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Little more than 24 hours after the Plain Dealer published news that the Cuyahoga County Commissioners agreed to the Merchandise Mart Properties Inc. request for an additional 30 days (I posted about that request here just a couple of hours ago), the PD’s blog has another post about the matter. This one is titled, “Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson fumes over Med Mart delays.”
A one-month delay isn’t a lot of time for a project that has been in the works for two years, but the postponement irked Jackson because he learned of it by reading a story in Thursday’s Plain Dealer. The original deadline for deciding on a medical mart site was Jan. 15.
“If someone would have called me and given me the rationale as to why it needed to happen and if in fact it made sense,” the mayor said, “I would have done what I have done so far, which is work with them in order to come up with the best solution for the city and the region.”
I guess he wants to be one of the in-crowd, with the rest of us who are fuming, or, as Commissioner Peter Lawson Jones says, “The mayor is entitled to have the same level of angst that everybody else does about this,” Jones said. “I don’t begrudge him those feelings at all….” Hope he doesn’t begrudge the rest of us the same angst – especially given that it’s our money being spent.
Speaking of which, in my previous post on this topic, I took a dig at MMPI saying that they want to keep the project to $400 million but that the Tower City site would cost about $583 million.
In this latest PD blog post, Mayor Jackson addresses MMPI’s scaling it down code language related to MMPI’s responsibility for cost overruns:
“The convention center is not just built for the medical mart,” Jackson said. “It’s built for every other convention that comes to use it. So I can’t have a scaled-down version that doesn’t accommodate anything but a medical mart and does not accommodate all the other conventions that we could get here. And so I need to be competitive and I need the connectivity.”
I’m with Jackson on that multi-purpose perspective.
So far, the only party we’re not really hearing anything from is…MMPI. Development isn’t my expertise but from what I know about negotiating, that isn’t a good sign.
By Jill Miller Zimon at 12:01 am January 2nd, 2009 in Business, Cleveland+, Government, leadership, med mart, Ohio, Politics, Taxes
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Shalom Jill,
Speaking as a journalist who has attended and covered dozens of business conventions in Chicago, Atlanta and Las Vegas over the years I’d laugh myself silly at the posturing of Cuyahoga County’s politicians over yet another lame-ass boondoggle if it wasn’t my tax money once again lining the pockets of the gonifs in suits.
Conventions don’t come to Cleveland because we don’t have a world-class convention center, they don’t come to Cleveland because a.) the convention business is dying and b.) why would you want to have a convention in Cleveland? Because we got a C+ or whatever the feck it was?
Feh! I say. Feh!
B’shalom,
Jeff
p.s. sigh i miss chas rich…
Speaking of “scaled-down,” did anyone else notice the following?
In his presentations in the summer of 2007, Christopher Kennedy talked about as many as 50 conventions/year and 300,000 total attendees, i.e., an average of 6,000 attendees per convention.
In its economic analysis, the Greater Cleveland Partnership assumed 25 conventions/year (link). The analysis also assumed that conventions would average 5,000 attendees (link). If one does the math, that’s 125,000 visitors/year, which is only 42% of Kennedy’s projection.
I might add that the 5,000-attendee number assumed by the Greater Cleveland Partnership may well be a SWAG.
The GCP analyst stated: “While a number of estimates have been offered as to the potential size of an average convention, the 5,000 per convention appears to be firmly placed in the middle of the range of estimates. Estimates of convention size ranged from 3,000 to 8,500.”
It’s worth noting that healthcare meetings in 2006 drew an average of about 1900 attendees (link). (I was unable to find a more recent number, but 1900 is probably in the ballpark for meetings in 2007 and 2008.) This suggests that the bottom end of the analyst’s range for convention size (i.e., 3000 attendees) may be reasonable for planning purposes. If so–and if we again assume 25 conventions/year at a new convention center–total projected attendees per year come to 75,000. That corresponds to just 25% of the original Kennedy number.