The Proposed Downtown Hotel

What The Mayor Thinks:

When I heard that my colleagues on the City Council were moving forward on a proposal to spend 100’s of millions of tax dollars on a Downtown convention hotel, I thought, “You have got to be kidding me.” Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to have another amenity Downtown. I’d also love to have a brand new Cadillac in my garage. Buying groceries to feed my family and making my mortgage payment have to come first at home. Likewise, adequately funding police and rebuilding our city’s neglected infrastructure have to come first over another glitzy project shadowed in red ink.
While hotel boosters keep insisting that it might be possible to fund a new hotel without raising taxes or drawing on the city’s general fund, I know better. These projects sound wonderful, and they are billed as job-generating economic engines – right up until they get sold for pennies on the dollar like the one in St. Louis, or start drawing from the city budget, like the one in Overland Park.

What The Mayor Has Done:

While I was skeptical about the need for a convention hotel and extremely skeptical that any proposal would be presented that didn’t require tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies, I let a City Council-created task force explore the idea. But when you give an inch…The council advanced and passed in one day $500,000 in city money for a consultant to support that task force last year when I was out of town, attending the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
The task force met. They discussed. They toured downtown on foot with media in tow. And they learned that the city would need to find nearly $300 million in taxpayer-supported incentives to convince a hotel operator to make a go of a convention hotel downtown.
The City Council’s answer was a vote to add another dose of taxpayer money, this time $250,000 to secure development rights to a proposed site for a year.
I could no longer let the farce continue. Against a flood of support from downtown boosters, I spoke out against what is so clearly a dumb, and expensive, idea. I was overruled by the Council. Again, where money is concerned, change doesn’t come easy. But that doesn’t mean you give in, or worse, give up. Any change worth doing, takes time.

What The Mayor Plans to Do:

I will continue to point out to my colleagues on the City Council and the business community the probable financial disaster that would follow the construction of a new publicly financed hotel Downtown. The hotel may well not even improve our ability to attract conventions.
We expanded Bartle Hall, built the Grand Ballroom, built Power & Light and the Sprint Center – each of was billed as the magic bullet that would supplement our ability to attract conventions. Despite all of those Downtown improvements, however, we have steadily lost conventions.
If the city has $300 million to spend, I want to use it to rebuild our crumbling neighborhoods and put people to work building sidewalks and repairing streets. I will continue to fight until I get this done.