report the same figures from CSL—43 percent more hotel rooms filled after an expansion, with a $93 million boost in attendee spending. But it also noted that those figures were less than had been offered by studies in 1998 and 1999. The article quoted city finance director Janice Davis as saying, “We needed validation…. I am extremely happy that it is in support of the expansion.”51
The findings of the CSL study effectively made the case for more convention center space, with seeming certitude that the expansion would bring real rewards in terms of increased convention business. When the study was finally finished in late January 2003, it included some specifics that had not appeared in the newspaper coverage the previous October. Indeed, those specifics never appeared in the local media, as the CSL study was not released to the public. The 58 percent “positive response rate” garnered by Philadelphia from convention planners was noted. But so was the information that Philadelphia’s figure was equal to Boston’s and lower than other competing cities such as Denver (65 percent), Las Vegas (70 percent), and New Orleans (77 percent). No comparable response figures were cited for New York, Baltimore, or Washington, cities CSL described as Philadelphia’s “primary competition.”52
The CSL study did offer the prediction that an expansion would increase attendance by more than 50 percent and boost annual hotel room night demand from an average of 503,000 per year to 786,000. But the analysis contained some other potentially troubling details. The center had averaged 246,839 convention and tradeshow attendees yearly from 1999 to 2002. But those totals were well below PKF’s 1998 forecast of 349,500 for those years. And the CSL consultants did not bother to note that the center’s room-night production of 503,000 included two years, 2000 and 2002, that were unusually successful. The 2000 total was boosted by the city’s hosting of the Republican National Convention, while 2002 had seen 27 major conventions, the highest in the center’s history. A more plausible baseline would have been the 470,000 room nights in 1998 or 420,000 in 1999.
CSL’s promise of more than 280,000 new room nights would be a fixture of arguments for the expansion, as the state legislature passed a 2004 slots gambling bill that allocated some $400 million for the expansion. It would be a constant in the press releases and publications of the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau. It would appear—unquestioned—with some regularity in press reports of the progress of the project as it moved to an early 2011 opening.53
Even as the expansion project was moving ahead in late 2006, it was evident to the Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority that it would be far less productive than CSL had predicted. The authority’s November 2006 “Convention Center Operating Plan” included the information that the existing center’s hotel room-night generation had fallen to 363,954 for fiscal year 2004 and 297,180 for 2005. The authority’s own forecast of future room-night generation was set to grow to 650,000 by fiscal 2014, a far more modest increase than the 786,000 predicted by CSL in 2003, and one not mentioned in public.54
When the Pennsylvania Convention Center expansion opened for business in March 2011, it faced a market environment reshaped by expansions at competing centers and the 2008 recession. The center’s room-night total dropped to 336,000 in 2007 and 303,000 in 2009. The actual performance for 2010 was 179,000. A new consultant study of the expanded center’s future performance and operations put the forecast at 321,300 for fiscal 2013 and 381,523 for 2014. It was clear that the expanded Pennsylvania Convention Center would be pressed to merely equal the average 503,000 annual room nights noted by CSL in 2003. Indeed, it managed 431,000 room nights in calendar 2012, well below the CSL forecast of 786,000.55
From the first public discussion of a new convention facility in downtown Philadelphia in the early 1980s through the opening of a new $786 million expansion in 2011, the series of consultant studies and their forecasts, regularly cited by the press and public officials, effectively defined the content and focus of the public discourse on convention center building. Those “expert” studies admitted no uncertainty about larger market realities or future performance. It was simply taken as a given that the new center would produce the anticipated benefits. And when the expansion proposal was developed, that discussion too was suffused with consultant predictions of an economic boom, with no real effort on the part of local officials, city and state bureaucrats, or news media to determine whether earlier forecasts had really been met.
The Philadelphia story neatly exemplifies the larger political and fiscal realities (or perhaps fantasies) behind the building boom. The new Pennsylvania Convention Center was financed with a combination of state dollars and local hotel tax revenues, neatly removing the question of center development from both the public and the city government. The expansion was financed with state revenues from slots gambling, in a deal—assembled and pressed by governor and former Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell—that also aided Pittsburgh and its convention center. In both cases, the public investment decision was focused on paying for convention center space, not on any larger goal or purpose, and with no consideration of alternative needs or public investments.
Without any direct public vote, the “deals” to finance the center were shaped by state-level politics. There, the deal-making was effectively distributive and geographic, with enough benefits for enough parts of the Commonwealth and their local legislators to succeed. The fundamental “deal” for Philadelphia’s center and its subsequent expansion were thus constructed in a remarkably narrow and constrained field, with serious public discourse and debate effectively limited and avoided, built on the unquestioned assumptions and presumptions of consultants who presented no record of their earlier forecasts’ accuracy and no evidence of expert knowledge beyond the contention that they had done many such studies before.56
The dynamic of “expert” consultant studies, promises of a boom in visitor spending, specific forecasts of “economic impact,” editorial endorsements, and seemingly “invisible” financing was much the same in New York City in the 1990s. Just a decade after the 1986 opening of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, center officials commissioned a feasibility analysis of an expansion from Coopers & Lybrand. The New York Times reported the findings of the Coopers & Lybrand study on the Javits Center in April 1997, that “To maintain its competitive edge” the Javits needed to double its exhibition space or risk being hurt by new centers or expansions under way in Chicago, Las Vegas, Orlando, Atlanta, and Philadelphia. From such an expansion, “the economic benefits could be huge…. creation of 13,000 new jobs and $87 million in annual tax revenues for the state and the city.”57 And the expansion call was renewed the following month in the New York Times, pegged to the opening of a new center in Atlantic City, complete with the same argument that “an expanded center would generate 13,000 new jobs and contribute $568 million in added spending at hotels, restaurants, theaters, stores and other New York City businesses.”58
The Times editorial page joined the chorus in June 1998, by noting that the city’s “attraction as a site for trade shows and conventions has been one of the key elements in its economic growth” and telling Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, “Building a world-class convention center would create jobs and assure the city’s ability to attract trade shows and exhibitions into the next century…. The Mayor must cooperate with the state in reaching that goal.”59
For all the seeming specificity and certainty of the Coopers & Lybrand study, the Times reportage succeeded in misreading its findings and substance. The report did estimate the jobs to be produced by an expansion at “12,700 full and part-time jobs.” And it did put “Estimated Annual Direct Spending in a Stabilized Year of Operations” at $568,254,000. But those figures would be the total product of the expanded center, not the added or incremental impact.60
The Coopers & Lybrand study did not include figures on the spending or job creation of the existing, pre-expansion Javits. Nor did it include numbers of anticipated new events or attendees, making it impossible to calculate the added impact of expansion. Indeed, the Coopers study contained only relatively limited information on the center’s
