You won't see this in the Iowa City DePressed Citizen...... And Coralville city officials didn't read it either....
American cities have increasingly been spending tax dollars to build and expand convention center space — at the same time the number of convention attendees has been falling.
“The result has been a gigantic nationwide surplus of empty meeting facilities, struggling convention centers, and vacant hotel rooms,” according to Steven Malanga, senior editor of City Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
“Given the glut, you’d think that cities would stop. Instead, many are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to expand convention centers and open yet more dazzling hotels, arguing that whatever convention business remains will flow to the places with the fanciest amenities.”
In 2000, conventions and meetings drew 126 million attendees, but that figure had dropped to just 86 million in 2010. Meanwhile, available convention space rose from 40 million square feet to 70 million over the past two decades.
Malanga cites the example of Boston, which spent $230 million to renovate its convention center in the late 1980s, then shelled out $800 million for a new center, projecting that it would produce about 670,000 hotel room rentals a year by 2009. The center opened in 2004, and the number of annual room rentals it has generated has barely topped 300,000.
Nevertheless, Boston tourism officials are now proposing to spend $2 billion to double the center’s size and add a convention hotel.
Similarly, Baltimore opened a $300 million city-owned convention hotel in 2008. The hotel lost $11 million last year, but Baltimore is considering a $900 million public-private expansion that would include an arena, another convention hotel, and massive new convention space. The taxpayers’ tab would be $400 million.
Malanga points to “the failure of publicly sponsored facilities to live up to exaggerated projections. As far as city officials are concerned, that failure is nothing that hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars can’t fix.”
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