[PRCo] Re: PAT's cuts

[Derrick Brashear]

On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 10:59 PM, Fred Schneider
<fwschneider at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> 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.

Your legislators, particularly, seem to have worked things pretty hard
to make the Lancaster Convention Center happen, in spite of the fact
that the original legislation would not have allowed it.

> 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.)

Most of the people in prison are within 6 to 8 blocks of there? Well,
I suppose that's one way to fill housing, right? ;)

I missed the last holiday, so uh, happy new year.