Cleveland’s Public Auditorium was approved by the city’s voters in 1916 and finally completed in 1922. But when voters were presented with a scheme for financing and developing a new convention center in 1957 and 1958, they turned it down both times. Finally, in 1960, a smaller, restructured convention center scheme won voter approval. That center was supposed to vault Cleveland to the front rank of convention cities. As of 1981, it was still ninth largest in the United States.
When, after some twenty years of use, the center required improvements and refurbishing, in 1985 Mayor George Voinovich chose to invest some $28 million without asking the voters to decide. The city issued notes, largely financed by the Greater Cleveland Convention and Visitors Bureau through the bureau’s receipt of countywide hotel taxes, that avoided both a public vote and the limits of the city’s fiscal circumstances.
Cleveland’s business and political leaders repeatedly sought to develop an entirely new downtown convention center, beginning in the late 1990s. They ultimately chose a scheme in 2007 that neatly avoided the city government and its ongoing financial problems. Instead, the initiative for the convention center and a “Medical Mart” trade mart came from the overlying Cuyahoga County government. And in financing the $450 million project, the county’s three commissioners (by a vote of two to one) avoided the need for any public vote by committing the revenues from a special countywide quarter-cent sales tax.
Cleveland’s fiscal evolution neatly illustrates the changes over the twentieth century in convention finance. Where city governments once dominated development of public assembly facilities, the public role has increasingly shifted to other government entities, a diverse group ranging from county governments, as in Cleveland, to public authorities (such as the New Orleans Morial Convention Center Authority), regional entities (like the Greater Richmond Convention Center Authority), and state governments. And where the initiative to finance and build a convention facility once commonly required a majority vote of the local electorate, the new financing and organizational arrangements now regularly avoid the need for voter review and approval.
The restructuring of convention center finance away from direct voter approval was not happenstance. It reflected the increasing willingness of the national bond market to accept revenue bonds—debt issues backed solely by a limited tax or revenue source, such as a hotel or car rental—and the imagination of investment bankers seeking to serve local officials. But far more important, it was a choice, imitated and repeated across scores of cities, that served the political and development ends of both elected officials and local business leaders, as the changed social and political environment of major cities after 1970 made voter approval increasingly unlikely.
Kansas City’s business leaders had long viewed their community as a natural locale for major national conventions, as it is a major Midwest rail hub. The city’s Convention Bureau regularly boasted dozens of major meetings, including some 24 national conventions, 54 regional meetings, and 36 state conventions in fiscal year 1929. The city had erected a new convention hall in 1900, just in time to host the Democratic National Convention. But by the 1920s this was increasingly viewed as outdated and too small. The minutes of the convention committee of the Chamber of Commerce said, “We are gradually being eliminated from consideration through the lack of two important civic facilities now possessed by virtually all of the larger cities in the country…. One is dining and meeting space in hotels … and the other is of course the lack of a convention hall with which to care for the larger gatherings.” In language that would be repeated decade after decade in Kansas City and beyond, the group argued, “Until they are realized, Kansas City must accept the fact that it is no longer a convention competitor with the larger cities of the country.”1
Yet if the convention committee and the larger Chamber of Commerce earnestly desired a bigger convention hall, financing required voter approval of a city bond issue by a two-thirds majority. An initial modest bond proposal for $800,000 to acquire land for a new “Municipal Auditorium” had failed to receive the needed majority in November 1925. A second attempt, to secure $3.5 million to construct a new assembly hall in 1928, also went down to defeat.
The succession of bond issue defeats during the 1920s, including eight separate proposals in 1928, led the chamber leadership to propose a very different political strategy that would encompass not only the proposed Municipal Auditorium but a host of other needed public investments. In his November 1929 address to the Chamber of Commerce annual meeting, chamber head Conrad Mann argued, “We are going after this [bond issue] thing piecemeal…. It is just a makeshift program and the very nature of this program creates hostility among our citizens.” Mann called on his colleagues to back a “non-partisan ‘Kansas City Spirit’ movement that will put this thing over.”2
Mann’s view of a comprehensive bond program was remarkable in fiscal terms. The failed 1928 bond program had involved some $18.5 million. Now Mann said the business leadership should “center your efforts upon a major program and submit to the citizens of Kansas City a bond issue of not less than 75 million dollars.” He concluded,
We must give visible evidence of our confidence in Kansas City to people, regardless of where they may reside, that as Kansas Citians, we have faith in our own city; that we are willing to carry the burden in order to make our city a place of happy homes as well as an abiding place for industry and business in general. There is no way in which we can do these things in a more substantial, a more convincing way than by voting a bond issue and by so doing make funds available to meet the expenditures for improvements which are so much needed for our town.
In early 1930, city manager H. F. McElroy proposed that the chamber’s Conrad Mann chair a Committee of 100, charged with crafting a ten-year “plan of improvements” that would be the basis of a comprehensive package of bond proposals. While Mann and city officials sought a broad base of citizen involvement, they were not about to leave a proposal as critical to the city’s economic future as the proposed auditorium to chance. The subcommittee charged with reviewing the plans for the auditorium was headed by the president of the firm operating the Muehlebach, the city’s leading hotel; the secretary was the manager of the convention bureau.3
Citing an annual loss of millions of dollars of “convention business … directly attributed to the lack of an adequate public auditorium,” the subcommittee recommended a $5 million bond proposal for the new convention facility. Business interests united behind a site adjacent to the existing convention hall, preserving the advantage for nearby hotels such as the Muehlebach. And despite the fact that most such recommendations were seriously trimmed to fit city financial resources, the final recommendation of the overall committee was for a $4.5 million auditorium bond—the second largest of 16 proposed city bond issues.
Mann’s political calculus proved quite correct. With solid business backing and support of the Pendergast political machine, all 16 bond issues on the March 1931 ballot were approved, with the Municipal Auditorium winning a 79.2 percent “yes” vote. The Auditorium was able to take advantage of a $1.29 million federal public works grant, and some $750,000 from the sale of the existing convention hall, and opened in October 1935.4
Kansas City’s successful 1931 bond program neatly illustrated both the potential and the constraints of voter-approved general obligation bonds for major public building projects. With Missouri’s requirement for a two-thirds majority for each bond proposal, minorities of the electorate had a substantial impact on individual projects. A broad package, calculated to win the support of a broad popular coalition, could deliver what a single scheme for a new auditorium or civic center could not. That pattern of broad electoral coalition-building through a collection of public investment projects—projects that could be distributed across the community—was also exemplified by Missouri’s other major urban center, St. Louis.
St. Louis in the 1920s faced a political and fiscal situation parallel to Kansas City’s. While the business leadership had embraced a series of major development schemes for a new complex of public buildings and parkways, the required bond