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A recent article in City Journal said that seven Texas cities and one county are building new convention centers or upgrading old ones. 

“Convention center” is a misnomer.  Many are so grandiose that they should be called palaces. 

Ironically, cities complain about a lack of affordable housing and then build these palaces.  They also build taxpayer-subsidized stadiums, and they use tax schemes to redevelop their downtowns into low-wage centers of hip bars and restaurants.

The article went on to say that most convention centers lose money.  Scores of scholarly studies over the decades have said the same. 

Naturally, vested interests disagree.  They claim that a convention center will bring millions of jobs and trillions in revenue to a locale.  

Okay, I’ve pulled those numbers out of my . . . well, out of my hat.  But the vested interests also pull numbers out of their hat, or wherever, when they spout numbers about jobs and revenue.  

Like magicians, the vested interests use sleights of hand to make it seem as if convention centers pay for themselves.

One trick is for host cities to convince their state legislature to force the residents of the rest of the state to subsidize their convention center.  They do this through a tax scheme that allows the city to keep state sales tax and hotel occupancy tax revenue within a certain radius of the convention center. 

There’s no telling where that revenue might have been invested had it not been spent on a convention center.  Maybe on schools.  Maybe on crime reduction.  Maybe on not letting the homeless live and die on city streets like animals.  Or maybe on lowering taxes for the masses.

Here in Tucson, the downtown convention center received funding years ago for a renovation from the Rio Nuevo redevelopment district, which in turn gets funding from a tax scheme similar to the one mentioned above.  Meanwhile, the Tucson Unified School District has abysmal test results, and the Arizona State Auditor has just announced that the district is a high financial risk due to declining enrollment and burgeoning costs.  

What would be better for Tucson citizens and the local economy: top-notch public schools or a spiffy convention center?      

Another magical trick of the special interests is to shift some of the costs of a convention center to visitors from out of town, through special taxes on rental cars and hotel rooms.  But this is a zero-sum game.  If you live in a city that imposes such taxes on visitors, you’ll pay the taxes when you visit another city.

Cities would save a lot of time and trouble if they agreed not to play this shell game.  

Then there is the Big Contradiction.  Special interests say that a convention palace will attract visitors.  At the same time, however, taxes on visitors make the cost of a visit more expensive and thus less desirable. 

There’s also the matter of fairness.  Some hotels and resorts have large conference centers.  They’re not as large as a convention center, but they can accommodate big events, including national conferences of major corporations.  A 390-room resort within sight of my house in Tucson does just that.  And by doing so, it creates jobs and generates sales taxes and property taxes.  Why shouldn’t it get the same tax breaks and subsidies as a downtown convention center?

According to the City Journal article, here’s the planned spending on convention centers in Texas alone:

Houston:  a $2 billion upgrade

Austin:  a $1.6 billion rebuild

Dallas:  a $3.5 billion rebuild

Fort Worth:  a $700 million facelift

San Antonio:  a $750 million to $900 million expansion

Corpus Christi:  a $70 million upgrade

College Station:  a $500 million multipurpose convention center

East Montgomery County, north of Houston, is building the seventh-largest convention center in the state.

Most of the above locales, as with most cities in the US, are also engaging in downtown redevelopment schemes, based on projections pulled out of a hat on the number of jobs and the amount of revenue that will be magically created.  

Tucson can’t win this arms race and shouldn’t try, given its dreadful socioeconomic problems and much higher priorities.  

To draw an analogy:  If your neighbors burn money in a fire pit in their backyard, it wouldn’t be smart for you to do the same.  

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