At the Lancaster County Convention Center Authority’s monthly meeting yesterday, Stephen Sikking, Chair, Pennsylvania Dutch Convention & Visitors Bureau, expressed concern about the lack of information on how many people stay in local hotels while attending functions and events at the Convention Center.
LCCCA’s executive director Kevin Molloy and various board members also lamented the lack of information.
Molloy pointed out that while Interstate Hotels, which jointly manages both the Marriott Hotel and the Convention Center, shares certain information with the LCCCA, but not the amount and sources of Marriott business. Such information is proprietary to the Marriott’s equitable owner, Penn Square Partners.
Nor is the information readily available, or even known, to the Marriott and other hotels in the region.
Molloy further stated that it is difficult to obtain useful information from sponsors of events either because they too don’t have it or they have reasons not to say.
Board member Lawrence Hinnenkamp observed that the community needs to know the impact of the Convention Center on generation of hotel room nights. “It is a big problem and a big challenge… I challenge the board to figure out a way. And it needs to be independent.”
Molloy responded: “To get good data costs money. Just to do a cursory review by ‘walking around town’ costs $30,000… I don’t think it passes the wiggle test.”
As part of public comment, Robert Field, NewsLanc’s publisher and editor, questioned repeated claims coming from Mayor Rick Gray and others, including the local media, of the need for more downtown hotel rooms since no such information exists.
Field referred to an article that appeared in the Lancaster Newspapers headed “City officials hope to qualify for new state program that could unlock $210 million for numerous projects. ” It stated “The former Brunswick Hotel, partially reopened as Hotel Lancaster last month, will undergo a $15.8 million renovation under the plan”
He pointed out that the original report was that the former Brunswick Hotel re-named the Lancaster Hotel was to have a moderate two million to three million dollar facelift and would attract an economy market not served by the Marriott. Field stated from his experience as a hotelier that an investment of as much as seven million dollars (between $30,000 and $35,000 per guest room) would restore the facility to its original Hilton Hotel standards, qualify it for a major franchise such as Hilton, Holiday Inn, Sheraton or Radisson, and position it to compete “head on” with the Marriott.
Such competition would seriously undercut the Marriott’s business base and might well render the hotel unprofitable, in which case Penn Square Partners could return the hotel to the City which actually owns it.
According to Field, given the shared services, facilities and contractual dependency of the Convention Center on the Marriott, this could in turn cause serious consequences for the viability of the Convention Center.
There was an indication that board members had reflected on such possibilities.
Nominations of a candidate for each officer for 2014 were reported by a committee headed by board member Ted Darcus. The following were then unanimously elected: Chair Kevin Fry, Chair; Vice Chair, Patrice Snyder; Treasurer: R. B. Campbell; Secretary: Sharon Nelson; and Assistant Secretary: Scott Bowser.
The uncertainty in your piece, due to the lack of good data, could lead some to think that the CC actually does spin off enough rooms and we dont know it. Let me clarify, IT DOES NOT!.
The only question here is how far below the LCCCA/PSP’s projections it actually operates? Those were the projections used to sell us the bill of goods.
The efforts from County Commissioner Scott Martin over the last 12+ months, as well as this story, say volumes about the lack of roooms being generated by the center, one that the hotels said should not have been built.
It is important to note that the basic premise of the CC funding was NOT that the current hotel market would generate enough taxes based on the status quo with normal historical increases to fund the CC’s losses but rather the SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASED hotel market, bolstered by the CC, would generate a substantially larger amount of tax revenue to cover the CC’s losses. They are not even close.
The Lancaster County Board of Commissioners, under the blind eyes of Paul Thibault, should never have accepted the garbage predictions brought to them by the LCCCA and PSP. Of course, the same counsel, Stevens and Lee, was representing both the LCCCA and the County at the time and had represented PSP prior to 2000. I am sure they were getting “great” counsel.
There has been ONE, and ONLY one, taxable property built as a direct result of the downtown Lancaster hotel and convention center project: the Subway restaurant at King and Christian Streets, diagonally across from the Marriott, with its vacant second floor. It does not begin to replace the taxable properties demolished for the project and its garages. No matter how the numbers are manipulated, this project has cost taxpayers a significant loss of money, and will for decades to come.
Even if one were to assume that the study were accurate, this is NOT money that reimburses taxpayers for lost real estate taxes to Lancaster City and the SDoL. Nor does it even begin to cover taxpayers for the millions of dollars a year it costs to keep the Marriott and convention center open.
Even given the best case scenario, this is a huge shift of taxpayer dollars to private companies. I thought that conservative Lancaster County would oppose most kinds of public welfare, especially that which primarily benefits corporations?