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C h a p t e r 5 Missing Impact June Arney’s front page article in the June 2, 2002, Baltimore Sun, under the title “Baltimore Built It—They Didn’t Come,” brought home the striking gap between the predictions of a consulting firm, the promises of city and state officials, and the reality of convention center performance in a competitive market. Arney narrated the promises surrounding the expansion project: “bigger conventions than ever before, more people than ever before, more spending and tax revenue than ever before. In April 1997, the transformed center, with three times the exhibit space, opened. Officials waited for the people to come.” What of the throngs of promised new convention visitors? “They haven’t.” When Robert Hillman had pressed the case for the expansion in 1991, he and the Convention Center Authority he chaired had sought to base the postexpansion forecasts on updated attendance numbers rather than those used by consultant Economics Research Associates: 217,884 convention and tradeshow attendees in fiscal year 1990, 233,461 for fiscal 1991. But the Sun reported that the larger center had only drawn “234,394 last fiscal year—only 1,000 more than a decade earlier.” Not only had the expansion failed to produce the likely 452,000 or even 508,500 attendees promised by Hillman in 1991, it was far short of ERA’s 330,000 forecast. Arney quoted Hillman that “it hasn’t been up for that many years. The story isn’t over.” But the “story” wasn’t substantially different fiscal year 2004, when the center drew 221,586 convention attendees, or in fiscal 2010, when attendance came to just 218,603. The response of Baltimore officials and business leaders? First, city officials undertook the financing and ownership of a new 757-room hotel next door to the center. Then, in May 2011, local business leaders called for another expansion of the center, justified by yet Missing Impact 151 another consultant study and the promise of greater attendance and economic impact.1 The business and political leaders of Baltimore who had promoted public investment in a major center expansion were wrong. Yet their failure did not lead to a call for greater accountability, or serious reconsideration of the city’s commitment to tourism and the visitor economy. It simply led to more public investment, justified by more promises. The experience was just the same in Boston, where a new convention center failed to perform anywhere close to consultant forecasts and official promises. Underperformance was just followed by the call to make Boston a “Top 5” city in convention business, with more center space and a new hotel. And in Washington, D.C., a brand new center, opened in 2003, produced no more convention business than its far smaller predecessor, and a fraction of that forecast by a series of consultants. The experience of Baltimore, Boston, and Washington is by no means unique. Over and over, from Chicago and Milwaukee to Philadelphia and Orlando, to San Antonio and Seattle, the actual performance of new and expanded convention centers has fallen far short of consultant projections. That disparity is not limited to the work of a single consultant or firm. Forecasts from Laventhol, PriceWaterhouse, and Coopers & Lybrand in the 1980s and 1990s have proved effectively as faulty as more recent products of PKF, HVS, and CSL. It is possible to argue, as officials at the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority have done, that one particular analysis or one individual firm was overly optimistic. But the pervasive reality is that actual performance , indexed by convention and tradeshow attendance or hotel room night generation, is often half or less that in feasibility report predictions. Expanded centers in places like Dallas, Austin, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, and Seattle have generally yielded no more business than their smaller predecessors. This chapter reviews the history of consultant analyses and forecasts for an array of cities of varying sizes and regions, major visitor destinations and new contenders, for both new convention centers and expansions. It focuses on the central factors that drive economic impact—the volume of annual convention and tradeshows attendees and the hotel room nights they produce . And it tells a remarkably consistent tale of consultant misestimates and overpromising, little serious analysis or review, and the result—not a questioning of consultants, state and local officials, and public accountability, but rather a call for more public investment in order to “compete.” [3.137.185.180] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 07:02...

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