Wednesday, the City Council voted 12-2 (councilmen Hunt and Rasansky voting "no" and Jones Hill absent) in favor of spending $500,000 in Dallas Convention Center & Visitors Bureau funds to option an 8-plus acre piece of land next to the convention center for likely use as a 1,000-room hotel, according to the DMN. The council has until Sept. 30 to come up with another $39.5 million to buy the land, select a private developer through RFP to build and/or operate the hotel, and tell the rest of us how much the city/taxpayers will need to contribute to the project.
No one is talking about the general amount of the projected subsidy, but that doesn’t mean no one knows about how much the subsidy will be (probably around $100 million). This is a project that has been bandied about for many years, but it has been talked about more pretty seriously the past 3-4 years (see our earlier discussion here at BackTalk). The likely subsidy numbers are generally known to someone in the city — and he, she or they are pretty sure they can generate the funds and convince us to move forward — or you can bet that the $500,000 in non-refundable money wouldn’t have been put down on the land parcel. That means the next few months will be spent selecting the developer and building a case to explain to the rest of us why this will be a good investment.
And it very could be, since our convention center as structured simply isn’t competitive with Atlanta, Las Vegas, New York, Chicago and other cities with convention-class hotels adjacent to their convention centers. The question really isn’t whether Dallas needs this project; the question is how much should we as taxpayers be yanking out of our pockets to pay for it. And will building a single hotel next to the convention center be the start of turning that part of downtown into Victory Jr., or will it simply be another major public works program without a visible contribution to the surrounding property?
