Found money?!? I really hope you don’t mean the downtown Lancaster hotel and convention center. The convention center pays nothing at all to taxpayers. Nada. Zip. In fact, it costs Lancaster City taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in traffic control alone.
The “private” hotel is SUPPOSED to be paying $200,000 a year for payments in lieu of taxes. The problem is, all this money goes to the owner of the hotel building, the Redevelopment Authority of the City of Lancaster (which receives no rent from the hotel). According to Lancaster City officials, $100,000 (half) of this money is donated to the Mayor’s Office of Special Events, which is supposed to forward it to the Lancaster City Police to help pay for overtime which results from special events. The problem is, there is no record anywhere in Lancaster City’s budget (available online) of this money being received.
There is no information available about what RACL does with the $100,000 it keeps.
