Tale of two convention centres needs smart ending
Once upon a time, there was a mid-market northern city with two convention centres.
Downtown, on the banks of its dramatic river valley, the city had a conference centre that hosted banquets, concerts, parties, trade shows and meetings. It was shiny and glassy and built at significant taxpayer expense.
Meanwhile, just five kilometres to the north stood another shiny and glassy convention centre, also built at public expense. It also hosted banquet, concerts, parties, trade shows and meetings.
The two buildings were such a short drive apart. Indeed, they were connected directly by a magical underground train that could whisk people from one site to the other. And yet, they operated as though there were thousands of leagues apart.
The two rival convention centres were run by two different kinds of city-funded bureaucracies. They bid against each other for business, competing to host the same events. If one convention centre was full and had to turn a client away, it didn’t co-ordinate with the other convention centre, to sync their calendars to maximize business for the city.
And each centre kept expanding, growing and growing at taxpayer expense, without anyone stopping to ask why the same citizens were paying for two duelling convention centres that undercut each other, without anyone stopping to think that perhaps a city with fewer than one million people needed to think a bit more strategically about how it was spending hundreds of millions in infrastructure dollars.
But, as in so many fairy tales, there came a day of reckoning. A day when the people who ran the centre north of the downtown came before the city council and confessed that they couldn’t pay back the money they had borrowed.
They asked the council to forgive the $48.7 million they still owed from their last expansion. (But since the council had, in turn, borrowed that money, with interest, from the wizards who ran the Alberta Capital Finance Authority, forgiving the $48.7 million loan would actually cost the councillors as much as $73 million.)
But the people of the northern convention centre, who have already stopped making loan payments, didn’t just want forgiveness of the old loan. They wanted the city to give them another $38.7 million to renovate and expand their building — yet again.
I wish I could tell, that at this point in our story, the poor city councillors broke the magic spell that the two convention centres had cast upon them and realized that it is mind-bogglingly idiotic to continue to underwrite two rival facilities, neither of which make any money.
But there is no true-love’s-kiss, no magic wand-wiggle, that frees us, neatly, from the curse of the two convention centres.
This coming Tuesday, at precisely 3:45 p.m., Edmonton city council is scheduled to go behind closed doors for a private meeting about a private report. I can’t tell you what the private report says. I can tell you it’s called “A Model for Integration of EXPO Centre and Shaw Conference Centre.” And about time.
It makes absolutely no sense to go on running our two major events facilities in competition with each other. They have to be managed together, with one booking calendar, so that we can attract the greatest number of events, large and small to the city, making the most efficient use of our physical plant and the most efficient use of our marketing dollars.
Beyond that, why should the city, which has already deferred Northlands’ loan payments until this July, simply forgive the debt and leave Northlands in charge of the Expo Centre? If the city is going to end up on the hook for the cost of the Expo Centre, the city shouldn’t hesitate to take over the management of the facility.
On Friday, no one from Northlands had any comment on next week’s “secret” meeting. Brad Ferguson is the president and CEO of the Edmonton Economic Development Corporation, which runs the Shaw Conference Centre. He says he hasn’t seen the report on integrating the Shaw and the Expo Centre either — and he’s not invited to Tuesday’s closed-door meeting. But, he says, his team would relish the chance to run both facilities.
“But I know they’re looking at multiple models,” says Ferguson. “We will take our direction from the city, either way.”
For now, though, Ferguson and all the rest of us will just have to wait to find out what’s in that secret city report — and whether it foretells a happy ending to the story of Edmonton’s two convention centres.