As communications scholar Phyllis Kaniss recounted in her case study of local media response to the convention center proposal, coverage of the scheme was dominated by official pronouncements and the image of pressing civic need. When some independent observers, including one professor at the University of Pennsylvania, did begin to question the PKF numbers, their views were given short shrift compared to “official” accounts and forecasts.45
The promises of abundant visitor spending and new city jobs did not eliminate conflict over issues such as location, cost, and political control. There was an extended public debate over the proper downtown site and then over city versus state control of construction and operation. The proposed center did manage to avoid any real local conflict over financing. The city would ultimately contribute some $300 million from hotel room tax revenues, while the state government agreed to provide a $185 million grant. But the state fiscal role opened the project to questioning from state legislators. Facing what the Philadelphia Daily News termed “gales of criticism from some politicians and community leaders who saw the center as a huge waste of money,” the newly formed Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority commissioned another PKF study.46
The PKF firm delivered its updated analysis in May 1988. The new estimate of annual convention delegate spending was slightly lower, if remarkably precise, at $618,927,900 for 2001, with 346,000 annual convention attendees producing new hotel demand of 664,800 room nights. With that presumably assured new demand, PKF promised a total of 4,848 new hotel rooms to be built in the city over the next decade, including a thousand-room convention headquarters hotel, and sufficient “over demand for the airport and City Line hotels.”47
The series of consultant studies in Philadelphia did not necessarily eliminate conflict or debate over the massive public investment in a new convention center. But it did shape both media coverage and public perception of the proposal—the experts had assessed the performance of a new center and offered the assurance that it would succeed in delivering a host of economic and employment benefits to a city that had seen serious job loss and decline.
Even before the center’s grand opening in June 1993, arguments were being made that the new Pennsylvania Convention Center was too small. In February, the Daily News quoted the findings of a City Planning Commission report that the 440,000 square foot center was not large enough to compete for major conventions and tradeshows against Chicago, Las Vegas, Atlanta, and New York. The city lacked both the financial resources for a bigger facility and the new hotel rooms to support it. Calls for a larger center began quite soon after 1993. In November 1997, Mayor Ed Rendell called for a major expansion, arguing, “In order to get the very, very largest groups to come back, we need more space.”48
Before Mayor Rendell could realize his goal of a bigger center for the largest groups, he and the Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority had to grapple with two problems. The first was finding a source of funds, presumably from outside a city government increasingly strapped for cash. The second was dealing with the impact of the center’s union labor rates and work rules on event organizers and exhibitors. Newspaper accounts of the possible expansion invariably included a discussion of labor issues, exemplified by a January 2000 Inquirer article that ended by noting that only New York and San Francisco had higher labor costs, and quoting the head of the convention center authority as saying, “Workers here have also been criticized by tradeshow and convention producers as uncouth and insensitive to their needs.”49
It was not until fall 2002, with union agreement on new jurisdictional and work rules, that the center authority was prepared to make the case for expansion. That came from a consultant study on the case—and forecast results—for a major expansion, commissioned and paid for by the Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority. The Conventions, Sports & Leisure International (CSL) findings were released by the authority in October 2002 and headlined by the Daily News as “Center Survey: If You Build It, They Will Come,” emphasizing that 58 percent of convention planners would “look favorably” at an expanded center. The study also promised that more space would boost the center’s annual economic impact from $215 million to $308 million, or 43 percent, and create 2,850 new permanent jobs.50
An Inquirer article the same day was somewhat more questioning, with the headline “Smaller Return Seen from Center Expansion.” The story went on to report the same figures from CSL—43 percent more hotel rooms filled after an expansion, with a $93 million boost in attendee spending. But it also noted that those figures were less than had been offered by studies in 1998 and 1999. The article quoted city finance director Janice Davis as saying, “We needed validation…. I am extremely happy that it is in support of the expansion.”51
The findings of the CSL study effectively made the case for more convention center space, with seeming certitude that the expansion would bring real rewards in terms of increased convention business. When the study was finally finished in late January 2003, it included some specifics that had not appeared in the newspaper coverage the previous October. Indeed, those specifics never appeared in the local media, as the CSL study was not released to the public. The 58 percent “positive response rate” garnered by Philadelphia from convention planners was noted. But so was the information that Philadelphia’s figure was equal to Boston’s and lower than other competing cities such as Denver (65 percent), Las Vegas (70 percent), and New Orleans (77 percent). No comparable response figures were cited for New York, Baltimore, or Washington, cities CSL described as Philadelphia’s “primary competition.”52
The CSL study did offer the prediction that an expansion would increase attendance by more than 50 percent and boost annual hotel room night demand from an average of 503,000 per year to 786,000. But the analysis contained some other potentially troubling details. The center had averaged 246,839 convention and tradeshow attendees yearly from 1999 to 2002. But those totals were well below PKF’s 1998 forecast of 349,500 for those years. And the CSL consultants did not bother to note that the center’s room-night production of 503,000 included two years, 2000 and 2002, that were unusually successful. The 2000 total was boosted by the city’s hosting of the Republican National Convention, while 2002 had seen 27 major conventions, the highest in the center’s history. A more plausible baseline would have been the 470,000 room nights in 1998 or 420,000 in 1999.
CSL’s promise of more than 280,000 new room nights would be a fixture of arguments for the expansion, as the state legislature passed a 2004 slots gambling bill that allocated some $400 million for the expansion. It would be a constant in the press releases and publications of the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau. It would appear—unquestioned—with some regularity in press reports of the progress of the project as it moved to an early 2011 opening.53
Even as the expansion project was moving ahead in late 2006, it was evident to the Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority that it would be far less productive than CSL had predicted. The authority’s November 2006 “Convention Center Operating Plan” included the information that the existing center’s hotel room-night generation had fallen to 363,954 for fiscal year 2004 and 297,180 for 2005. The authority’s own forecast of future room-night generation was set to grow to 650,000 by fiscal 2014, a far more modest increase than the 786,000 predicted by CSL in 2003, and one not mentioned in public.54
When the Pennsylvania Convention Center expansion opened for business in March 2011, it faced a market environment reshaped by expansions at competing centers and the 2008 recession. The center’s room-night total dropped to 336,000 in 2007 and 303,000 in 2009. The actual performance for 2010 was 179,000. A new consultant study of the expanded center’s future performance and operations put the forecast at 321,300 for fiscal 2013 and 381,523 for 2014. It was clear that the expanded Pennsylvania Convention Center would be pressed to merely equal the average 503,000 annual room nights noted by CSL in 2003. Indeed, it managed 431,000 room nights in calendar 2012, well below the CSL forecast of 786,000.55
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