The Keystone Hotel and the Tower City Bailout

It's reassuring: the Keystone Cops are now protecting our public investment in the Med Mart and Convention Center. As I read it:

The County set up a Convention Facilities Authority, only to shut it down. (In the famous words of Gilda Radner's Emily Litella, "Never mind". We can sympathize. Emily had these problems all the time: ""What is all this fuss I hear about the Supreme Court decision on a "deaf" penalty? It's terrible! Deaf people have enough problems as it is!")

The County moved remaining $161,000 over to the budget of Positively Cleveland, the tourism folks.

The County Commission thought that the money at Positively Cleveland would pay for Fred Nance (aka "Fred the Fixer" in the memorable PD headline of July 7, 2007 "'Fred the fixer' called in to push Medical Mart plan") according to Jay Miller at Crains.

Except, that it won't. The tourism folks moved the money over to the Greater Cleveland Partnership which was news to the Commission. (Another missed communication, according to the tourism folks.)

The GCP took the money and spent it on a $350,00 definitive siting study. Except that it wasn't.

These funds went to a "handful of companies", like engineering firms and Fred Nance's law firm, according to Joe Guillen at the PD.

The resulting report, “Greater Cleveland Partnership Medical Mart/Convention Center Site Selection Committee” said the best place to put the project is on Forest City property at Tower City, according to Roldo.

Except that it's probably not. No architect or planner was involved in the siting deliberation. In Steve Litt's view, the convention center/med mart will turn Tower City into "an urban octopus". (Nice image.)

Nobody apparently bothered to talk to any logistics companies either, according to reporting by Charu Gupta. The tight logistics around Tower City could quickly make the convention center uncompetitive.

In the same article my brother, Hunter, the former city planner for Cleveland, raises some serious questions about slipshod analysis underlying the GCP's siting decision.

And the siting study is, well, not very convincing with the Chicago Med Mart either, because they are doing their own, according to Guillen.

Meanwhile, the City of Cleveland's Planning Commission -- which, you would expect, should be in the middle of these discussions (the convention center is the biggest public project in the city, after all) -- has suffered a case of amnesia. They apprarently stripped out all their documents relating to the convention center from their web site.

But all of this still leaves Nance without his $100,000.

So, he goes back to the County Commission to get his money.

And the County Commission apparently is agreeing to pay the bill. (Did anyone bother to ask for time sheets?)

Is it time to get a grip, yet?

Let's take a step back. The County Commission imposed a tax on the citizens of Cuyahoga County to pay for a convention center and a medical mart without a business plan or a proper siting study. No one has yet explained how all this will work. And the job keeps getting tougher. There's no explanation of how current economic conditions will impact the project. Back in 2005, an article in Forbes noted that the convention market was already in the tank:

The biggest 200 shows, a rolling list measured by Tradeshow Week, are using the same amount of space they did in 1992. Attendance has fallen at most centers, even those with new space such as in Indianapolis, Chicago and Atlanta. The thriving destinations, Orlando, Fla. and Las Vegas (which just announced a $400 million expansion), are stealing smaller shows away from other cities, stuffing in several at a time. The smaller trade halls are discounting, even giving space away.

In an assessment published earlier this month, one analyst notes:

The storm buffeting the U.S. economy threatens to swamp the $175 billion corporate meetings industry as companies seek to cut back on expenditure by reducing the number of conferences they hold.

For years, Forest City has been trying to engineer a Tower City bail-out. (Remember Learn and Earn, the proposal that Crain's called "egregiously misnamed" and the Dayton Daily News, somewhat more poetically, called a "crock"?) The problem is, of course, that as Forest City tries to fix the game, a lot of people are looking like they just checked into the Keystone Hotel.

This is the only part of the siting study that was available on the web.

Appendix 6 URS GCP Urban Planning Analysis