Please share three instances of “huge economic losses” and/or “…many growth opportunities due to the misrepresentation and bias by the Lancaster Newspapers (LNP) during the convention center planning, launch and more recent operations.” Facts are needed for your opinion to be taken seriously.
EDITOR: We gave two big ones:
The Lancaster Public Library had to cancel its expansion and renovation due to the re-directing of promissed ear mark funding from its campaign to pay the cost overruns for the convention center project. The library hosts well over fifteen hundred members each day.
Lancaster Square East could have been redeveloped with a tiny fraction of the state and local funds that were miss-directed to the Convention Center.
And to add another observation, having the barren convention center across from the Lancaster Newspaper building creates a desolate block on most evenings, thus discouraging the spread of gentrification from the north side of King Street to the south.
Also, keep in mind that ongoing subsidizing of the convention center by the city through services for which they receive no tax revenue, neither from the convention center or the hotel. That means higher real estate taxes for homeowners.
In 1997, an agreement for the Harrisburg Area Community College to open a major branch in the Watt & Shand building was in place and ready to be enacted. However, (then) newly-elected mayor Charlie Smithgall promptly blocked its implementation. Now HACC is located on a large campus between Old Philadelphia Pike and Pitney Road, where thousands of young adults attend. Imagine the amount of economic development in downtown Lancaster that would have been created by that many additional people frequenting shops and restaurants.
This would have allowed one of the prime recommendations of the LDR/Winterbottom report to be implemented: a convention center in Lancaster Square, accompanied with a major renovation of the Brunswick Hotel.