Re: “LCCCA / Tourist Bureau: Little idea of how many hotel room nights Convention Center generates”
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.
In his book “America’s Real War”, Rabbi Daniel Lapin quotes from the Torah in Deuteronomy…. ‘Do not place a stumbling block before the blind’. Rabbi Lapin then suggests…This law prohibits us from deriving economic benefit from information that we have deliberately withheld from another. In other words, do not ‘trip’ up someone economically after you have made him ‘blind’. After all, no business will result between two people who feel no trust for one another. Feeling assured that your colleague is not concealing information from you certainly makes it more likely that you would trade with him.
If only LNP ownership would subscribe to this basic principle!!! They, of all people, should know better. Can anyone trust anything from LNP/PSP??
ALL of the players/decision-makers should have demanded total/full disclosure every step of the way before ANY final decisions were made. Surely there must be some way to right the wrongs that have been made, and to hold accountable those parties which are feeding/profiting from the taxpayer feed trough.