[PRCo] Re: PAT's cuts

[Fred Schneider]

On the third point .... the hotel ... the Commonwealth passed enabling legislation allowing all cities to build convention centers and tax the hotels out in the county to pay for them.   This was a case of our legislators at play.   Once the opportunity is there, most mayors are dumb enough to take the money and run.

The convention center in Lancaster was held up for years by the suburban motels challenging the right of the city to tax them.   They lost.   

How well the new Lancaster Convention Center will work is open to conjecture.   There are over 100 motels in the county, some others are large enough to handle such events.   The only advantage is that you can walk from this place to a handful of downtown restaurants and pubs ... high priced places that were once stores.  But I am not convince that a skyscraper hotel (it is now the tallest building in down and eclipses the old Griest Building by about 10 feet) is worth our tax money.   It will take a monumental effort to keep it filled.    

The Berks County Convention Center Authority owns a theater downtown ... same sort of scheme ... if the public isn't willing to support it, then let's force them and tax them.   It was the old Rajah Shrine theater rebuilt with your money and mine because no one went to downtown Reading.   

http://www.sovereigncenter.com/udp.php?id=76

Considering that the number of people in prison, an indicator of crime, has increase four-fold since 1980 and most of that is within six to eight blocks of the new convention center, would I really want to recommend to my friends that they go there and walk around the streets at night?   (If you want those numbers, they were in the Lancaster paper this morning ... jumped from .06% to .23% of the population in 30 years.)

On Dec 26, 2010, at 8:02 PM, Derrick Brashear wrote:

> On Saturday, December 4, 2010, Fred Schneider <fwschneider at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On the subject of urban renewal (runinal?) ... Lancaster, PA tried it too.   David Schuyler, an F&M professor, wrote a book on the subject about how we tear down the bad neighborhoods without considering where the people will move ... it generally creates multiple bad neighborhoods as we move into the future.   He also talks about how we renewed downtown which was aging and tarnished but people went there.   No now no one goes to the block that was renewed. We will now renew it again.   The department store became a bomb fuse factory and now its empty.
> 
> The owner shafted his employees, dissolved and took his contracts to a
> similarly named company in Florida. Still looking to make a buck from
> the building.
> 
>>   The headquarters building for Armstrong Cork is empty.
> 
> The current Armstrong management has no real community commitment;
> they're a global corporation and you should be happy you have any jobs
> nearby.
> 
>> The hotel ... well it was shut down for an entire year because of unrepaired defects.   Why?  No one goes to city hotels so the city retaliated and built a new one two blocks away ... a convention center ... to compete with it.  That way we can have two empty hotels.   :<)   Who pays for it?   A tax on the suburban hotels / motels.
> 
> When your local news media is in bed with, nay, *is* the developer of
> the hotel, well...
> 
> 
> -- 
> Derrick
> 
>