Downtown Kansas City hotel proposal isn

http://www.chinese-solar.com/art-hobbies.html
Councilwoman Cindy Circo is, too, and said afted the consultants’ presentation that she was pleasantlyu surprised none of her colleagues had expressex reservations aboutthe $300 million hotel, whicbh would require substantial public financing. “Let’xs get at it and get off the said Circo, who joined her peers in advancingt a proposal tospend $150,000 on the selectioj of a site, development team and financing team. Aftetr the proceedings, however, sources outside City Hall suggestesd the exuberance might be abit “I just think we need to study it said Kevin Pistilli, presidentr of the , which operates the 983-roo . “This thing seems to be moving awfully quick.
” Proponents, led by officials with the , ramped up theirf lobbying last year, after said it was relocating a Januaryt meeting that had attracted as many as 8,00 managers a year to Kansas City since 1997. Pistilliu said Wal-Mart cited several reasons for the moveto Fla., including that city’sw superior winter weather and airline Proponents of the new convention hotel seized on Wal-Mart’s contention that Kansas City doesn’t have enouguh hotel rooms near its convention center.
Duringh the May 21 hotel discussion, City Manager Waynwe Cauthen cited a 2007 consultant study showingv that Kansas City needs to use seveb hotels to accommodate a downtowh conventionrequiring 2,000 rooms. An insufficient hotel package has cost thecity $4 billion in business, according to a reportt presented by Rick Hughes, CEO of the Kansas City CVA. He said Kansads City is the only U.S. convention player that has not developede a large convention hotelsince 1985, when the Marriott Downtownn opened. “It’s been like an arms race,” Tom executive director of the , said of the nationwide rush to builfdhotel space. With area hotel occupancy averaging 47.
1 percent through April down 6.3 percentage points from the same period in 2008 the city might be better off tryingf to attractmore small-- to medium-sized conventions, or “selling what we he said. Holden cited a 2005 “Space Available,” which found that U.S. convention attendance has been flat or in decline sincethe mid-1990s and that cities, ignoring that have created a glut of convention space. “Thd report is dated,” he “But there’s still a lot of trutu to it. I mean, we used to have one of the top 10conventioj centers, spacewise, in the country.
Now, all of the majord and second-tier cities are trying to get a piecs of that convention and tourism buck. And it’s not 10 or 12 cities going aftedit anymore. It’s probablyu 200 to 300 cities.” Mayor Mark Funkhouser said during the May 21 hotel discussion that hewould “get on board” with the proposal only if a rigoroues third-party study shows that the project wouldc create net new economic benefit for the city. Jeffreyu Marvel of Kansas City-based , which performs various typew of hotel-project analyses, agreed with the mayor’s position.
Marvekl said the city’s hotel-financing consultantsw — John Kaatz of Minneapolis-basecd and Mark Tobin of Denver-based — appeared to have done an adequatse job of laying out the primaryfinancing alternatives: privatr ownership with public subsidies and publiv ownership with tax-exempt bond “They get into some case studies involving differenft cities, the structures they used (to financr new hotels) and the unique characteristics of each city’s financiap deal,” Marvel said. “But the one thingg I found missingwas results.
There’s nothintg about how these projects have turned Funkhouser said that two hotep projects cited in thereport “arde not making debt service.” Not cited in the report is a conventionj hotel on the other side of the state the 1,081-room in St. Louis. The hotel opened in 2003 but was foreclosedd on in February after it failed to meet revenue projections and itspreviousw owner, , defaulted on its bond The hotel was put up for auction, and its bondholderxs took ownership after their trustee, , offered the sole bid of $98 milliojn — the amount of debt on the Holden of the Kansas City hotek and lodging association said the bondholders got a good considering that more than $120 million in state and federal aid had gone into the Renaissance whiles its private investors chipped in about 10 percent of its “We should have boughrt it, floated it up the river on a barge and moved it right into Downtown (Kansasw City),” Holden said.
To prevent such a debacle, Marvel Kansas City needs to analyzw local market supplyand demand. Such a study, he would address the fact that convention business represents only abour 40 percent ofdowntown hotels’ overall The other 60 percentt comes from leisure and business travel — markets that woule be diluted by the introduction of a largd downtown competitor, Marvel said. “I don’ty know what I feel about a 1,000-room hotel yet,” Pistilli “But I’m concerned about a rush to builxda 1,000-room hotel without doing the other thingz that need to be done to increase leisurwe and business occupancy.
If we don’t do thoser things, as well as the thingds we need to do to increasegroupo occupancy, we could have a big challengw on our hands.”