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LTC 012-2012 Wall Street Journal r - j /V . AA t5 OFFICE OF THE CITY MANAGER _ _ - - -__ -� LETTER,TO COMMISSION NO. ETC #(0 . TO: Mayor Matti Herrera Bower and Members of the City Commission FROM: Jorge M. Gonzalez, City Manager DATE :. January 13, 2012 SUBJECT: Wall Street Journal Convention Center Editorial This Letter to Commission is intended to provide you with a copy of the Editorial regarding the convention industry referenced at the January 11, 2012 City Commission, meeting. I have also provided you with a letter from the President and CEO of the Center for Exhibition Industry Research, as well as an article from Convention South a convention industry magazine. Please let me know if you have any questions. JMG /HMF /MAS C: Hilda Fernandez, Assistant City Manager = Max Sklar Tourism and Cultural. Development Director _' GO Have We Got a Convention Center to Sell You! From Boston to Austin, politicians spend money on fancy white elephants. Article Comments (53) MORE IN OPINION » Email Print ( Save Like 1�rl 2 Tweet 203 t 1 j *ARTICLE FREE PASS Enjoy your free sample of exclusive subscriber content_ GET ALL OF WSJ.COM: $U8SCRI®E NOW > GE T 8 WEEKS FREE By STEVEN MALANGA For two decades, America's convention center business has been declining, resulting in a nationwide surplus of empty meeting facilities, struggling convention halls and vacant hotel rooms. How have governments responded to this glut? By building more convention centers, of course,.financed by debt backed by new taxes and fees on already struggling taxpayers. Back in 2007, before the recession began, a report from Destination Marketing Association International described America's convention industry as a "buyer's market" suffering excess capacity. It's only gotten worse, attracting just 86 million attendees in 2010, compared to 126 million. in 2000. Meanwhile, the amount of convention space angling for business has increased to 70 million square feet, up from 53 million in 2000 and 40 million two decades ago, a That's largely because governments refuse to stop making convention centers bigger and hotels even more dazzling, arguing that whatever business remains will flow to the places with the fanciest amenities. To finance these risky projects —which the private sector won't build by itself -- cities float debt backed by new taxes and fees on already struggling taxpayers. As Charles Chieppo, a former board member of Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, lamented last year, "Logic rarely has a place in the convention business." Take Illinois, an industry leader,where officials have invested heavily to keep Chicago's McCormick Place, long one of the three most -used centers in the nation, on top. They spent $1 billion in the early 1990s to build a 840,000- square foot expansion financed by fees on auto rentals, a hotel tax and a surcharge on restaurant meals in downtown Chicago., In 2007 they opened a new building, McCormick" West, at a cost of an additional . $900 million. The result? According to the Chicago Tribune, the center.operates at 55% capacity. Then there's Boston, perhaps the quintessential example of a city that interprets failure in the convention business as a license to spend more on it. Massachusetts officials shelled out $230 million to renovate Hynes Convention Center in the late 1980s. When the makeover produced virtually no economic bounce, officials decided that the city needed a new, $800 million center financed by a hotel occupancy excise tax, a rental -car surcharge, and the sale of taxi medallions. Opened in 2004, that new Boston Convention and Exhibition Center-was projected (by consultants hired by the state) to have Boston renting some 670,000 additional hotel rooms annually within five years. Instead, Beantown saw just 310,000 additional hotel room rentals in 2009. U Now Massachusetts officials want to spend $2 billion to double the size of the I ' T Boston Convention Center and add a 'V hotel. Of course they predict that the ex panded facilities would .bring an additional $222 million into the local � � . economy each year, including 140,000 hotel room rentals. Even with these bullish projections, officials claim that the hotel Associated Press Chicago political and labor leaders, including Mayor would need $200 million in public Rahm Emanuel (arms crossed), appear at the subsidies. expanded McCormick Place convention center in October. • "The whole thing is a racket, ".Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby recently observed. "Once again the politicos will expand their empire. Once again crony capitalism will enrich a handful of wired business operators. And once again Joe and Jane Taxpayer will pay through the nose. How many times must we, see this movie before we finally shut. it off? Many times, if officials in Baltimore have their way. Several years ago they built a $300 million city - owned hotel, (the Hilton Baltimore Convention Center Hotel) to boost the fortunes of the city's struggling convention center. Having opened in 2008, the hotel lost $11. million last year. Now the city is considering a public - private expansion plan that would add a downtown arena, an additional convention hotel, and 400,000 feet of new convention space at the cost of $400 million in public money: The list goes on— everywhere from Columbus, Ohio, to Dallas, Austin, Phoenix and „places in between. One problem is that optimistic-projections about new facilities fail to account for how other cities are expanding, too. Why did Minneapolis struggle to hit projected targets after it enlarged its convention'center in 2002? "Other cities expanded right along with us," Minneapolis's• convention center director, Jeff Johnson, said this year. The surest sign that taxpayers should be leery of such public investments is that officials have changed their sales pitch. Convention and meeting centers shouldn't be judged, they now say, by how many hotel rooms, restaurants, and local attractions they help fill. That's , "narrow- minded thinking," said James Rooney of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority this year. Instead, as Boston Mayor Thomas Menino has said, expanding a convention center can "demonstrate to the world that we have unlimited confidence in our city and what it can do, not only as a convention destination but as the center of the most important trends in hospitality, science, health and education." This new metric —a city's amorphous brand value —is little more than a convenient way to ignore the failure of publicly sponsored facilities to live up to exaggerated projections. But as far as city officials are concerned, that failure is nothing that hundreds of millions more in taxpayer dollars can't fix. Mr. Malanga is a senior editor at City Journal. A longer version of this article appears in City Journal's Winter 2012 issue. A ceir Center for Exhlbltlgn.IndustryReswreh 4 January 2012 Transmitted via e -mail to: Alan Murray, Executive Editor, WSJ.com a.murray @wsi.com Kevin- Delaney, Managing Editor, WSJ.com .k.delanev@ws*.com Jonathan Krim, Senior Deputy Managing Editor, WSJ.com ionathan.krim @wsi.com Darren McDermott, Deputy Managing Editor, WSJ.com darren.mcdermott @wsi.com Gentlemen: The 31 December issue of The Wall Street Journal reprinted a portion of an article about convention centers originally published by Steven Malanga in the City Journal Winter 2012 issue. The opening statement in the article that claims convention business has been in decline for two decades is incorrect. The benchmark data for the convention and exhibition industry was published in a paper written by Bob Black and delivered in a lecture at Cornell University 19 November 1986. That paper identified 2,733 business -to- business exhibitions held in 1986 with 41.4 million attendees. A second benchmark study of the exhibition" industry was published by the Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR) in 