After their latest legal victory in late 2002, convention center sponsors now looked to move the project forward without impediment in 2003.

But they would have to do so without one of their most helpful hands in Harrisburg.

This is a familiar pattern since the inception of the project whereby the Lancaster Newspapers warns that the ‘sky will fall’ unless the public opens its purse to benefit the various sponsors, when each one shares responsibility for what went wrong.

The ‘frontlines’ in the battle over the convention center changed as the project progressed. At first, the debate was centered in Lancaster city, around the acquisition and private development of the Watt & Shand building.

The controversies that attended the first year and a half of the convention center and hotel project only intensified into its second year.

The first skirmish of 2001 (apart from the hotelier lawsuit) involved the poorly maintained but structurally sound buildings at Vine and Queen Streets purchased the year before by the LCCCA.

In early 2000, the Lancaster County Convention Center Authority (LCCCA) began the process of purchasing properties around the proposed Penn Square convention center site. In March, the Authority, led by Chairman Jim Pickard, bought four dilapidated buildings bordering South Queen Street, Vine, and Christian Streets. The land and buildings were purchased for a reported $539,900.

Lancaster Mayor Charlie Smithgall had no doubt which way the Lancaster County Commissioners were going to vote on establishing a hotel room tax and a convention center authority. Three weeks before the September 15th vote, during a Lancaster City Council meeting, Mayor Smithgall nominated three people to sit on the not-yet-formed, seven-member Lancaster County Convention Center Authority (LCCCA) board of directors.

Ernst & Young did not conclude that the Lancaster market “is viable for a convention center,” as Baldridge stated and Schreiber reported. Its conclusions were far more tepid and equivocal than that.

“With upgrading of the [Brunswick] hotel,” said Winterbottom, “there is the opportunity to create a small, state-of-the-art conference center and additional hotel space. If the renovation to the Brunswick is significant and if you can create that conference center, I predict that within five or six years you’ll have a second hotel.”

Between the time Charlie Smithgall was elected mayor in November, 1997, and the time he took office in January, 1998, the Bon Ton company announced its intentions to sell the Watt & Shand building to the highest bidder.

On a frigid day in late February, 1992, readers of the Lancaster New Era newspaper found on the front page a story that shocked and saddened them: “Watt & Shand stores are being bought by Bon-Ton: Name will change at downtown and Park City location”

The timeline below covers the history of the Lancaster County Convention Center and Marriott Hotel project. The timeline is part of a comprehensive revision and edit of the convention center series originally published by NewsLanc.com. The entire revised series will be published in the coming weeks and months.

At the end of March in 2007, the Lancaster County Convention Center Authority sold $64 million in construction bonds. This permitted the construction of the taxpayer-financed hotel and convention center project – which was already under way – to legally proceed.

In response to the local press coverage of the alleged discrepancy between the County Treasurer’s reports of revenue and the hotel rooms sales tax and the hotel industry’s STR reports, thus repeatedly implying incompetence if not malfeasance by the County Treasurer, NewsLanc submitted specific questions to Country Treasurer Craig Ebersole.