(Tenth in a series)

By Christiaan Hart-Nibbrig

The story of the Lancaster County Convention Center begins with an obscure law called the “Third-Class County Convention Center Authority Act” that was passed in the Pennsylvania legislature and signed by Governor Robert Casey on December 27, 1994.

The Act permits local county governments of third-class counties (those with populations between 210,000-500,000) to create “Authorities”, taxpayer-subsidized bodies empowered to build and administer convention centers and to fund the projects through a hotel room sales tax.

Lancaster County, with a population of just under the half million at the time – with scores of hotels and motels, was a “Third-Class” county and thus authorized to tap new revenue through a hotel room sales tax for tourist promotion and convention center purposes.

The Convention Center Act was sponsored by house member Thomas Caltagirone of Berks County. The real authors – the ones who conceived and drafted the language and the ones who would benefit from its largesse for more than a decade — were attorneys at the law firm of Stevens & Lee, a powerful Reading-based corporation. Dealing in most forms of commercial law, the law firm is also an influential lobbyist in state government, representing a number of counties, including Berks. (Stevens & Lee will appear later and often in this series.)

According to political observers, the Act was later utilized in a trade-off involving a very expensive stadium bill for Philadelphia and Pittsburgh that came a few years later, one strongly supported by Casey’s successor, Governor Tom Ridge.

The stadium initiative, passed in a lame duck, post-election session at the end of 1998, proposed to spend $600 million public dollars to build four new sports stadia: two in Pittsburgh; two in Philadelphia. The inducement for legislators outside of those specific counties and their immediate suburbs to fund this bill was to receive economic development grants that would flow to their communities throughout the state.

At the time, Lancaster County had two very influential senior legislators in Harrisburg: Representative John Barley and Senator Gibson “Gib” Armstrong. Barley was the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and Armstrong chaired the Senate Banking Committee. Together, Barley and Armstrong, both Republicans, had been in the legislature for decades.

It has been suggested that Barley and/or Armstrong made a deal with Governor Tom Ridge, also a Republican, that Lancaster be rewarded with state money for a downtown convention center, in exchange for political support for funding the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh stadia bill. Both Barley and Armstrong were closely connected to prominent citizens (all major political contributors and volunteers), who were negotiating to  purchase the large and centrally located, historic Watt & Shand building, which they believed could be developed into a hotel and an adjoining convention center.

Fifteen years – and almost two hundred million public dollars – after Casey signed the bill, we find the Lancaster County Convention Center has become a reality.

This is the story of how a project of dubious feasibility was pitched to the public as a $75 million, half private and half publicly funded investment and over the years evolved into its current $180 million form, with the taxpayers swallowing more than 90% of the cost and risk.

It is a project that has sharply divided the entire community. And it is a story that yet-to-be-written ending will likely define Lancaster for many years.

Footnote:  When the idea of a convention center for the city of Lancaster was first introduced Ronald Reagan was president.  In April 1986, Mayor Arthur E. Morris anounced a committe would explore whether the city could support such a project.  The tentative idea for the center was not particularly grand. “I don’t envision a big place seating 10,000 people,” Morris said.  No location for the project had been determined at that time.  When no private party stepped forward to finance a convention center in Lancaster, the idea lay dormant for several years.