2001. The CEIR Industry Census identified 7,933 business -to- business exhibitions held in .2000 'with 59.6 million attendees. Clearly an increase of 190 percent indicates significant growth in the 1990's: The CEIR Census was updated as scheduled in 2010. That edition identified 8,962 business -to- business exhibitions with 61 million attendees. Despite the economic declines in 2001 -2002 and again in 2008 - 2010, the exhibition industry recorded continued growth in the number of events during these periods. Since the first, purpose -built convention centers opened in the 1960's following the completion of the interstate highway system and the commercial introduction of the jet airplane, the exhibition industry has thrived and shown resistance to decline during economic downturns and resilience in recovery following a downturn. Perhaps next week while you are covering the largest annual convention and exhibition held in.the U.S., - the Consumer Electronics Show, you can find an opportunity to correct the record on "the industry - performance, for the last two decades. Sincerely, Douglas L. Ducate - President and CEO Center for Exhibition Industry Research k 12700 Park Central Drive, Suite 308' Dallas, Texas 75251. (972) 687 -9242 tel (972) 692 -6020 fax info @ceir.org www.ceir.org f ! r.. 1� t � t Lek #• » =`- 1 = ` agenda p9i s. • , { r 28 YEARS OF EXCELLENCE: -, ANSWERS. INSIGHT. ryp 201 ren S.-j"... MOM _ �� if,• � }3} 11' - - , Nr .+' on The z Rise S av ng `> i I : 698 -o Money j __ Seller's N Markett�� _ x Returns, so Is The rd y ao a ' �q 70 AIG'Eff E ° ect Dissipates a R01 xt � 5T eCll en %1VI � r v + r :_a 1 d 1� f 5 ,S � 1 7 � 7 t dge s Lo: r. i - AK " , ' On Location @ Larger OCCUPANCY I Gi s a 14. AEXAmefica r� SPORTS yww� - Scan this Microsoft ::�` a�''. i t�� I - Smartphone tag to instantly Insider's Guide ' �° ®- ,u. firy r download the full Trends Report)` f , Tunica 3 r{ 1 Hilton Head ofa �AOt ���tt ��tt.( a@t ��s�A�lil tt��� €1t,ot Louisville _ C,titT- E.CTEE I ; :r Nashville � il ,�f, .J_J_' Brunswick & "' 3'3 _i - }_ _ i_ >,-r- ; _ :f_i�_n*v. -.: The Golden Isles ,ate „W,ad a 31S3 n 03 a 301Aa3S SS3lt Alabama Gulf Coast ;Lx 'uo.ir)unruoucgal Lb99c Td `S3HoHS dlnJ QIdd L9ZZ X09 'O 'd atmsod •sp ' dli00 SN011d01Nnwwoo A3A03 P upucispaumid -AS 03Hsiiend n 5 ren a " �,> s - - h 4 " 7- The Wor The word for 2012 is MORE! More meetings, same amount of meetings this year com- °. more attendees, more business and more ex- pared to last year. � QI M penses simply put, these are the trends noted. ® For 2012, 26% expect the number of meet- from ConventionSouth's 2012 Meeting Trends in ings they plan to increase, while 62% ex- r � the South report. pect they will plan the same amount of ��; Gleamed from a survey of more than 100 meetings. � meeting planners from across .the country—all of l 33% expect the health of the meetings in- whom book meetings in the South, the report re- dustry to stay about the same —in good, sta- . t k vealed two key signs that the meetings industry ble health — throughout the next 18 months, NA is rebounding: while 31 % expect it to get slightly better. xe ra r a r s b• �r ,,�� ®Nearly 25% of meeting pros planned more Since many meeting planners typically plan meetings this year while 55% Tanned the the same amount of meetings year after ear, no 4 rIM -1, Y P b y Y, t 2012 Meetings Outlook 2012 Attendance Rates h Meeting planners rate how they Meeting planners rate s a s feel about the health of the meetings their expectations industry in the next 18. months: for attendance- rates in 2012: 3 50 /o , 40% o " r. o 34/0 33% 43% JO O w x ah M �0 > t 40 Q �0 r tM tL 30% 200/ 20% '10% �p 16/0 %4r J CD CL 10%. z �t sa 0 f Gets St ays The Stays The Gets y n 0 . k Stays The Increases Decreases Decreases Y r Better Same Same Worse Same (stable, Slightly Greatly �y e, good) (week) (slight 1 3 y) ''yh BX"(rg ��i' Sy" f - n - edG ,£ r &w l i a4 a i s 201 2 T� c ;'�' i :��^ _,..,t°'�.q Y n�� i ` ?