You probably heard about the big flap at City Hall in November regarding the folks over at the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau livin’ large on the taxpayers’ nickel. Without rehashing some of the line items uncovered, suffice it to say that it sounds like our convention officials have been having a lot more fun lately — and gotten better raises and bonuses — than most of the rest of us have.
Having said that, it’s not as clear as you might think that that’s really such a bad thing. The Bureau is funded by about $12 million a year in hotel taxes, and the convention business is both a major chunk of
Dallas ‘ economy as well as extremely competitive among cities. So, it actually makes some sense to wine and dine the good people at the American Widget Association or whichever other prospects can steer conventions our way.
You can bet that hotels, restaurants and retailers, especially in a slow economy, need all the conventioneers they can get, which in turn has a multiplier effect in the form of sales taxes, purchases from vendors, wages and tips.
So it doesn’t bother me much that we’re buying some trade association guy the occasional porterhouse to get him to bring his group to the exciting tourist Mecca of Dallas, Texas. What did bother a lot of people (including your humble columnist here), is that the Bureau was reported to have borrowed $1 million from city-owned radio station WRR-FM to pay for, among other things, nice raises and bonuses to bureau employees. Meanwhile, WRR, which coincidentally makes an annual profit of about $1 million, has had to forego equipment upgrades as well as, like the rest of the city’s civilian employees, any raises at all.
The point here is not to knock the Convention and Visitors Bureau but rather to make a point in favor of WRR. First of all, the very fact that in today’s economy, the station’s management can run a station that plays Brahms and Mozart and consistently ranks far down the list in ratings, and still make a nice profit is remarkable by any standards. Few operations the city runs are anywhere near as financially healthy.
Beyond that, of course, and really a lot more important, is the “public good” idea: the incalculable public service that WRR performs. It’s a pretty safe bet that our readers out there have as varied taste in music as we have variety in our neighborhoods. But even if you don’t know Elgar from Eminem, Schubert from Sisqo, or Puccini from Pink, a full-time classical music station is a crucial cultural resource.
It’s exactly the sort of thing that people who bring companies here look at to reassure themselves that they’re not moving next door to the O.K. Corral. Much more important than that, there’s no telling how many people of any age have come to learn about and grow to love this music because they stumbled on it one day on the FM dial and were able to broaden their musical horizons for free.
It’s even therapeutic for your mental and physical health. I can almost feel my blood pressure drop while I listen.
Beside all of that, the station carries a lot of arts news, as well as live broadcasts of city council meetings so the people can hear their local government in action. And speaking of the council, fortunately it’s been a while now since anyone’s talked about selling WRR, although the idea of selling its frequency and moving it farther down the dial has been broached. It seems to me that something so successful, and so vital to the community, must be doing something right with its format and frequency right where it is.
The public ownership part shouldn’t bother us in the least either. A glance at the Arbitron ratings shows that it’s obviously not unfair competition for all those other stations. So I say, to use a very un-WRR-like turn of phrase, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Except for those equipment upgrades, of course.
