Dallas Hearbreak Hotel

The Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) has written a piece: the Heartbreak Hotel…and we agree with their assessment.

Dallas city leaders are eager for Dallas taxpayers to be funding a hotel that should be built by the private sector, if it is built at all.

I was convention director for the Republican National Committee when the '84 Republican National Convention was held in Dallas. I staffed the convention search committee and was responsible for all the convention logistics, facilities and set-up.

Never once did we want -- or expect -- a hotel to be attached to the convention center. And large conventions require much more housing than the Heartbreak Hotel could accommodate.

We too have fought against taxpayer-funded hotels, convention centers and sports arenas. Thanks for what IPI is doing! Here is their piece below. - Peggy Venable, Americans for Prosperity-Texas


February 2, 2009 – IPI

Heartbreak Hotel

A thousand rooms! A 50,000-square-foot ballroom! A spa! A $525 million price tag! Just the kind of quarters you might want to luxuriate in as a Dallas convention-goer.

That’s the projections for the new city-owned convention hotel. And Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert wants taxpayers to pony up the votes—and the bucks—to put the city in the hotel business.

The mayor and local-convention promoters say 22 other cities already have convention center hotels. And unless Big D follows suit, economic-weather forecasts call for the loss of “$800 million in direct spending and $2.6 billion in annual economic impact.”

But since politicians almost always understate the costs of projects and programs they support and overstate the revenues, we think it’s a break-even deal at best—and most likely a money loser.

Does Dallas, which in 2007 hosted only five citywide conventions, need such a project when major convention business is draining off to fun localities like Las Vegas and Orlando—if they’re having any functions at all?

Consider that in the comparatively sun-splashed economy of 2007, downtown Dallas hotels (offering 6,500 rooms) ran nearly 46 percent empty. And the mayor wants to add another thousand rooms on top of that. The new government-owned hotel would inevitably siphon off customers from the already-existing private hotels—making their efforts to stay afloat even more daunting.

To be clear: We have no objection to a convention center hotel. We just don’t think the city should be in the hotel business. Dallas voters will get to decide in a May referendum whether to ban through a city charter amendment the public ownership of convention center hotels.

While the mayor’s efforts to bring more conventions to Dallas are surely well-intended, we think a city-owned hotel—especially in this economic climate—would lead to heartbreak for everyone … and especially taxpayers.