• A 12 1 ConventionSouth NOVEMBER www.conventionsouth . com :.�.�..- ..__�..,.�._.. ...,,.,. :_... ...,.... ..:......._.,_.,..._ y. �._.,. ,.,.:..,...,- ..:>:ea.n..r �: a.' �, srnawwe�.. , a« � ,,M.,�•,+.rz'- ��.,.,w'+ --.5 _ _ ,. .._ _ _., 4 i P , AIG - Effect Dissipates R E �i 5 of meet d t g proshave not made ` Tra esh® s aSt���l��e ,otter the state of the econom these fi tires are � recent ch YpeS in the es t �, y'r g y 9 nificant. And, they parallel witli' "other "stafs _ of. destinations or properties they, , Most meeting pros expect the amount t show using attendance. Ac to the re T have selected for meetings due of trade they plan in 2012 will negative ROlperceptions or either increase or stay the same. . t, nearl}� 40% expect;their attendance rates to the AIG- effect. However, 21 %are _ � cease in 2012 while 43% expect attendance to booking more economical cities 17 /U Increase E y the same.- & 31 % are booking more ['he Trends Report was compiled in partner- affordable hotels /venues. 80 % Stay The Same D with Atlanta's PKF- Hospitality Research. eY• pert- Mandelbaum, director of research infor- don - services for PKF -HR, analyzed the data Zg with other hospitality industry reports. { rice March 2010, group occupancy has Motel Ra tes Slowly Start To Climb Meeting Aily increased, but has yet to reach the pre- £' g pros were asked: ssion levels observed in 2007 and 2008," How do you feel about the current state (2012) of hotel room rates? adelbaum said. Whilegreater numbers of conventioneers Increasing slightly be seen roaming the lobbies, prefunction a h Increasing ;e,and banquet halls of U.S. hotels, operators g greatly Owners are telling us that they are still nego- Decreasing slightly 1 2 6% ng with meeting planners and concessions )eing made to attract events to their hotels Decreasing greatly aid. "And, it is interesting to note in Conven- f Staying the same (low) r� `,14% South's Trends Report that 58% of the time, ners are still encountering hotel operators Staying the same (high) 3% '. rig to concede room rates." However, he d that while this is a significant number, it is 0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% ii •. than the 71% occurrence rate reported in last Percent of Meeting Planners 's Trends Report. andelbaum also notes that another indicator A e increase in meetings activity is the reduc- in number of times hotels have had to en- the attrition and cancellation clauses in Economy's Im pact . meetings contracts. � )wever, while meeting suppliers are still On Site Selection Decis l a to negotiate contracts, their rates are ris- Meetin Has the econom g pros were asked: ` swinging the market pendulum back in y affected your selection of destinations or venues? - t , of the seller. ConventionSouth's trends re- �ound that 44% of meeting planners expect expenditure per meeting to increase over Yes, booking more economical � ' , .. � 4 , � � , cities /hotels /venues :xt year, while 44 expect it to stay about Mme. According to Mandelbaum, the im- ® Yes, finding deals at pricier PP Y rig balance between: supply and demand cities /hotels /venues nable hotel operators to be more aggressive No change in city /hotel /,: it pricing policies. Because of this, PKF' venue selection sped its 2011 annual ADR (average daily r M .,r ;rowth forecast to 3.2% and placed the ADR growth forecast at 4.8 %. ® Percent of Meeting Planners , { �. convention south.com NOVEMBER 2011 1 ConvenbonSouth 1 13 Attendees Book The Ro Block Meeting pros were asked: How are your attendees housed during your meeting? Most attendees typically book the room block. f Most attendees book the room block, but an ' increasing amount are booking outside the block. Most attendees typically book outside the room block. Percent of Meeting Planners „s, .� ai? t sxTx. .�. - a - �..: `#;?,%�� rte,...'?� '�.,�s�4�;4.e. w ,: rx '. yr �. �z:' a ;._..., ,� vr,.•. ,+�'.. {.FFaa x... �, ..s, �..s.. ,n,•u* s...r,.. *ur3'7 i1 `�' '�:`:c I. � ak,..� _. ,. Wiz+ .. sw fi .. x�..,, ,,...,,�G� �:..