Watchdog needs to clean glasses re today’s LNP manipulation
If the CC defaults, both LNP and High are faced with a huge PR disaster. If the CC were to close, they also take a financial hit at the hotel but that is small potatoes to their larger corporate umbrellas. As much as High Hotels does not want to deal with a hotel tax increase, the bigger High concern is a CC default and for that reason they are 100% behind a tax increase NOW, before the LCCCA has to show up before the commissioners and beg, literally.
Commissions on $8.5 million listings are a huge deal to Kevin Fry, not that the Brunswick could ever sell at that amount, he is not a High or a Steinman. The cost for him to purchase the type of publicity he got this morning for his listing would be measured in the 10’s of thousands of dollars. He now owes LNP whether he asked for the PR or not.
While he should have been creating a public scene for the last 4 months to revisit the agreements he has not and I cannot see him doing it now that LNP has become the propaganda arm for Prudential Commercial here in Lancaster.
The Watchdog needs to clean his glasses, realize that hotel taxes are going up and call for this tangled web to be untangled.
No one outside of the Penn Square Partners knows if the Marriott hotel might be facing a financial crisis. In spite of the fact that they are occupying a taxpayer-owned building with their only “rent” payments toward about 1/3 of the total construction debt, and receive far too much of their revenue from taxpayer-owned ballroom and meeting spaces, their financial results are a tightly-guarded secret.
The way that the convention center financing deal is structured, it cannot default. For starters, the managers of the construction debt have a lien against the full revenue of the “hotel tax”. And former Lancaster County Commissioners irrevocably guaranteed $20 million of the $63+ million construction debt. The question is, WHICH $20 million is guaranteed by Lancaster County taxpayers? In the unlikely event that the total revenue from the “hotel tax” cannot meet the convention center’s debt obligations, there can be no doubt that Lancaster County taxpayers will be expected to make up the difference.
Several years ago, the Penn Square Partners issued a publicity pamphlet called “What’s The Risk?”. It might be worth reviewing, since it looks like its predictions may indeed be coming true.
Both this letter and the response to said letter demonstrate what should have been obvious to anyone with any knowledge of the project, and that is the Hotel Tax is going up, with or without Kevin Fry or anyone else on the LCCCA board, and the LNPs articles (I.E. obfuscations) on this issue in recent weeks are red herrings.
I think the main issue behind the center remains whether or not a tax should be imposed on the competition to support its competition. One could, make, and many have made, a helluva good argument for a convention center in downtown Lancaster. But, one could also make a helluva a good argument that these types of arrangements set bad legal precedents and are fraught with a Pandora’s box of further complications which cannot be stopped. PSP borrowing the words from CSN: “I have my ship and all my flags are a flyn’…..”