Why the city’s rush on hotel decision?

At the same time we are rooting for a new hotel to go with the Pine Bluff Convention Center, we shake our head at times over the rush rush rush to roll out such proposals. The city council, on a 5-to-3 vote, recently gave the nod to spending almost $3 million as a show of the city’s commitment for a new Marriott Courtyard hotel that would be built where the old and deteriorating and closed Plaza Hotel sits today.

As the council members took their seats, one member quipped that it was the mayor’s job to start the special-called meeting at 5:30 p.m. and gavel it closed at 5:35. The meeting, however, would go on for more than an hour, and some of the conversation was about how unprepared the council was to tackle such an important proposal.

Council Members Steven Mays and Bruce Lockett said they needed more time to digest the issue.

“I just got this about 20 minutes ago,” Mays said. “This is not the way we do business. This is wrong.”

We agree.

Mayor Shirley Washington said the information had been sent out via email a few hours earlier in the day. But still, the idea of spending close to 10% of the city’s annual budget — the public’s tax dollars — on a project would, one would think, be something that had been poured over by the whole council well in advance of the day when a vote was needed and that no one would be left gasping to read over, as Mays put it, a “book” of information in just minutes.

There was also a cavern-deep misunderstanding about how the hotel project was going to come into existence. Council Member Glen Brown Sr., who doubted the viability of a hotel at the downtown location when Saracen Casino will be building its own grand hotel, said he had been assured that no city money would be expended on the project. That was fine with him, he said, since others would be taking the risk. And yet, quite a lot of city money was now being expended. No one spoke up to explain the contradiction, leaving the world to believe that indeed, he had been told that, and now, well, things had just changed.

And where was the money coming from? It was to be taken from the Urban Renewal Agency, which is a spinoff entity of Go Forward Pine Bluff.

Funny, just a few weeks earlier, when money for Jimmy Cunningham’s music and cultural district was being debated, the $2 million he needed could absolutely not come from Urban Renewal, which, by way of Go Forward, claimed to be on board with. But now, suddenly, $3 million for a hotel is ready and waiting.

The optics hearken back to the kinds of power plays that former Council Member Joni Alexander found most disturbing, that being that Mayor Washington, armed with enough “for” votes for Go Forward, can run roughshod over the “against” votes for any issue that comes along.

The better way, of course, would be to bring everyone along, respecting all council members and the constituents that elected them. But that takes time and patience and hearing arguments to the contrary of whatever issue is on the table. Apparently, it’s better just to rush something past the aginners, knowing that no matter what their objections, the proposals will pass.