�- ,�.::a.�.s .,_; ,.v % ✓.5..., '*ytS�: ,..c*a,,.s.- ... _... r z, ,,o_ F..��� .- +.. s,. . =.��x ..:�.r.._..; ..., �,:�:G f�� .. a�, .., �.; +�� .N ,�., "`x,. �� ..�. '��^",, `�:. �., r.. - ... v' Most Important Factors When Selecting A Meeting Site Where Meeting Planners �? Available Are Cutting Costs ,µ p Meeting Meeting planners say they are still working to limit their costs w Space and are especially working to limit spending in these areas: i s t � Food & Beverag r ysd t "�<rr X53 %a t z�C ry ,, Willingness d - * "rD�� , "" To Negotiate Off-Site Events or PartiesrrhX�28 %�` Contracts 4 y5 1 t None fi - '• Guest Rooms /Housing @ w X25 Price of t� �.• • Meeting ' Space /Service Audio/Visual sM t'N'� 24161 17 r Meeting Rooms` # 2 ° yip "� wR a uv y� ' O �0 to LLA Programming u Service k 4 Standards Length of Meeting %i § e r" Transportation" x ' '13 ° / N � r M Vi o �.� � � � yN r s Incentives /Rewards/ ' 0`0 t d 1 VIP Services Price of r t N G4 73 t z t o ( N Hotel Guests Rooms o 10% 20% 30 40% 50% 60% Percent of Meeting Planners 14 ConventionSouth NOVEMBER 2011 www.conventionsouth.com. Other - - �. r -4 The Social Media Revolution is Upon Us x Meeting pros were asked:. What Social Media tools do you use the most and for what reasons? " You ' 46 % To Market Meetings - k 56 %. To Connect With Attendees 5 23% To Connect With Planners #v`t 39% To Connect With Suppliers h` 22% To Share Ideas �' 2�% ky 33% Not Using Social Media �aS t 01, J yx ` 4 �E��p3y� E t; Top Resources For Continuing Education Meeting Pr Meeting pros were asked: Their Job Which sources do you most frequently rely upon for industry information /continuing education? While job satisfaction; _ -remains high and nearly half 80% of planners surveyed I are receiving raises, j 7U% job- related stress is high. 60% a r . 75 % CU 506% said the h ' ave not considered y yf a career change. 40% r ®� 30% x said they have received a raise i 20% in the past 12 months. 10 % '+ X 0 said their work - related stress Industry Networking Industry Conventions/ Online Online lever in 2011 compared to Publications /. With Assoc./ Tradeshows Publications Seminars / Magazines Colleagues/ AffiliatedOrg. &Seminars Webinars 2010 has increased.: Social Media: w.convention'south . com NOVEMBER 2011 1 ConventionSouth 1 15 Negotiating 'Concessions R01 Matters r Meeting pros were, asked: ._ Meeting Pros were asked: For which of the following Items are`,. y::.. I,'n 2011, compared to previous years, how important hoteliers most vvi lling to make concess,ions� is it for you to show ROI on your meetings? - More important, now critical ® 66% ��� 1 ► Meeting Space Rental Fee More important, but not critical x k 6 .� E Same as before very critical ;< " Guest Room Rates r Same as before not critic al W3 N 0 10% 20% 30% t Percent of Meeting Planners Attrition �r r Penalty Fees u- w 36% f ��� I+ Food & /-,ttenCleeS Ch ® ® Se To Dr A ttend _£ iu Beverage Costs t °r Meeting pros were asked: What method of transportation do your attendees typically use? 37% 7 8 �. Resort or 1 1 Amenity Fees l 75 rE Cancellation f Fees v. Percent of Meeting Planners Most drive to meetings t,= 1.2% Most fl to meetings Meeting Y g Services as k ;'a x r tt a A good mix of fly -in atten -- ' e ha sin a rt ■ dees and drive -in attendees . 16 I ConventionSouth NOVEMBER 2011 www .convent-ionsouth.com 4,:; Monroe �West NV�onroe r The Place Where People Meet. Who Took Our Sum* ey The largest - r *'*fr3 " 7'S 2 -` � ` -� A l tom ' '3 r " ' r ; "' _""Si t - a e •r -/''• gest number of survey F respondents— f 48% —are independent �:f r ,,k s or in- house meeting planners, h3� followed by association at 24 %, corporate at 14% and government nonprofit at 14 %. 41 .1 a of respondents have earned a Certified Meeting Professional" designation. And, the majority of X00 -�43 is i4 �� res ondents -48° #� p /o —have more , Y did • • • than 20 years of experience within the meetings industry. 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