By Merrie Spaeth, KERA 90.1 commentator
Dallas, TX – Recently, the Dallas and Fort Worth City Councils met together. They said they could learn a lot from each other. Right now, Dallas can learn a lot from Fort Worth. They want to build a new convention hotel - paid for with $160 million of taxpayer money - without the taxpayers voting on it.
Since some groups in Dallas are making the argument that Dallas needs a new, fancier, closer convention hotel, too, it's instructive to cast our eyes westward. There are really several issues here - the new hotel, the use of the hotel-motel tax, public funding without public approval, and public funding of a project which would compete with private enterprise.
Let's deal with the funding first. Fort Worth is using certificates of obligation, not bonds, so citizens don't get to vote on them. The Legislature dreamed up these beauties for a legit reason - when local government needed to fund small or emergency projects. But a convention hotel isn't small and it isn't an emergency. Debt is real money. If you go into debt for one project, that's actually other projects we can't fund. If Dallas wants to proceed with this project, citizens should vote on it.
Now to the hotel-motel tax - my understanding is that money, collected from the private sector, was supposed to be used by the Convention and Visitors Bureau to promote tourism, not fund a public project which will compete with the private sector.
Does Dallas need a new hotel? Will we attract more conventions if we have a better hotel? Would people like a fancier hotel? The envelope, please... No. And yes. Yes - when you poll people, they always say they want a nicer hotel. But when you look at what attracts conventions, it's not the hotel space. South of us, San Antonio offers a model for how to attract conventions. Build Sea World. Build Fiesta Texas.
Occupancy rates here in Dallas are about 65%. They are about 53% in Fort Worth, which is why a new hotel there could bankrupt the existing hotels and destroy those jobs. By comparison, USA Today just wrote about Las Vegas' hotel occupancy problems and noted they "plunged" to 89%.
Should government compete with private enterprise at all? I say "no." Particulary in our current economic climate, but philosophically, it's a bad idea.
Dallas can learn from what's happening in Fort Worth. We can learn to avoid a bad idea in the first place. For KERA, I'm Merrie Spaeth.
Merrie Spaeth is a communications specialist in Dallas. If you have opinions about this commentary, call 214-740-9338.