annual debt service and $14.2 million for marketing. Orlando’s Orange County Convention Center saw an operating loss of $14 million.
But the regular argument of convention center backers is that these persistent operating losses, in addition to the cost of building a center, are more than counterbalanced by the “essential economic activity that [drives] new tax revenues, economic benefit and employment from other services and establishments like hotels, restaurants and retail stores.”41
The argument for convention centers as economic drivers has come to be structured around the analyses and predictions of consultants. Where once a local government research bureau or chamber of commerce might provide an estimate of future convention center business, by the 1980s and 1990s the public rhetoric of center investment revolved around formal forecasts of visitor volume, convention delegate spending, and multiplied economic impact.
These consultant forecasts, whether by hotel consulting firms such as PKF or major national accounting firms like PriceWaterhouse (and its predecessor Laventhol & Horwath), Coopers & Lybrand, and KPMG, were presented as both more expert and far more precise than their predecessors. Laventhol’s promotional materials circa 1989 boasted of its computer-based “predictive attendance model” and told local officials that its “estimates of economic impact…. can be used to gain community support and interest.” The language of public officials and newspaper headlines changed as well, describing the benefits of convention center development in terms of an exact number of annual new spending dollars and a seemingly guaranteed flow of new local tax revenues. Thus the discourse surrounding convention center investment was altered, from choosing one public investment against another in a broad package of bond proposals to a focus on the evident and certain rewards a new or bigger center would bring.42
For Philadelphians, the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer in January 1983 brought the headline that “Big Civic Center Is a Must, Study Says.” The article reported on the conclusion of the PKF study that a new downtown convention center would bring some $700 million a year in convention delegate spending, yielding the city $1 billion in new tax revenues over thirty years. A second major Inquirer story two weeks later added the forecast that a new center would create as many as 5,000 new jobs. And with the boom in visitor spending and jobs would come a larger if less measurable benefit. A large new convention facility would reshape the city’s image from a “drab” location to a “progressive” and “forward thinking” community.43
The PKF analysis did include some alternatives, including a smaller center or renovation of the existing Civic Center. But the firm emphasized a large new convention center in the Center City area as its “first recommendation.”
Armed with the conclusions from the PKF consultant report described by its reporters, the Inquirer’s editorial writers chimed in, repeating the consultant claims of delegate spending, economic impact, job creation, and tax revenues and calling on the city to “move ahead with design and construction of a new and modern convention complex in Center City…. It should do so with enthusiasm and resolve.” Deeming the project of the “highest priority,” the stirring editorial concluded, “The need now is to get on with it—with vigor and dispatch.”44
For the Inquirer’s editorialists, there was little need for additional analysis or independent review. Nor was there questioning of the logic of convention center investment at a time when competing cities like New York and Washington were also building new centers. The bulky PKF study was sufficient evidence and justification for an investment that would ultimately cost $523 million, the promise of new visitor dollars and job creation far too entrancing.
As communications scholar Phyllis Kaniss recounted in her case study of local media response to the convention center proposal, coverage of the scheme was dominated by official pronouncements and the image of pressing civic need. When some independent observers, including one professor at the University of Pennsylvania, did begin to question the PKF numbers, their views were given short shrift compared to “official” accounts and forecasts.45
The promises of abundant visitor spending and new city jobs did not eliminate conflict over issues such as location, cost, and political control. There was an extended public debate over the proper downtown site and then over city versus state control of construction and operation. The proposed center did manage to avoid any real local conflict over financing. The city would ultimately contribute some $300 million from hotel room tax revenues, while the state government agreed to provide a $185 million grant. But the state fiscal role opened the project to questioning from state legislators. Facing what the Philadelphia Daily News termed “gales of criticism from some politicians and community leaders who saw the center as a huge waste of money,” the newly formed Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority commissioned another PKF study.46
The PKF firm delivered its updated analysis in May 1988. The new estimate of annual convention delegate spending was slightly lower, if remarkably precise, at $618,927,900 for 2001, with 346,000 annual convention attendees producing new hotel demand of 664,800 room nights. With that presumably assured new demand, PKF promised a total of 4,848 new hotel rooms to be built in the city over the next decade, including a thousand-room convention headquarters hotel, and sufficient “over demand for the airport and City Line hotels.”47
The series of consultant studies in Philadelphia did not necessarily eliminate conflict or debate over the massive public investment in a new convention center. But it did shape both media coverage and public perception of the proposal—the experts had assessed the performance of a new center and offered the assurance that it would succeed in delivering a host of economic and employment benefits to a city that had seen serious job loss and decline.
Even before the center’s grand opening in June 1993, arguments were being made that the new Pennsylvania Convention Center was too small. In February, the Daily News quoted the findings of a City Planning Commission report that the 440,000 square foot center was not large enough to compete for major conventions and tradeshows against Chicago, Las Vegas, Atlanta, and New York. The city lacked both the financial resources for a bigger facility and the new hotel rooms to support it. Calls for a larger center began quite soon after 1993. In November 1997, Mayor Ed Rendell called for a major expansion, arguing, “In order to get the very, very largest groups to come back, we need more space.”48
Before Mayor Rendell could realize his goal of a bigger center for the largest groups, he and the Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority had to grapple with two problems. The first was finding a source of funds, presumably from outside a city government increasingly strapped for cash. The second was dealing with the impact of the center’s union labor rates and work rules on event organizers and exhibitors. Newspaper accounts of the possible expansion invariably included a discussion of labor issues, exemplified by a January 2000 Inquirer article that ended by noting that only New York and San Francisco had higher labor costs, and quoting the head of the convention center authority as saying, “Workers here have also been criticized by tradeshow and convention producers as uncouth and insensitive to their needs.”49
It was not until fall 2002, with union agreement on new jurisdictional and work rules, that the center authority was prepared to make the case for expansion. That came from a consultant study on the case—and forecast results—for a major expansion, commissioned and paid for by the Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority. The Conventions, Sports & Leisure International (CSL) findings were released by the authority in October 2002 and headlined by the Daily News as “Center Survey: If You Build It, They Will Come,” emphasizing that 58 percent of convention planners would “look favorably” at an expanded center. The study also promised that more space would boost the center’s annual economic impact from $215 million to $308 million, or 43 percent, and create 2,850 new permanent jobs.50
An Inquirer article the same
