hire lousy employees by the bushel compared, what kind of jackass system do we have for hiring?
And you wonder why our taxes are twice anyone else’s?
What is “metro Nashville”? Are you saying Nashville/ Davidson metro government? Not saying Memphis/ Shelby county is not bloated but the combined population of Memphis and Shelby County is significantly larger than that of Davidson County. I would also like to see a comparison via square miles. All things being equal, a larger, more heavily populated county will require more employees for maintenance and construction work if nothing else.
Yeah,you threw out the same random numbers on the Flyer website, but you don’t provide key information such as the population of the combined city/ counties, the level of services provided, what services are “in-house” in Memphis and Shelby County and what services might be outsourced in the cities mentioned, ect… Random numbers don’t really provide the basis for constructive conversation.
Oops, I see another “anonymous” beat me to the punch.